As part of Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, films by 3 artists will be regularly screened at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Films will be shown consecutively in this order:
Give Us Our Skeletons! (Antakaa Meille Luurankomme), a film by Paul-Anders Simma, Length: 49 minutes

Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, a film by Tracey Moffatt, Length: 19 minutes

Bedevil, a film by Tracey Moffatt, Length: 90 minutes

Iracema (de Questembert), a film by Maria Thereza Alves, Length: 27 minutes

Maria Thereza Alves is a Brazilian artist living in Europe who researches social and cultural phenomena, working particularly with situations that question social circumstances. Her work examines what we think we know, who we think we are, and the realities of where and how we actually are at this time. Alves has recently exhibited in the Guangzhou Triennal, Manifesta in Trento, the Prague Biennal, the Athens Biennal and the Lyon Biennal where she received the Francophonie prize.

WORK

Iracema (de Questembert)
Length: 27 minutes
Courtesy the artist
In her docudrama Iracema (de Questembert), Maria Thereza Alves recounts the ambiguous story of Iracema, a young woman from the isolated Brazilian village of Corubime. Iracema makes the long journey from São Paulo to France, where she learns that she has just inherited her father’s estate. She is now the owner of a vast property which the local authorities would like to buy from her rather than see it in the hands of a “savage”.

Paul-Anders Simma is a Sámi filmmaker, who grew up in a nomad family. He was educated at the Swedish Film Institute and has worked in TV production since the mid-1980s. All his films have a close connection with Sámi culture. His breakthrough short film Let’s Dance! (1991) is a humorous story about a Sámi boy going to his first dance. Simma’s feature films include The Minister of State (1997) and The Legacy of the Tundra (1995), which explores the psychological dimensions of reindeer herding Sámi. His documentary work includes the celebrated Give Us Our Skeletons! (1999) about Sámi activist Nils Somby and his quest for the repatriation of the human remains of Sámi ancestors.

WORK

Give Us Our Skeletons! (Antakaa Meille Luurankomme)
Length : 49 minutes
Courtesy the Finnish Film Foundation
Give Us Our Skeletons! (Antakaa Meille Luurankomme in Finnish, Oaivveskaldjut in North Sami) is a 1999 documentary film directed by Paul-Anders Simma about Niillas Somby, a Sami man who retraces his family ancestry as he searches for the head of his ancestor, Mons Somby.

Tracey Moffatt is an Australian photographer and filmmaker. Her work reflects her views on Aboriginality and the misconceptions about and representations of her people in art and cinema. Her earliest photographic work, a series of black-and-white portraits of members of the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Company, was entitledSome Lads (1986), and was a subtly subversive take on the 19th-century ethnographic photograph. Using a documentary style, Moffatt often draws on images from film and television made during her youth in the 1960s and 1970s as an adopted half-Aboriginal child in a white family. She carefully stages images to reflect familiar tableaux, but with a twist.

WORK

Night Cries, A Rural Tragedy
Length: 19 minutes
Courtesy Women Make Movies, New York
On an isolated, surreal Australian homestead, a middle-aged Aboriginal woman nurses her dying white mother. The adopted daughter’s attentive gestures mask an almost palpable hostility. Their story alludes to the assimilation policy that forced Aboriginal children to be raised in white families. The stark, sensual drama unfolds without dialogue against vivid painted sets as the smooth crooning of an Aboriginal Christian singer provides ironic counterpoint.

Bedevil
Length: 90 minutes
Courtesy Women Make Movies, New York
Inspired by ghost stories she heard as a child from both her extended Aboriginal and Irish Australian families, Tracey Moffatt has constructed a sublime trilogy in which characters are haunted by the past and bewitched by memories. All three stories are set in Moffatt’s highly stylized, hyper-real, hyper-imaginary Australian landscape.

This event is free and all are welcome.

Virtual exhibition/publication is available here.