I’ve been to it thrice now but I realise that I haven’t posted anything about the CCCB’s show The Complete Letters (Totes les cartes), a video correspondence between six filmmakers that is less of a dialogue and more of a swap.
Perhaps I’m still traumatised by the one about the Chinese mountain folk, who kept pigs and grew potatoes and who subsisted on those potatoes, and whose dogs subsisted on potatoes and whose children, too, ate only potatoes, picking off their charred skins with muddy little fingers. It was filmmaker Wang Bing’s only ‘letter’ to poor Jaime Rosales, whose response, filming unwitting strangers in Madrid’s Barajas aeroport, was terribly intrusive and really very interesting. Another worth watching was the exchange between Mexican Fernando Eimbcke and New York-based South Korean filmmaker So Yong Kim (right at the end). Eimbcke films a wee leaf quivering on his window pane, So Yong Kim’s responds with a livid, sea-sucking sun.
Not from So Yong Kim’s film
I couldn’t get into some of the others. Isaki Lacuesta spent his camera time paying film homage to his love life: crumply sheets and bits of his girlfriend. Iranian icon Abbas Kiarostami filmed an apple bobbing down the river ducking and diving to perky (that’s a euphemism) jazz. Something to remember is that you can revisit the show again for free by swapping your ticket for another at the end. Another important reminder is that a bag of nuts makes a more discrete snack food than a cherimoya.
Find more
info about the touring show:
The Complete Letters
from another source
here.
