Screening In the presence of director Eric Baudelaire
Winter, Beirut. On a beach littered with cans washed up from the sea, Lili and Michel meet. Or perhaps they know each other from before... As they struggle to piece together the fragments of an uncertain past, memories emerge: an act of terrorism, an explosion and the disappearance of a child, Elena. Woven throughout these fragments is the deep voice of a Japanese narrator who recounts his own experience of a weeping Beirut, and his 27 clandestine years fighting alongside the Palestinians as a member of the Japanese Red Army. His voiceover shapes Michel and Lili's story, their fate dictated by the enigma created for them by this narrator who turns out to be legendary Japanese New Wave filmmaker Masao Adachi. Eric Baudelaire is a French artist and filmmaker born in Salt Lake City in 1973. Working in photography, film, video and installations, he is interested in the relationship between images and events, documents and narratives. Recalling factographic practices, his work can involve elaborate staged situations that appear to be real, but are somewhat off-kilter, placing the viewer in a situation of questioning the modes of production and consumption of images, political and social constructs and their modes of representation. Saturday May 9, 2015 at 8:00 pm.