Sun 19 | 6pm

in attendance of Yony Leyser

Featuring never-before-seen archival footage of Burroughs, as well as exclusive interviews with colleagues and confidants including John Waters, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Gus Van Sant, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Sonic Youth, Laurie Anderson, Amiri Baraka, Jello Biafra, and David Cronenberg, WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: A MAN WITHIN is a probing, yet loving look at the man whose works at once savaged conservative ideals, spawned countercultural movements, and reconfigured 20th century culture. The film is narrated by Peter Weller, with a soundtrack by Patti Smith and Sonic Youth.

Burroughs was one of the first writers to break the boundaries of queer and drug culture in the 1950’s. His novel Naked Lunch is one of the most recognized and respected literary works of the 20th century and has influenced generations of artists.  The intimate documentary breaks the surface of the troubled and brilliant world of one of the greatest authors of all time.

about Yony Leyser:

Yony Leyser is a twenty-five-year-old filmmaker from Chicago, Illinois, and currently living in Berlin. He has directed several short films. After film school, he moved to Lawrence, Kansas, and began his first feature film, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, about one of the most interesting icons of the 20th century. He also works as a curator, video artist and photographer, documenting people who are outside the mainstream of society. His photograph series have included Ida, a utopian transgender commune in Tennessee; Christiana, an anarchist village in Copenhagen; Kopi, Berlin’s largest squat, and naked bike rides in the US. His work has been shown in galleries and venues in Chicago, New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Vienna and Los Angeles.

90 min

www.burroughsthemovie.com

Fri 17 | 8:30pm

pictured: still from The Door Ajar by Patrick Jolley

Renowned installation artist, photographer and filmmaker Patrick Jolley tells a self-spun tale of what may have happened during six lost weeks in the life of French poet Antonin Artaud, who in 1937 came to Ireland claiming to have in his possession the Staff of St. Patrick, which he wished to return to its rightful place. The lost time and its possible sequence of events, which ended upon Artaud’s arrest, are reconstructed from scant evidence and Artaud’s writing during the period. Jolley recounts his gripping vision in grainy Super8 and 16mm black and white imagery, diving into the surreal in a dense and unforgettable journey of stark poetic writings and stunning visual associations. A like-titled book written in collaboration with two co-authors has been published. Jolley’s solo and groups works have been shown in major festivals and exhibits the world over from Helsinki to Sao Paulo; in addition, a number of international museums have his works in their collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Patrick Jolley IE The Door Ajar 84 min 2011

Sun 12 | 6pm

A journey through the life and music of Roza Eskenazi

She was the most famous singer of the ‘30s in Greece and Turkey, the Diva of Rebetiko. With her posters displayed in every gramophone store, her Bohemian looks would drive even the toughest men crazy. (From the short story Roza, by Dinos Christianopoulos)

Roza Eskenazi sang the way she lived, with passion, fire and love.
This is the story of three young musicians from Greece, Turkey, and Israel,
who embark on an exciting musical journey, to tell the story of Greece’s
best-known and best-loved rebetiko singer for the first time on film.
It’s a journey that will take them from Istanbul to Thessaloniki and to
Athens, following the musical trail she left behind. Most of all, it’s a
journey into a world that has largely vanished, but whose sounds continue
to echo throughout the Mediterranean Basin.

Roy Sher IL My Sweet Canary  89 min  2011

www.mysweetcanary.com

Sun 20th 10:30pm

The Farewell Special of the 7th Berlin International Directors Lounge

Nyman With A Movie Camera is a 64-minute, shot-for-shot remake of Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera with a live score played by the Michael Nyman Band. Nyman has been heavily involved in cinema for most of his working life, creating the Oscar-winning score for Jane Campion’s The Piano and numerous other features including Peter Greenaway’s Drowning By Numbers and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover.

Conceived and directed by Nyman, Nyman With A Movie Camera painstakingly reconstructs Vertov’s iconic silent picture of 1929 using footage from Nyman’s own film archives shot over the last two decades. A press release offers some further explanation:

“Deeply rooted in Vertov’s original ideas concerned with ‘the perception of truth’, the documentation of ‘life as it is’ and that of ‘life caught unawares’, Nyman’s film attempts to capture the essence of ‘what is there’, and reflects on what he calls ‘the persistence of glance’ a multi-sensorial experience of time as it occurs, of life as it happens and as recorded by the human memory. The film is a modern-day take on experimental documentary film making through the bias of cinematographic collage and proposes to renew a discourse with the ideological and aesthetic precepts once defended by Vertov in his pursuit of the ultimate ‘cleaning up’ of film language from the ‘corrupting influence’ of drama.”

“Nyman’s previous engagement with Vertov’s film dates back to 2003 when he composed the original musical score for Man With a Movie Camera. The encounter with the Russian master was instrumental in defining Nyman’s own aesthetic phraseology and experimentation with the medium of film and documentary. In Man With a Movie Camera, the shot sequence follows a systematic and paced visual pattern in an attempt to mimic the language of the visible, the raw and the unscripted.

“Vertov’s driving vision was to capture ‘film truth’ — that is, fragments of reality, which when organized together have a deeper truth that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Whilst Vertov’s rhythmic patterning unifies the aesthetic surface of his film, Nyman’s choice of footage for Nyman With a Movie Camera, is a random punctuation of a visual text drawn from his own film and sound repertoires and from his photographic archives. The result is a patchwork of imagery embroidered in Vertov’s threads of the newsreel and of the dogmatic values of the film truth.”

via

screening made possible in cooperation with Myriam Blundell Projects