La Captive

A chronicle of the genesis and creation of Memoria, the new film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. After visiting Colombia in 2017, Apichatpong chose the country as the location for his first feature shot outside of his native Thailand. In the following two years, he returned for several visits and travelled extensively, listening to the stories of the people he met along the way. The book 'Memoria' gathers the memories he collected, in the form of photographs, a personal diary and sketchbook, research notes, treatment excerpts, and email correspondence.

Le numéro 1 de la revue de cinéma Fidback éditée par le FIDMarseille, avec un retour sur la 35e édition du festival, un regard rétrospectif sur des films qui ont fait l'actualité mondiale du cinéma en 2024, une carte blanche à Clara Schulmann, et un portrait de l'artiste et cinéaste Declan Clarke par Alice Leroy.

Retour sur six films issus de la sélection officielle du FID, par des auteurs, critiques et écrivains de langues française et étrangères. Les textes critiques sont accompagnés d'entretiens, de documents ou de matériaux inédits. De Amsevrid, premier film magistral du cinéaste algérien Tahar Kessi, jusqu'au Tríptico de Mondongo du maestro argentin Mariano Llinás, ce bouquet de films est un condensé de l'édition 2024 du festival – une poignée de films parmi tous ceux qui auraient mérité le retour.

Le choix des huit films sur lesquels nous avons invité des auteurs et autrices à poser leur regard est en soi un geste critique. Il nous a semblé que les derniers films d'Albert Serra, Miguel Gomes, Alain Guiraudie, Jia Zhangke et Victor Iriarte méritaient plus que d'autres l'inscription dans le temps long de la revue. Films restaurés, écrits édités, rétrospective et exposition au Jeu de Paume : Chantal Akerman fut pour beaucoup, cette année, une révélation. Naked Acts, le film ressuscité de Bridgett Davis, aura marqué ceux qui ont eu la chance de le voir.

Pour sa carte blanche, Clara Schulmann a choisi le film Lucciole (2021), de Pauline Curnier Jardin. Mais son texte porte au-delà de l'œuvre, il déplace le geste critique en un récit spéculatif sur la manière dont une vie et un travail se tissent sur une trame faite de lieux, d'histoires, de personnes.

Alice Leroy est la première à faire le portrait de l'artiste et cinéaste irlandais et berlinois Declan Clarke : à prendre la mesure, à tracer les perspectives d'une œuvre majeure, bien qu'encore méconnue, du cinéma d'aujourd'hui.

Fidback est une revue de cinéma éditée par le FIDMarseille. Chaque année, elle dessine une image-constellation du cinéma aimé et défendu par le festival.

Searing in its energies and mysterious in its icy depths, Love is Colder than the Lake is a tour-de-force of the experimental French poet Liliane Giraudon's power and range. 

Love is Colder than the Lake weaves together stories dreamed and experienced, fragments of autobiographical trauma, and scraps of political and sexual violence to create an alchemical and incantatory texture that is all Giraudon's own. In its feminist attention and allusive stylistic registers, Love is Colder than The Lake claims a unique position among contemporary French literature. The heroes (or anti-heroes) in this collection include Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lorine Niedecker, Emma Goldman, Chantal Akerman, the Marquis de Sade, and the unnamed lake itself. Giraudon's writing, editing, and visual work have been influential in France for decades, and English-speaking readers will thrill to this challenging, important voice.

Liliane Giraudon was born in Marseille in 1946. She continues to live and work in Marseille, and her writing is inseparable from the place, shaped by the vibrant community of poets and writers and artists Giraudon has herself shaped, as well as by the city's gritty and diverse cosmopolitanism. Giraudon's many books have, since 1982, been primarily published by France's P.O.L. editions. Giraudon has also been instrumental as an editor for influential reviews such as Banana Split, Action Poétique, and If. She performs and collaborates widely, including with Nanni Balastrini, Henri Delui, Jean-Jacques Viton, and many others. Two of her books ( Fur and Pallaksh, Pallaksh) were published in English by Sun & Moon Press in 1992 and 1994, respectively. She lives in Marseille, France.

Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collections Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018) and The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, 2023). She has twice received French Voices awards for her translations from the French, which include books of poetry and philosophy by Stéphane Bouquet, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Duforumantelle, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Sarah Riggs is a poet and multivalent artist. Her most recent book The Nerve Epistle appeared in 2021. Translation is one of her arts, for which she received a Griffin prize with Etel Adnan, and Best Translated Book Award, also for Adnan's Time (Nightboat, 2019). Riggs lives in Brooklyn, after many years in Paris. Author residence: Marseille, France.

Looking at pictures, she was reminded of the lack of time. And anyway, where did all the time go?

