ONE DAY PINA ASKED…
OPENS ON FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 2014 EXCLUSIVELY AT THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER FOR ONE WEEK ONLY
CHANTAL AKERMAN, FROM HERE
OPENS ON FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 2014 EXCLUSIVELY AT THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER FOR ONE WEEK ONLY
ONE DAY PINA ASKED… is director Chantal Akerman’s singular look at the work of the remarkable choreographer, Pina Bausch, and her Wuppertal Tanztheater during a five-week European tour. The film is a fortuitous encounter between two icons of film and dance. The film originally opened in New York on July 7, 1989, and recently played to a sold out audience for the 2014 Dance on Camera series. Back by popular demand, One Day Pina Asked… will open theatrically at the Film Society of Lincoln Center exclusively on Friday, June 6, 2014 for one week only.
More than a conventional documentary, Akerman’s film is a journey through her world, composed of striking images and personal memories transformed. Capturing the company’s rehearsals and assembling performance excerpts from signature works such as Komm Tanz Mit Mir (Come Dance with Me, 1977) and Nelken (Carnations, 1982), the director applies her unique visual skills to bring us close to her enigmatic subject. Writing about the film, Richard Brody in The New Yorker said: “With her audacious compositions, decisive cuts and tightrope-tremulous sense of time—and her stark simplicity—it shares, in a way that Wenders film doesn’t, the immediate exhilaration of the moment of creation.” An Icarus Films release.
CHANTAL AKERMAN, FROM HERE was directed by Gustavo Beck and Leonardo Luiz Ferreira and examines the renowned Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman as she sits down for an hour-long conversation about her entire body of work. Throughout, the camera holds steady from outside an open door. The long, unbroken shot and the frame-within-a-frame pay homage to Akerman’s own unmistakable style (“I need a corridor. I need doors. Otherwise, I can’t work,” she says). But by shooting her in profile, the filmmakers provide a contrast to the signature frontality of her compositions (one of the many subjects covered in the wide-ranging interview)—an acknowledgement of this portrait’s contingency also underlined by the title. The film will open at the Film Society of Lincoln Center exclusively on Friday, June 6 for one week only in the Amphitheater and will screen for free once a day. An Icarus Films release.
Born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1950, Chantal Akerman is a filmmaker whose work gives new meaning to the term “independent film.” An Akerman film is an exercise in pure independence, pure creativity, and pure art. The viewer must give him- or herself over completely to the experience of the film, to watch with open eyes and an open mind. To label Akerman’s work “minimalist” or “structuralist” or “feminist” is to miss most of what she is about. Strong themes in her films include women at work and at home, women’s relationships to men, other women, and children, food, love, sex, romance, art, and storytelling. Each Akerman film is a world unto itself and demands to be explored on its own terms. Her films are the subject of recent books including Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday by Ivone Margulies.
One Day Pina Asked…
Director – Chantal Akerman
France/Not Rated/57 minutes/Digibeta/French with English subtitles/1983
Chantal Akerman, From Here
Directors – Gustavo Beck and Leonardo Luiz Ferreira
Brazil/France/Not Rated/60 minutes/DVD/French with English Subtitles/2010
Press Notes and Stills available at:
www.filmlinc.com/press
Psswd: pressfslc
For information or access to a screener or a link to view the film, please contact John Wildman, [email protected]
