Sci-fi Film Cycle

Film Cycle

Curated by: Laurence Rassel, Constant vzw, Brussels

"A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not
seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or
until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is
only one possibility." (D. Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto)

If a cyborg is not born in a garden, neither is this program. Born in a
basement where tapes have been kept for 7 years now, it is a program body put
together by different minds as we followed our experiences, hearts, chance and
irony to build it. This construct of movies is a possibility, one of many to
put together a partial selection of experimental feminist science-fiction
movies, made by women, that you might not have seen yet.

But what do we mean by science-fiction?

We see it as a reconstructed body, as a trans-genre,
trans-disciplinary science. As a post-apocalyptic tabula rasa which will allow
the passport-less, the Others, to weave other social fabrics than those of the
capitalist market, a chance to freely imagine relations not based on
domination.
A body, and a genre (gender?), as the result of a scientific, individual,
collective process, the body emerging from thought, constructed by thought or
by experience. That body can have multiple relations with spaces and other
bodies through multiple extensions. The journey through those bodies and spaces
challenges the notion of the individual identities that take the risk of
otherness/heterogeneity somewhere between science and fiction.
But we won't be spared having to situate this (social) body in a given
territory: border zones, zones to be defined or explored, enclosed areas,
dumping grounds, war zones, media zones…Because this science fiction is also
the story of territories and individuals crossed by flows, communities,
colonies, politics, by what will be private and public.
Science fiction as a construction, as a hotchpotch of imagination and reality,
an association of utopia and dystopia, of flesh and the machine, a body issued
from the mind as an alternative to the domination of the market.
Science-fiction as a figure of speech, stylization, a scientific process.
Intrusion, discrepancy, incongruity as a system of resistance.
Science-fiction is thought as a strategy for transformation and reflection,
rather than the beginning or the end of inflexible truths.
Laurence Rassel

ROGRAMME:

Mon., Sept. 27, 11 p.m.

Klub Gromka, AKC Metelkova mesto
Hans Scheirl (UK/Austria): Dandy Dust (1998, 16mm, colour, 94'),

Fri., Oct. 1, 7.30 p.m.
Kinodvor,
Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, Richard Couzins (The Otolith Group) (UK): Otolith
(2003, DVD, colour, 22')
Dara Birmbaum (USA): Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978, DVD,
colour, 5'50'')
Peggy Ahwesh (USA): She Puppet (2001, DVD, colour, 15')

Mon., Oct. 4, 10.10 p.m.
Kinodvor,
Mara Mattuschka (Bulgaria/Austria/Germany): S.O.S. Extraterrestria (1993,
11')
Lizzie Borden (USA): Born in Flames (1983, 80')

Tues., Oct. 5, 10.10 p.m.
Kinodvor,
Cornelia Sollfrank (Germany): Have Script, Will Destroy! - Interview with
Clara G. Sopht
(2000, 15')
Nadia El Fani (Tunisia): Bedwin Hacker (2003, 103')

Wed., Oct. 6, 9.30 p.m.
Klub Gromka, AKC Metelkova mesto
Lucile Desamory (Belgium): Clone Zone (2000, 12')

Organisation: City of Women
In co-operation with: Kinodvor; Klub Gromka, AKC Metelkova mesto