Today, last talk of the Forum at 4pm (FID Lounge, 3rd floor of the Artplexe Canebière) and Tête-à-tête with Isabel Pagliai at 6pm (BLUM Brasserie).

For its 36th edition, FIDMarseille remains true to its mission: to spotlight independent cinema that is attentive to the echoes of the contemporary world and to the stories that reveal its fractures, both intimate and collective.

The Audience Award is open for voting until Sunday noon: among the competing films, choose your favorite!

To end this 36th edition on a high note, join us at the Petit Théâtre of La Friche la Belle de Mai from 10:30 p.m. - and until 4 a.m. - this Sunday for the Grand Closing Party!

Today, last talk of the Forum at 4pm (FID Lounge, 3rd floor of the Artplexe Canebière) and Tête-à-tête with Isabel Pagliai at 6pm (BLUM Brasserie).

For its 36th edition, FIDMarseille remains true to its mission: to spotlight independent cinema that is attentive to the echoes of the contemporary world and to the stories that reveal its fractures, both intimate and collective.

The Audience Award is open for voting until Sunday noon: among the competing films, choose your favorite!

To end this 36th edition on a high note, join us at the Petit Théâtre of La Friche la Belle de Mai from 10:30 p.m. - and until 4 a.m. - this Sunday for the Grand Closing Party!

The Most Dangerous Question, The Most Dangerous Question

John Bruce

90’

To lose oneself in the act of walking across landscapes; sojourns adrift in a transnational current. To be lost as an act of disorientation from the paralysis of history; from the charting of territories from colonial maps; from nation-forming borders; the militarization of sovereignty; the extraction of resources; and the speculation of land. The gait of the embodied camera wanders discontinuously through time, shifting across an archive of seemingly disconnected moving images. The slow moving gestures of Noh, the excavation of phosphate on the Pacific island of Nauru, the moss that grows on Snake Rock, the water path of San Agustin Etla, the resonances of Reza Abdoh’s theatre still present. The Most Dangerous Question is a film that refuses to weave its fragments as locatable and instead reveals presences across decades. It is an ode to the ecstatic, intimate states of being.

Director’s statement

The Most Dangerous Question began for me in 1995. I was still alive despite a decade of believing otherwise. I had experienced the advent of HIV/AIDS in NYC having wandered there a decade earlier. Comrades of the resistance disappeared, lessons gleaned through a glimpse toward extinction faded like a problem solved and tidily put away. Through the haze of the fin de siècle, we acted out a resistance to the violence of distances – the many ways we are separated from ourselves, our bodies, each other, ancestors and the land. We recorded a series of site-specific happenings on stages and streets through the performance of ethnography, in part inspired by theater artist Reza Abdoh who left behind a body of work that served as an unvarnished co-witness to my own unblinking experience. Our collective fabulation included tales of Nauru, a Pacific island suffering a tragic, almost comic unfolding of environmental and cultural devastation. Walking with others and the land, listening in and across false separations of time and space are opportunities for these rituals to proliferate, expand, and ravel.

Technical sheet

  • Production:
    Miko Revereza (miko.revereza@gmail.com)
    Train Tracks (John Bruce : mrjohnbruce@gmail.com)
  • Budget:
    180 792 €
  • Acquired Budge:
    70 552 €
  • Funds:
    The New School Provost Office Research Award - The School of Design Strategies Research Award - Parsons Faculty Research Fund
  • Shooting countries:
    United States, Japan, Greece, Italy, Colombia