Cineclub at Houtnacht 2022

Film 1: PRETTY PICTURES

In his film Pretty Pictures, the Brazilian artist Bernardo Zanotta shows the gap between beautiful images and their production. He recorded the ‘beautiful images’ in a semi-automatic greenhouse in the Dutch countryside. Indoors, bromeliads are grown artificially, a plant species that comes from Brazil and is produced and prepared for sale here in the Netherlands.

As a starting point for his work, Zanotta often harks back to historical stories or existing texts. He brings these texts to the present through new characters and critical reflection. His film Pretty Pictures is based on the novel Les Belles Images (1966) by the French writer Simone de Beauvoir. The book examines different social roles in an ever-growing consumer society. The narrator switches between the description of events and the inner dialogue of the narrator who questions the increasing influence of technology and the utopian dream of a mechanized future.

The Brazilian artist Bernardo Zanotta (1996) makes films, theater performances, performances and installations. Since graduating from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, he has worked on a film trilogy about the relationship between cannibalism and the history of sexuality. From a decolonial perspective, he examines the rhetorical relationship between cannibalism, exoticism and sexual prohibition.

Film 2: MOTHER EARTH’S INNER ORGANS

Coal and hammocks are the setting for the film Mother Earth’s inner organs by Colombian artist Ana Bravo Pérez. This film installation is about the extraction of coal in Colombia and the consequences for the local communities in La Guajira and industries in the Netherlands and the rest of the world.

Bravo Pérez searches for the perspective of Mother Earth in the film. Research shows that major Colombian mining companies are involved in human rights violations. The Netherlands has been one of the largest importers of coal from Colombia for decades. Due to a lack of transparency, Dutch buyers are hardly associated with the social and violent circumstances involved.

In Colombia, Bravo Pérez realized that the overwhelming nature of her youth was also the setting for a war that once started with colonization and the exploitation of natural resources. In 2005 she fled her own country because of violence. As an artist, with a master’s degree in film, (de)colonialism, climate, (forced) migration and exile play an important role in her work.

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