Program 1

Short film program consisting of MUN KOTI, MOUNE Ô, O DENTE DO DRAGAO, and INSTANT LIFE

Total running time approx. 83 min.

Mun koti

“A bee stung me on my finger. It happened yesterday in the yard of a kindergarten, even though I am not in kindergarten anymore.” Fragmented memories of childhood and adulthood blend together in a song that an unknown narrator is humming. Children are learning a new game in a sixties TV show. Someone is waiting in the hallway for permission to re-enter the classroom. Everything is set. Everything is nailed down.  
Childhood is both hard to forget and to remember. There is a lack of words as we are still learning them—the way that words are put together and then validated. The film goes through various archives, both personal and public, from different times and from different moments of life. It tries to remember. These ingredients do not build a single coherent narrative, one pure argument, a continuously developing story of growth, nor a piece that is solely a person’s own. We know and remember things even if they have not happened to us.

Moune Ô

“I close my eyes. The crowd makes me smile, breaks my body, and that’s the end.” 
By presenting the festive events which accompanied the premiere of the film JEAN GALMOT, AVENTURIER (1990) by Alain Maline, in which the filmmaker’s father played a role, the images of MOUNE Ô reveal the survival of the colonial inheritance within a western collective unconscious always marked as stereotypes. From little gestures of daily life, the resistance toward oppression comes in its own rhythm.

O dente do dragão

After killing the dragon, Cadmus released the blue curse, spreading like dust into the city. 
The second-biggest nuclear accident in the world happened in Goiânia, capital of Goiás, Brazil. In September 1987, two scrap collectors looking through an abandoned clinic (Goiânia Radiotherapy Institute) found an old radiotherapy device. Moved by curiosity with the machine, they took it to a junkyard, where they disassembled it and extracted a capsule containing a blue powder that glowed in the dark. From that night onwards, the radiation spread unseen throughout the city, contaminating more than a hundred people, leaving deep marks and traumas. From a collage of contaminated images, radioactive ghosts emerge, embedded in the history of that place.

Instant Life

The three films you will see are shot-for-shot reproductions of the compilation film INSTANT LIFE (1981). Each film in INSTANT LIFE (1981) was a remake of an earlier film also called INSTANT LIFE (1941). The earlier INSTANT LIFE (1941) was a single film, not a compilation.
In 2017, we decided to recreate INSTANT LIFE (1981). We did not attempt to recreate INSTANT LIFE (1941) because that Instant Life is lost. INSTANT LIFE (1941) was a silent film presented with live musical accompaniment. After the show, audience members received a printed riddle. INSTANT LIFE (1981) is a sound film. The riddle is part of the film. No answer to the riddle exists.