In Day Book a woman artist looks at time in an address to quotidian events and their unfolding. Exploring motherhood, unpaid labour, childcare, and the time of the artist, she reads the work of contemporary women filmmakers through the earlier works of filmmakers, writers, and photographers, including Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras, Natalia Ginzburg and Christa Wolf, Bertien van Manen and Bernadette Mayer. The inability to capture the accumulation of days emerges—a form without form, day after day after day.

This book is based on two related projects that take form as text, photography and film. Les Goddesses (2011) collapses the lives of Davey and her five sisters with those of the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th-century feminist writer and activist. Hemlock Forest (2016) weaves references to Wollstonecraft, Chantal Akerman and Karl Ove Knausgaard with her own family stories. During the making of Hemlock Forest, Akerman took her own life. Her death soon engulfed Davey's awareness, prompting a broader exploration of Akerman's and her own biographies, amid more universal themes of compulsion, artistic production, life and its passing.

Texts by Moyra Davey and an introduction by Aveek Sen
Design by Filiep Tacq

Stars at Midday –نجوم الضُهر is a personal diary in which the artist and filmmaker Noor Abed compiles visual and poetic notes from the production phase of her film A Night We Held Between, filmed in Palestine in 2023 with family and friends.

Like the film, the book interweaves narrative fragments, song and diaristic observations, creating a fusion of natural and composed sequences of movement, of documentary and fictional elements.

Through a choreography of bodies, sites, stories, and temporalities, Abed’s work prompts contemplation on the manifestations of social action and resistance in everyday life.

A Toast to St Martirià is an improvised speech given by the cult Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra at the St Martirià fiesta in Banyoles, the town of his birth. Transmitting his subversive attitude and impulsive lust for life, it is a journey through his formative years and early relationships – established in the nightlife of his hometown – that have shaped his particular conception of cinema, art and life. ‘Cinema should be this, making perception of time and space more intense.’

Translated by Matthew Tree
Afterword by Alexander García Düttmann

The Catalan artist and filmmaker Albert Serra was born in 1975. His films usually depict European myths and literature. In 2001, he co-founded the production company Andergraun Films. His Honor of the Knights was selected by Cahiers du Cinéma as one of the ten best films of 2007. For Story of My Death, Serra was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2013. For The Death of Louis XIV, Serra received the Prix Jean Vigo in 2016. Pacifiction was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022.

Matthew Tree was born in London in 1958. He taught himself Catalan in 1979 and moved to Catalonia in 1984. Since then he has published nine works of fiction and non-fiction written in Catalan, and five written in English. He writes regular columns for Catalonia Today magazine in English and El Punt Avui newspaper in Catalan. He has translated works by Jordi Puntí, Maria Barbal, Monika Zgustová, Joel Joan, Marta Marín-Dòmine and Albert Serra, among others. Two of his English novels, Just Looking and Almost Everything, will appear in Catalan translation at the start of 2025.

‘May my story be beautiful and unwind like a long thread . . .’, she recites as she begins her story. 

The storyteller is the living memory of her time: at once an oracle, weaver, healer, warrior, witch, protectress, teacher and great mother. Her powers are to do with passing on – not only the stories but transmission itself: ‘what grandma began, granddaughter completes and passes on to be further completed.’

In contrast to the idea that a story is ‘just a story’, pioneering postcolonial feminist theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha recodes ideas about truth and fantasy to tell a different story about power, civilisation, history, medicine and magic. Grandma’s Story shows how creative speech is connected to women’s powers of enchantment, drawing upon and speaking with storytellers including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Clarice Lispector, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko and Zora Neale Hurston – all who may be known as ‘she who breaks open the spell’. 

The story as a cure and a protection is at once musical, historical, poetical, ethical, educational, magical, and religious.

The book includes Mendieta's first published comprehensive filmography resulting from three years of collaborative research conducted by the Estate of Ana Mendieta and the University of Minnesota as well as original essays by John Perreault, Michael Rush, Rachel Weiss, Lynn Lukkas, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, and Laura Wertheim Joseph.

The first book-length treatment of Mendieta's moving-image practice, Covered in Time and History aims to locate her films centrally within her larger oeuvre and at the forefront of the multidisciplinary shifts that characterized visual arts practice during the 1970s.

The materials collected in the publication have been developed departing from the documentation, transcription and translation of textual, visual, sculptural and audio materials produced between March and November 2021 for STILI DRAMA. 

STILI DRAMA is an open-ended episodic para-cinematographic project, which functions as a spontaneous expression of MRZB research. STILI DRAMA XVIII-XXI and LA GIOSTRA DI LULU XLI-XLIV are the two first fragments of the work.

Language: English, Italian
Edition of 100 copies