Anna Sanders Films
Anna Sanders Films, a Paris-based production company, has blazed a trail for a new breed of cinema – one made by visual artists that is shown most often in galleries, but increasingly is finding its way into cinemas and film festivals. Indeed, the company’s production with Thai artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Blissfully Yours, won the prize Un Certain Regard at Cannes Film Festival 2002 and the KNF prize by the Dutch critics at the 2003 International Film Festival, Rotterdam.
Other Anna Sanders Films artists, meanwhile, have claimed some of Europe’s most prestigious visual art prizes recently. Pierre Huyghe was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize and Dominique Gonzales-Foerster the Duchamp prize, both in 2002.
Gonzales-Foerster’s work is represented by three short films, Riyo, Plage and Centrale. These pieces are united by a cool, melancholic unveiling of places and personal stories fleetingly entwined with them. Ryio, is a single shot of ten minutes with the camera moving along the river Kamo in Kyoto, Japan. We overhear an awkward telephone conversation between two adolescents whilst the camera surveys the urban riverside. As the conversation and the landscape reveal themselves, the flirtatious dialogue between the unseen boy and girl unveils an emotional city, transitory and immature.
In his films Shimkent Hotel and Le Pont du Trieur [The Sorter’s Bridge], Charles de Meaux also explores the imagery of place and its relationship to personal narratives. In a small, faded hotel room in Central Asia, Alex, with the help of a neurophysiologist struggles to regain his memory. Dominated by images of the infinite natural and gigantic industrial landscapes, his memories slowly reveal the story of the naïve adventure he embarked upon with two friends, as it became a nightmare, reaching its climax in the traumatic shock that led to his amnesia.
Le Pont du Trieur, co-written by de Meaux and Philippe Parreno, with an original score by Dave Stewart, is set in Pamir, a region situated in the highest part of Tajikistan, at the border between Afghanistan and China. This is a strategic zone controlled by various armies in the midst of a region that awaits reconstruction. The film stems from the simple question of how to tell the story of a country of which the West is deprived of images. Both fiction and documentary, it is about reality and the means of telling it.
23 & 30 Jul, 06 & 13 Aug 03 | FACT, Liverpool, UK
Produced by Forma
