AMATEURS, STARS AND EXTRAS OR THE LABOR OF LOVE
Cinema and television also have their own lumpenproletariat, so far away from sequins, mu ing the screen. Marwa Arsanios only chooses to keep amateurs and extras so she can turn them into fully-featured artists in their own right at the foreground. And (this is no insignificant trait) exposed to the gaze from one scene to the other, extras are also employed in the home backstage. A matter of invisibility in both cases, of the bodies – usually women’s – placed or displaced as needed. In Mexico as in Beirut, Marwa Arsanios turns points of view around to shed light on the background. (N.F.)
Marwa Arsanios
Technical sheet
Original version :Arabic, Spanish, English. Subtitles: French. Image : Maria Secco, Karam Ghossein, Ayman Nahle. Editing and sound: Katrin Ebersohn. Casting : Mayra Serbulo.
Production : MUAC (Daniela Perez).
Filmography : I’ve heard stories, 2008, I’ve heard 3 stories, 2009, Have you ever killed a bear of becoming jamila, 2014, Olga’s notes, 2015, Falling is not collapsing falling is extending, 2016.
Director
EP – Histoire(s) de Portrait
Cinema and television also have their own lumpenproletariat, so far away from sequins, mu ing the screen. Marwa Arsanios only chooses to keep amateurs and extras so she can turn them into...
En savoir +
A young woman is reading The Songs of Maldoror. But the reading is unsettling: the voice over is split and repeats itself; the voice of the reader is followed by a whispered, hushed voice: the same...
En savoir +Alongside images, a text: poetic prose that punctuates a flow of images (of Provence, relatives, animals) that bit by bit form a network – remanences of the Algerian war that surface in the...
En savoir +A sequence shot of the slightly slow-motion movement of hands massaging and caressing the surface, textured with scars like a zebra skin, of a vaguely anthropomorphic wax sculpture. For sound, we...
En savoir +A shooting: the blocking, the settings, the resumptions. Antecâmara uses images captured by the camera in-between takes. Then a dialectic of the gaze, both determined and free, sets in between the...
En savoir +The Republic of Karelia is a region in Russia on the border with Finland. It’s home to the Pankrat’ev Family with their Shamanic legacy, devoted to communing with nature and holding on to...
En savoir +Kain the Poet, the eloquent and loud-mouthed African-American and pioneer of hip-hop, reads accompanied by the experimental percussionist Lander Gyselinck. At the heart of his poem lies a cryptic...
En savoir +A mother writes to her daughter, from one paradise to another: one is on holiday in the Mediterranean, the other is in a foster family in the Southern Hemisphere. On screen, shots of Italy alternate...
En savoir +At FID (2016) we discovered Je rey Dunn Rovinelli’s first film, the unsettling Empathy where we were invited to follow the enigmatic Em, a young sex worker, from New York to Los Angeles. Here Je...
En savoir +To be sure, « chaos » names the cause, the sinister cause, of everything at stake here: war devastating Syria, a country and its people. « Chaos », however, is also the name of its...
En savoir +