Date: 25 October 2009 | Season: London Film Festival 2009 | Tags: London Film Festival
THE EXCEPTION AND THE RULE
Sunday 25 October 2009, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
Akosua Adoma Owusu, Me Broni Ba (My White Baby), USA-Ghana, 2008, 22 min
Driven by the pulsing sounds of Afrobeat and American soul, this spirited study of Ghanaian hair salons questions representations of beauty and ethnicity. While teams of women weave elaborate styles, children practice braiding on the blonde hair of white baby dolls, surplus stock exported from the West.
Laida Lertxundi, My Tears Are Dry, USA-Spain, 2009, 4 min
A song of heartache, an afternoon’s repose and the eternal promise of the blue California sky.
Karen Mirza, Brad Butler, The Exception and the Rule, UK-Pakistan-India, 2009, 38 min
Shot primarily in Karachi, The Exception and the Rule employs a variety of strategies in negotiating consciously political themes. Avoiding traditional documentary modes, the film frames everyday activities within a period of civil unrest, incorporating performances to camera, public interventions and observation. This complex work supplements Mirza/Butler’s Artangel project ‘The Museum of Non Participation’.
PROGRAMME NOTES
THE EXCEPTION AND THE RULE
Sunday 25 October 2009, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
ME BRONI BA (MY WHITE BABY)
Akosua Adoma Owusu, USA-Ghana, 2008, video, colour, sound, 22 min
From weaves to Jehri curls and dreads, the politics behind hairstyling comes from the roots of self-identification. I am always interested in representations of beauty. I wanted to use the specifics of hair as a metaphor for personal identity, culture, and language. I was also interested in showing the creativity of African women and how this creativity is applied to the body. Me Broni Ba was inspired by an event my older sister experienced when she immigrated to the States. My father told me she touched the hair of white children in her elementary class. The bold touch of the hair is what always stuck with me. Like my sister, I find it difficult to integrate successfully into both Ghanaian and American cultures, and it is often manifested in the way I style my hair. The text in the film came from an excerpt of her childhood journal, the film sort of stemmed from this. (Akosua Adoma Owusu)
MY TEARS ARE DRY
Laida Lertxundi, USA-Spain, 2009, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 min
A film in the three parts of a dialectic. Hoagy Land’s song is played and interrupted by guitar sounds, two women, a bed, an armchair, and the beautiful outside. The lyrics of the song reference the eternal sunshine of California and its promises. (Laida Lertxundi)
THE EXCEPTION AND THE RULE
Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, UK-Pakistan-India, 2009, video, colour, sound, 38 min
The Exception and the Rule, a film shot in Karachi as part of the Museum of Non Participation project, references problematic aspects of the ethnographic documentary film. How might one make a film about a foreign culture and thereby get away from one’s own inscribed images of that culture? Furthermore, is it possible to make such a film and thereby include the perspectives of those being filmed? And, finally, which film genre is able to deal with this kind of theoretical issue? The result is an extremely idiosyncratic hybrid composed of various genres that do not permeate one another but are presented consecutively, in such a manner as to be cited as methods. Genres such as the classic ethnographic film pop up along with the experimental genres of first person documentary, conceptual film and the fake. If the Museum of Non Participation is a non-museum, The Exception and the Rule is a non-documentary film. One learns as little about a foreign culture via the media as one learns about the vital artistic moment (symbolized in myth by the muses) via a museum. The film entwines images of the Other in a complex interweave of medial references and formal refractions; it insists on the moment of non-communicable experience – and thus exacts from the viewer the direct, ‘uncomfortable’ encounter with the real Other. (Marcel Schwierin)
www.mirza-butler.net
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