With the presence of the director, the leading actress and the selector Raffaele Meale
Post-colonial studies meet the history of visuality. This could be a summary of this essay film that, with considerable visual flair, but a serious anthropological approach, investigates the nature and modes of the gaze and of constructing the Other. Namely, it departs from the invention of the magic lantern and how lantern projections were to bee mployed to ‘sell’ the colonial project not only to the Belgian public, but also to the colonized themselves. However fragile images made of glass may be, many thousands survived.
Often lavishly hand-coloured, these tainted, horribly beautiful artefacts are the main raw material of the film, along with slides, photographs, and footage of the time that illustrate the tension between aesthetic experience and the reverberation of colonial ideology. The film attempts to map the colonial gaze from a broken view, how it persists across time and shapes the way we view, think of, and speak about the past.
Bernardo Zanotta (Brazil 1996) is a filmmaker and visual artist based between Amsterdam and Paris. His films blend historical and fictional narratives that subvert genre and convention. His work has been exhibited internationally at art venues, cinemas, and festivals, including FID Marseille, Rotterdam, and Locarno, where he was awarded the Pardino d’Argento for Heart of Hunger (2018). Alongside short and mid-length projects, he is currently developing his first feature film.
script Bernardo Zanotta
cinematography Ville Piippo
editing Paul Nouhet
production Venin Films (Yann Gonzalez & Flavien Giorda), Near/by film (Manon Bovenkerk)
cast Jun Ortega, Lydia Giordano. Gustavo Jahn, Leandro Lefa, Gabriele Pavesi
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