Projection Black Bach Artsakh
The first screening of the film Black Bach Artsakh (2021) in Paris, will be accompanied by performative readings on the film in French and followed by a Q&A session with the directors Ayreen Anastas and René Gabri.
This event and the two days of conversations at Salon Beton on December 15-16, are part of the multi-chapter program of moving image practices, Sensible Grounds, organized by Azar Mahmoudian and co-financed by Ensad and Creative Europe.
The film Black Bach Artsakh is based on interviews with inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh made in 2007, in a time between two wars. As in their earlier works shown in Forum Expanded, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri work with different layers of time: In the past they edited and presented their films live. Here they use the temporal distance to re-evaluate old footage.
Harking back to Straub/Huillet’s and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s engagement with Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions they experiment with the possible effects of his music.
Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri are artists who have taken an interest in the cinematic experience as one that offers, like a clinic, the space for revisioning our worlds, for caretaking, for nourishing the eyes and ears, for healing the souls, especially for those whose worlds remain threatened, whose voices have been silenced and assigned to oblivion by those who would imagine and assign themselves at the center of history and in the seats of so-called power.
