FLAT SCREENS | film and conversation

FLAT SCREENS is a monthly programme of films curated by Andrea Luka ZImmerman

Flat Screens1 :Towers in the Sky

W e are delighted to ask you to join us for tea and home baked cake at the first Flat Screens screening & conversation on April 20th, from 6.30 – 9.30pm. FREE

Please rsvp as there is limited seating, via Studio 75, Hebden Court, and info @ studio75.org.uk

Looking forward to seeing you!

Journey to the Lower World by Marcus Coates

The Tower Block has featured in many works of literature and films such as G.J. Ballard ’s novel High Rise (1975), Haneke’s Benny’s Video (1992), Rose’s Candyman (1992), etc . It has often been used as a setting for stories with dark undertones of violence and social breakdown. Curiously non-fiction work has reproduced this kind of response as well. Nowadays, where tower blocks built by councils are narrated as failed social experiments; increasingly the people inhabiting them have become equated as being failed people, too. There we see the peculiar force of representation and popular imagination.

This first screening in a series of 10 explores another aspect of the High Rise, looking locally as well as internationally. How does the High Rise, and the people living within it, fare in a different context? The two films are chosen in order to pose questions around belonging and exclusion.

Journey to the Lower World by Marcus Coates (30min, 2004)

For his film 'Journey to the Lower World' Marcus Coates filmed himself performing a shamanic ritual for residents of a Liverpool tower block scheduled for demolition. Wearing antlers and with a deer skin strapped to his back, the film focuses on the response of the audience to the live performance – caught between scepticism and belief, spoof and sincerity.

High Rise (Um Lugar ao Sol) by Gabriel Mascaro (71min, 2009)

What does it mean to have a penthouse in poverty-filled Brazil? During the film, penthouse residents open up their homes to reveal their thoughts on social inequality, politics, and the world that surrounds them, as well as discussing more intimate subjects such as their desires, fears, insecurities, prejudices and personal histories.

Through dialogues with the owners of penthouses in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Recife, High-Rise explores the social and cultural mindset of the elite, and the phenomenon of the 'verticalization' of the Brazilian cityscape. This is a film about height, status and power.

For more information about Andrea Luka Zimmerman, see:
http://fugitiveimages.org.uk/soloworks/andrea-luka-zimmerman/