Vive le cinéma! Art & Film

Jia Zhang-ke (born in Fenyang, China, in 1970) represents the voice of Chinese independent cinema. Films like Platform (2000) and Still Life (2006) often explore the intersection of fiction and documentary. Social observation is another key element in his work. His most important stylistic device is the extended total shot. The individual always forms part of a larger entity — a space, a situation, an era. For Vive le cinéma! he has made a new work based on the ubiquity of surveillance cameras.

Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese (born in Hlotse, Lesotho, in 1980) is one of the most exciting visual voices around today. He belongs to a generation of makers from Africa whose work questions stereotypes surrounding the continent’s cinema and develops new visual imagery to tell their stories. His film This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (2019) uses wonderful and penetrating images to tell the story of his grandmother, who is forced to leave her land to allow for the construction of a water reservoir. For Eye he has made an overwhelming installation with multiple screens that focus on the representation of the black female body.

Since the emergence of cinema, there have been experiments in which filmmakers venture off the beaten track of the ‘ordinary’ narrative movie. As filmmakers and artists, they investigate the language and possibilities of film. That can sometimes lead to innovation within narrative cinema, or to intersections with other art disciplines. Such efforts are sometimes referred to as ‘experimental cinema’, or ‘expanded cinema’, or simply artistic cinema.

The International Film Festival Rotterdam has been exploring that intersection more explicitly since the mid-1990s, initially under the name ‘Exploding Cinema’. Innovative filmmakers and artists from places and continents that, cinematographically speaking, had been ‘terra incognita’ for a long time had finally found a platform.

Vijf jonge filmtalenten hebben de films van de kunstenaars van Vive le cinéma! bekeken. In deze nieuwe online serie vertellen ze over wat hen inspireert. Dit zijn Stefanie Kolk, Zara Dwinger, Dylan Werkman, Daphne Lucker en Aramis Garcia Gonzalez.