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Curated Program: Blossom

March - May, 2024


I am writing this curatorial text on a very sunny February day. It feels as though this warmth should bring joy. However, given that our lives are filled with brutal wars, the rise of populism, global warming, and uncertainty, this delight from the February sun feels undeserved and misplaced; the happiness we derive from it is overshadowed.

But, despite the nihilism and frustration, Spring is always there. Despite everything, this perpetual cycle brings forth sometimes inexplicable feelings of change, renewal, and resurrection. It always blossoms. The DOCA Spring program resembles hope that might show us the way out.

Various documentary and experimental films selected for the program represent emancipation from form and narrative constraints. They explore topics such as love, sexuality, identity, emancipation etc. Guests and the audience will engage in discussions on how to address these topics without ignorance.

It might seem untimely to discuss blossom, but there is no future without contemplating it.

Anna Dziapshipa, curator of the program


* The cinema is wheelchair adapted


Blossom - March, April, May 2024

movies
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WOMEN

Director: Vaja Zubashvili

1990 / 25' / Georgia   Sub: ქარ ENG​

Documentary film director Vaja Zubashvili describes dreams and reality of Soviet women of various age groups, education and social backgrounds.

WHY I NEVER BECAME THE DANCER

Director: Tracey Emin

1995 / 7' / United Kingdom  Sub: ქარ ENG

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Like the majority of Tracey Emin’s works, Why I Never Became a Dancer is autobiographical. Emin recalls her teenage bid to leave the seaside town of Margate, where she had grown up, by entering the British Dancing Championship.

ASPARAGUS

Director: Suzann Pitt

1979 / 20' / USA Sub: ქარ ENG​

Throwing open the doors of perception onto a shape-shifting vision of polymorphous sexuality and a mesmerizing exploration of the artist's inner world.

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BRAINWASHED: SEX-CAMERA-POWER

Director: Nina Menkes

2022 / 107' / USA

Sub: GEO ENG

"Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power is a mesmerising visual journey through cinema’s sexist bloodstream that will forever change the way you see and make films. Director Nina Menkes compels the casual moviegoer and cinephile alike to confront how the visual language of cinema is used to disempower women at the most fundamental level. Using more than 175 film clips from canonical Hollywood favourites and cult classics as well as interviews with filmmakers and scholars, the film reveals a sinister framework of misogyny and paternalism that, from early cinema to the present day, infiltrates some of our favourite movies.

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LOVE IS ALL

Director: Kim Longinotto

2014 / 70' / UK​

A hundred years of love and courtship on the silver screen, with music created by celebrated Sheffield singer-songwriter-producer Richard Hawley​​​​​​.​​

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MUTZENBACHER

Director: Ruth Beckermann

2022 / 101 / Austria

Sub: ქარ ENG

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For more than a hundred years, the novel, “Josefine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Viennese Whore”, has been the subject of controversy for its lustful depiction of child and female sexuality. Though published anonymously, the novel has over the years been attributed to the Austrian writer, Felix Salten (the author of “Bambi”), and despite being banned for a period has also been celebrated as a world-renowned work of Viennese literature.

Ruth Beckermann announces a casting call for a film based on the well-known pornographic novel: “Looking for men between the ages of 16 and 99.” Shot in a former coffin factory, the film, MUTZENBACHER, sees a hundred readers confronted with excerpts from the text. And just as in real life, reading these “offensive” passages on the set evokes not only personal memories and erotic fantasies, but also reactions of denial, rejection, self-distancing and strategies of justification. We live and love in an age when sex is more ubiquitous than ever, and yet at the same time is met with a highly charged moral environment.

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IN CALIFORNIA

Director: Charles Redon

2015 / 77' / France

Sub: GEO ENG

Charles Redon immerses himself in his wife's environment, the ballet dancing, and starts documenting it. Slowly, he begins to understand that he can build a drama with his own life.

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TO BOOKS AND WOMEN I SING

Director: María Elorza

2022 / 71' / Spain

Sub: ქარ ENG

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Standing against fire, water, moths, dust, ignorance and fanaticism, an anonymous female army looks after books. An intimate resistance, lacking epic events, revolution or weapons.

