Sunset Kino

_{Film by Niels-Christian Bolbrinker, Dr. Kerstin Stutterheim} 

_{Programmed by Emilia Kabakov and Séamus Kealy}

_{Flies and Angels , 2008, 92 minutes}

_{Ilya Kabakov was born in the Ukraine in 1933. Today he is considered one of the most important contemporary artists worldwide, and there is practically no significant museum of contemporary art around the world that doesn't show at least one of his installations. With his etchings, paintings and particularly with these installations he has for decades now created a phantastic world that serves as a counterpoint to the brutal reality and its many failed visions. These installations, executed with exquisite detail, are strange and enchanted spaces. They are like film sets telling life histories, touching emotions and memories held by people everywhere. But his stories are more than personal dramas: Kabakov is one of the last great utopists, he looks disenchantedly at the debris of the 20th century but at the same time, with human warmth and a distinct imagination, he is able to envision other worlds.}

_{Films by Maryam Samadi, Shadi Harouni, Rouzbeh Akhbari, and Malak Masoumi}

_{Programmed by Ala Roushan}

_{Salt Sellers, Maryam Samadi, 2023, 14 minutes}

_{Salt Sellers conveys the impact of climate change at the human scale through a personal narrative set along the receding Salt-lake Urmia. A desolate landscape reveals the quiet devastation of environmental disaster and its intimate, bodily and psychological consequences. Maryam Samadi (b. 1988) is a filmmaker living and working in Iran. Her short films—including Blue Kite, Common Moments, Me..., Swan Summer, Karnica, and A House Near the Sun—have screened internationally at film festivals and received numerous nominations and awards.}

_{I Dream the Mountain is Still Whole, Shadi Harouni, 2017, 17 minutes}

_{An eroding mining pit provides the backdrop to a dialogue that explores the fragile relationship between human life and the natural world—one deeply entangled with a personal history shaped by years of political conflict. Shadi Harouni (b. 1985) is an Iranian Kurdish artist and art critic based in the United States. As a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, she explores the resistance in Kurdistan in her work, which includes installation art, photography, and video.}

_{Prizes From Fairyland, Rouzbeh Akhbari in collaboration with Amin Roshan, 2018, 10 minutes}

_{Filmed around an active oil well in the suburbs of Ahvaz, Prizes from Fairyland stages a performance that reflects on the colonial and corporate histories of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP), and the extractive violence that has reshaped the region’s landscape. Rouzbeh Akhbari (b.1992, Tehran) is an artist working in video installation and film based between Toronto and Lisbon. His practice is research-driven and usually exists at the intersections of story-telling, political ecology, critical border studies, and human geography.}

_{There is Another Breath, Malak Masoumi, 2023, 5 minutes}

_{Dedicated to “Water, Sea, and the Caspian Sea”, this short film captures both the state propaganda surrounding Iran’s northern water crisis and the mundane yet surreal moments of daily life shaped by this ongoing scarcity. Malak (Masoumeh) Masoumi (b. 2004) is a cinematographer living and works in the Gilan Province, Iran. Her short films include Alphabet of Memories, Life of Water, Silent Residents of the City, and How Blue is My Lagoon.} 

_{Films and Programmed by Rabih Mroué}

_{Face A, Face B, Rabih Mroué, 2002, 10 minutes}

_{Rabih Mroue's Face A/Face B is constructed around a 1978 sound recording by Mroue and his brother; using virtually no images, this short piece is an intimate record of a family's life affected by loss and the political ideals of the Lebanese Civil War. A metaphysical film exploring the nature of memory and knowledge, sight and sound, physical evidence and identity, and recollection and survival. Acclaimed Lebanese stage and performance director and actor Rabih Mroué leads us on a seemingly autobiographical journey from his childhood, through the Lebanese civil war, to his present as he searches for meaning among the fragments of his memory, cassette tapes, and photos.} 

_{With Soul, With Blood, Rabih Mroué, 2003, 10 minutes}

_{The tension between "I" and "we" is at the heart of democratic life. How to be in a collective without erasing one’s individuality? This film focuses on Mroué’s search for his own unique voice, values, and ideas within a group context, while considering the intentional or unintentional overshadowing of others.}

_{Shooting Images, Rabih Mroué, 2012, 9 minutes}

_{Rabih Mroué was particularly struck by a sentence he encountered:“The Syrian protesters are recording their own deaths”. Mroué confronts a harrowing group of videos in which we witness a Syrian protester being shot by one of the regime’s soldier forces. These videos show the moments of eye contact between the killer and his victim, when the gun’s line of sight and the camera’s lens meet.}

_{Cheers to Our Wishes, Rabih Mroué, 2020, 15 minutes}

_{For Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s series of online commissions, ‘CC: World’ (2020), Mroué created Cheers to our Wishes (2020). This video essay combines an adaptation of Antonin Artaud’s story on the oriental plague, an email correspondence between Mroué and his doctor concerning an infection in his way of seeing and a video-letter to his sister in which he reflects on a family gathering.} 

_{Footnotes, Rabih Mroué, 2016, 50 minutes}

_{In Footnotes of an Unwritten Text About War, Body and Theatre (2014–16), Rabih Mroué addresses his own experiences of war and its lingering aftermaths. The work collects visual footnotes, unfinished thoughts and outtakes from years of living and working in his home country of Lebanon; references to civil war and displacement are frequent, as well as broader questions about living and dying and the strange commune between.  Footnotes was largely completed during Rabih Mroue´s fellowship at the International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures/FU/Berlin, 2013-2014, and was completed in 2016 for the Wiesbaden Biennale/Germany.}

_{Films and Programmed by Renèe Helèna Browne}

_{Daddy’s Boy, Renèe Helèna Browne, 2020, 22 minutes} 

_{Framed by the moulding and transformation of a plasticine dinosaur and presence of sci-fi classic, Jurassic Park, the film invites viewers into the world of Browne’s rural Irish home. Intimately depicted, the film then brings its viewers in on its sense of unease and breakdown, as it delves into a longing for home that is simultaneously haunted by the claustrophobia and alienation of traditional expectations surrounding identity.} 

_{Sanctus!, Renèe Helèna Browne, 2024, 28 minutes}

_{Sanctus! is a film installation exploring devotion in relation to portraiture, faith, and belonging. Browne presents a fragmented portrait of rally car culture in Donegal as a route to finding understanding with their mother Helen. The 28 minute film moves through opening ceremony celebrations, drivers’ preparations, bystanders' excitements, to race day action, and adjacent amateur drifting competitions. Weaving through these scenes are encounters between mother and child, as they examine Helen’s relationship with faith, loss, and the afterlife. The project borrows its title from the Latin word for ‘holy’, which was chanted three times by the Prophet Isaiah upon seeing an apparition of God.} 

_{Sacred Disease, Renèe Helèna Browne, 2019, 20 minutes}

_{Sacred Disease is a two-colour animation with voice-over essay. This voiceover, written and performed by Browne, is an exploration of language and its power when consumed by the performance of romantic partnership. An episode of T.V series Sex and the City is examined next to the mythological love story of Acontius and Cydippe from the Roman poet Ovid’s book ‘The Heroides/Letters of Heroines’ (5CE).}