PLJFF week 2 programme: On My Decomposing Body, the People will Sow Their Future
What to do with all this violence?
Pravo Ljudski Film Festival opens the second programme of the 15th edition, with a thematic focus on violence: violence as an instrument at the basis of the so-called progress of humanity. Behind justifying any kind of violence – institutional, economic, cultural, or physical – there is an „explanation“ that victims somehow deserved it, just by being there. By being Other.
– Division of the Earth through territorialization and delineation of borders through violence strengthens the “sacred” division to the world of The Global South, Third world, and the center, First world, “civilization”. In such a world, when only one immigrant crosses the “holy” border, the whole system shudders, states the programme note of 15th PLJFF, addressing the most urgent issue in Europe today – the migrant crisis.
The film Purple Sea by Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed recounts the migrant experience. Hour-long film, shot using the camera attached to the wrist of Alzakout is a vivid and disturbing display of the destiny of the immigrants crossing to Europe by the Mediterranean Sea in plastic boats. A seemingly simple account of Alzakout’s own experience from 2015, this film clearly addresses the indifference of Europe that refuses to acknowledge the responsibility for making the Mediterranean Sea a graveyard. We invite you to join the interview with Alzakout and Abdulwahed on December the 4th, with our programmer Diogo Pereira.
Violence is the topic of the other films of the programme On My Decomposing Body, the People will Sow Their Future. The film by Mirabelle Fréville, The Reel 11004, takes us to the essence of the most destructive violence imaginable – the violence caused by the atomic weapon. The author makes use of the 19 minutes reel by American soldiers, shot eight months after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and explores the secrets of this first censorship of nuclear history. Halima Oudairi’s Mutts shows the boredom and misery of a stray-dog refuge in Morocco, paralleling the similar, but far more tragic waiting endured by millions of human beings in search of a new home. In her film Cause of Death, Jyoti Mistry examines femicide and the ways of hiding and perpetuating the structural violence against women and their bodies.
Ouvertures by Louis Henderson and Olivier Marboeuf explores violence through the history lesson. The film brings Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture back to life, through a hybrid form that makes use of the research project on this important historical figure, as well as an experimental play that recounts his last days in prison. Henderson and Marboeuf will be guests of the Instagram live interview with Arman Fatić on December the 7th.