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TRANSNISTRA

Director: Anna Eborn

2019 / 95' / Sweden, Denmark

Sub: ქარ ENG​

She loves me? She loves me not? Uncertainty dominates the lives of youngsters in the tiny, unrecognised state of Transnistria.

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LOVE HOTEL

Directors: Philip Cox, Hikaru Toda

2014 / 80' / United Kingdom, Japan

Sub: ქარ ENG

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In Japan, long working hours, cramped living spaces and the need for privacy drive many people to establishments that discreetly cater to lovers and their needs.

Preceded by a short

AN ASIAN GHOST STORY

რეჟისორი: Director: Bo Wang

2023 /37' / Hong Kong, Netherlands

Sub: ქარ ENG​

Wigs played a vital role in the rise of the Asian economy in the post-war era. In the heyday of the 1960s, it ranked as the fourth-largest export in Hong Kong's export-orientated industrialization.

This project examines the role of Hong Kong as a transient space that mediates and sanitizes the connection between different worlds.​​

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THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE

Director: Marie Losier

2011 / 72' / France, USA

Sub: ქარ ENG​

An intimate, affecting portrait of the life and work of groundbreaking performance artist and music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV) and his other half and collaborator, Lady Jaye, centered around the daring sexual transformations the pair underwent for their “Pandrogyne” project.

Preceded by a short

TOWARDS TENDERNESS

Director: Alice Diop

2016 / 38' / France

Sub: ქარ ENG​

Four young men from the Paris suburbs talk about their own masculinity-both their macho facades and the fundamental desire for love that their posturing seeks to hide. The men act in a way society and their friends expect "men" to act.

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SEARCHING EVA

Director: Pia Hellenthal

2019 / 84' / Germany

Sub: ქარ ENG​

Eva, 25, drifter, Berliner, pet-owner, poet, lesbian, sex worker, virgo, housewife, addict, feminist, model, declared privacy an outdated concept at the age of 14. This is the tale of a young woman growing up in the age of the internet, turning the search for oneself into a public spectacle, and challenging the definitions of what a woman should be.

Preceded by a short

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EVEN IF SHE HAD BEEN A CRIMINAL

Director: Jean-Gabriel Périot

2006 / 10' / France

Sub: ქარ ENG​

Reflection on the archive images of the end of the Second World War in France.

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FETISHES

Director: Nick Broomfield

1996 / 84'  / USA​

Fetishes is a 1996 documentary by Nick Broomfield filmed at Pandora's Box, one of New York City's most luxurious SM/fetish parlors.

Preceded by a short

THE WAGES OF JOHN PERNIA

Director: Ben Yong

2023 / 8' / United Kingdom Sub: ქარ ENG​

Charles Redon immerses himself in his wife's environment, the ballet dancing, and starts documenting it. Slowly, he begins to understand that he can build a drama with his own life.

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ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY

Director: Paul B. Preciado

2023 / 98'  / France

Sub: ქარ ENG​

It is a debut essay film by the Spanish philosopher and writer Paul B. Preciado, a kind of collective autobiography narrated by the author through the gender transition stories of more than 20 characters in the film.

The film is a bold and cheerful reflection on Virginia Woolf's well-known satirical novel 'Orlando,' in which the main character undergoes a sex change and travels through time. Preciado references Woolf's writings through theatrical portrayals and challenges us to re-imagine them from a contemporary and critical lens and with festive lightness, aims to immortalize in history those characters whose stories have not been preserved in the writings of the past.

We would like to thank Amirani cinema for providing the cinema for the Film Club.

Supporters of the curated program

past programs

ახალი ქართული დოკუმენტურები
New Georgian Documentaries
September 16 and 23, 2024
რა მოხდა რუსეთში
Blossom - May, June 2024
გაფურჩქნა
Blossom - March, April, May 2024
პერიფერიული ტრანსფორმაციები
Peripheral Transformations and Memory Spots January - February, 2024
რა გაანათებს ღამეს?
What Lights up the Night?
September 25 - October 30, 2023
რაც დავიწყებით არ იბინდება
History Revisited
November - December, 2023
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