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Sat 17 Jul – Fri 27 Aug
Known Unknowns
Part of Arnolfini’s Old Media season, this season of films and videos focuses on the camera’s role not only in recording events, but also in producing them. The lines between documentary and fiction, acting and being, thought and moving images, become fuzzy; suggesting that cinema has become a prosthetics for our memories, subjectivities and doubts.

Sat 17 Jul 3.30pm
Close Up (PG)
After Kiarostami read about the trial of a poor Tehranian accused of impersonating the famous film director Moshen Makhmalbaf, he persuaded all involved to re-enact the odd story for his cameras. A film of the greatest humanity, constantly probing the limit where moving images and reality influence each other.
Dir. Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1990, 1h 40m, Subtitled

Sun 18 Jul 2.30pm
The Apple (U)
The strange story of an impoverished old couple in a Tehran suburb who kept their twin daughters permanently locked up at home, stirred furious debate in Iran. This unscripted re-enactment, with everyone playing themselves, opens up questions around the blurring of truth and fiction in documentary forms.
Dir. Samira Makhmalbaf, Iran/France, 1998, 1h 26m, Subtitled

Sun 25 Jul 2.30pm
A Moment of Innocence (12)
Moshen Makhmalbaf’s metafilm layers time and reality; inter-mixing memory, fiction, real characters and amateur actors to restage a violent encounter from his own past when he stabbed one of the Shah’s policemen.
Dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iran/France, 1996, 1h 18m, Subtitled

Thu 29 Jul 6.30pm
Glowing Rectangle #2
Double Take (12A)
Hitchcock stars in Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y director Grimonprez’s second feature, a fascinating tale of intrigue, personal paranoia and deception. Using archive footage, the film uses Hitchcock’s own sardonic wit to explore his preoccupation with doubles – a recurring theme in his films – to great effect.
Dir. Johan Grimonprez, Belgium/Germany/Netherlands, 2009, 1h 20m

Thu 5 Aug 6.30pm
How to Live In the FRG (NC)
Wherever one looks, people appear as actors playing themselves. Here Farocki assembles a fascinating picture of the incessant effort to be prepared for the emergency of ‘reality’; a society in which childbirth and dying, crossing streets and killing are all taught and performed.
Dir. Harun Farocki, Germany, 1990, 1h 23m, Subtitled

Fri 6 Aug 7.30pm
Fata Morgana (PG)
Herzog’s science-fiction elegy of decayed colonialism in the Sahara is also a cinematic essay on the uneasy relationships between man and Earth. The film captures the vast African wasteland, with the desert’s residents depicted with a deliberately staged quality.
Dir. Werner Herzog, West Germany, 1971, 1h 19m

Sat 7 Aug 7.30pm
A Grin without a Cat: Scenes of the Third World War 1967-1977 (NC)
Re-editing an enormous quantity of film, much of it taken under dangerous conditions during the activist struggles of the 1960s and early ’70s, Marker – who always thinks about the condition of film as memory – presents a vivid picture of world unrest, denouncing ‘governments, who would like us to have no memory’.
Dir. Chris Marker, France, 1977, 3h, Subtitled

Thu 12 Aug 6.30pm
November (NC)
£3.00/£2.00 Concs
In the eighties Steyerl shot a Super 8 feminist martial arts film with her best friend Andrea Wolf (who was later killed fighting for Kurdish independence) in the lead role. Steyerl’s memories and accounts of Wolf’s life provoke the filmmaker to engage in a fundamental reflection on how fact and fiction are intertwined in global discourse.
Dir. Hito Steyerl, Germany, 2004, 25m

Fri 13 Aug 6.30pm
Little Dieter Needs To Fly (NC)
With typical brilliance and idiosyncrasy Herzog persuades a former US pilot who was shot down over Vietnam to return to the jungle sites of his capture and internment to retell and restage the unbelievable details of his horrific experience, all the while being harassed by AK-47-brandishing Vietnamese actors. Dir. Werner Herzog, France/UK/Germany, 1997, 1h 20m

Sun 15 Aug 2.30pm
David Holzman’s Diary (15)
Far ahead of its time, this film was a kind of mockumentary, yet so convincing that the audience booed it at Cannes as they saw the credits and realised it wasn’t ‘real’. But much of this film-diary of a recently drafted New Yorker was documentary, as well as being a sublime, funny piece of filmmaking.
Dir. Jim McBride, USA, 1967, 1h 13m

Fri 20 Aug 6.30pm
Videogrammes of a Revolution (NC)
Farocki and Ujica’s brilliant documentary examines the political role of the camera in recording but also producing revolutionary events (or history, as they call it), via their persuasive analysis of the political role of TV and video images during the Romanian revolution of December 1989.
Dirs. Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica, Germany, 1991, 1h 46m

Sat 21 Aug 7.30pm
Lost Highway (18)
Lynch’s ‘psychogenic fugue’, a horror/thriller that involves spontaneous, uncontrolled time travel, body snatching and ghostly apparitions. Mostly, it’s about the malleability of identity, all quite impossible to explain, but wonderful visually, and with striking performances from all, especially Patricia Arquette, Bill Pullman and Robert Blake. Dir. David Lynch, USA/France, 1997, 2h 15m

Sun 22 Aug 2.30pm
The War Game (15)
Using amateur actors to imagine a nuclear strike on Britain at the height of the cold war, this controversial film was almost immediately banned. Watkins’ ambition was to question the illusory aspects of media-produced reality, confronting notions of reality and objectivity by deliberately staging films as though they were really happening. Dir. Peter Watkins, UK, 1965, 47m

Thu 26 Aug 6.30pm
Glowing Rectangle #3 – Isabell Heimerdinger films
This Berlin based artist examines difference between acted and authentic behaviour, between role and identity and between posing and ‘genuine’ expression. In doing so, she uses strictly analog technologies, such as slides, Polaroids and 16mm film. A selection of recent film and video works will be screened.

Fri 27 Aug 7.30pm
Solaris (PG)
A cosmonaut psychologist visits the troubled distant Solaris space station, which is orbiting a planet able to physically replicate the cosmonauts’ memories. A science fiction of inner space, this haunting work meditates on existence, memory and human subjectivity.
Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR, 1972, 2h 45m, Subtitled