ON THE ROAD WITH ROBERT FENZ
Sunday 23 October 2011, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

Robert Fenz’s films explore culture diversity and the human condition with a keen eye reminiscent of his tutors Peter Hutton and James Benning. Mixing improvisation with luminous photography, he offers a poetic but political worldview. An associate of Robert Gardner’s Studio7Arts, Fenz has also collaborated with musician Wadada Leo Smith and worked as cinematographer for Chantal Akerman. (Mark Webber)

THE SOLE OF THE FOOT
Robert Fenz, USA, 2011, 16mm, colour, sound, 34 min
Filmed in France, Israel and Cuba. ‘Borders (and all the politics attending the drawing of borders) exist to keep some people in (citizenship) and others out. This film is an attempt to capture the presence of people otherwise denied the political right to be at home in some place that is their home, where they have their roots, where they have their being.’ (Robert Fenz)

CORRESPONDENCE
Robert Fenz, USA, 2011, 16mm, b/w, silent, 30 min
Filmmaker Robert Fenz returned to the locations of three classic films made by the pioneering American ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner. Dead Birds (1964) was filmed in West Papua, Rivers of Sand (1974) was filmed in Ethiopia and Forest of Bliss (1986) was filmed in Benares, India. Correspondence is not a straightforward commentary on Gardners’s films; it is an elegy for a kind of image-making that is in the process of disappearing. (Robert Fenz)

Back to top