Currents Program 6: Site Specific
61st New York Film Festival
September 29 - October 15, 2023
Featuring the North American premiere of Dane Komljen’s Projekt, the U.S. premiere of Ayo Akingbade’s The Fist, and the North American premiere of Huw Lemmey and Onyeka Igwe’s Ungentle.
Q&A with Ayo Akingbade and Huw Lemmey on Oct. 9 & 11
Projekt
Dane Komljen, 2023, Germany/Nigeria, 26m
Igbo, Yoruba, Pidgin, and English with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Forty-six years after its completion, the International Trade Fair Complex in Lagos, Nigeria, lies waterlogged and in disrepair, its modernist concrete pavilions flooded and overgrown with vegetation, and its shopping stalls and convention centers now serve as makeshift workshops, bike repair stalls, and playgrounds. Shooting in a soft-edged standard-definition video, Komljen observes the complex’s grounds with equanimity and warmth, marking both its history as a former utopian project and its present-day vernacular uses.
The Fist
Ayo Akingbade, 2022, U.K./Nigeria, 24m
U.S. Premiere
Filmmaker Ayo Akingbade’s lush 35mm-shot portrait of the Guinness factory in Ikeja, Nigeria—the first of Guinness’s breweries built outside Ireland and the U.K.—is at once a closely observed process film about industrial production, an intimate glimpse into the sociality of assembly-line labor, and an incidental measure of globalization.
Ungentle
Huw Lemmey and Onyeka Igwe, 2022, U.K., 37m
North American Premiere
Like a clandestine encounter between the worlds of John le Carré and Alan Hollinghurst, Ungentle lingers in cruising spots, historic sites, and the enclaves of British espionage. With a droll, urbane narration read by Ben Whishaw, Huw Lemmey and Onyeka Igwe’s collaborative film brings the covert fraternities of spies and homosexual men into an unlikely proximity, mapping an obscure and enigmatic landscape of loyalty, secrecy, and desire.
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