Two Films from the Periphery | Activity
Screening of the films NEIGHBORS by Laboratorio Reversible and In Lua Plazt by Jérémy Gravayat, two collective film experiences that explore contexts of urban struggles in Barcelona and Paris. The session, programmed by Pilar Monsell and associated with her film installation The periphery of the imagination (The Periphery of the Imagination), part of the exhibition Unknown City Beneath the Mist: New Images from Barcelona’s Peripherieswill close with a colloquium featuring the participation of Jérémy Gravayat and members of the Laboratorio Reversible collective.
As residents living among the streets of neighborhoods that are constantly being rebuilt, we are a community in constant transformation, existing and resisting despite the pressures of the real estate interests that stalk our cities. The periphery can sometimes be in the city centers, in the empty lots of buildings demolished in favor of property speculation, occupied by families to build a temporary space to live in, or by neighborhood collectives that find in cinema a collective tool for the creation and transformation of certain narratives. The periphery is for us, and is the place where we create and construct other possible lives, other possible images.
The two films that make up this program are linked to the singular modes of film production practiced by two associative filmmaking spaces that work with photochemical media: one in Barcelona, Reversible Laboratoryand the other in the Parisian banlieue of La Courneuve, The Abominable.
Filmmaker Pilar Monsell, who has been part of these spaces of collective and mutualised film work for the past decade, programs this small diptych as a way of expanding her piece The periphery of the imaginationwhich forms part of the exhibition Unknown City Beneath the Mist: New Images from Barcelona’s Peripheriesto take its title towards a meaning that can also be understood as a way of thinking and making cinema: peripheral cinema.
Pilar Monsell is a filmmaker and lecturer on the MA in Contemporary Film Studies at Pompeu Fabra University. She takes part in Unknown City Beneath the Mist: New Images from Barcelona’s Peripheries.
Reversible Laboratory is a self-learning collective dedicated to experimenting with analogue film. Their practice is influenced by the local reality of Barcelona’s Poble-sec neighborhood.
Jérémy Gravayat is a filmmaker, editor and programmer in associative film spaces.
Programme
18:00 – 18:30 h
NEIGHBORS (22 min, 2017, Spain), directed by Laboratorio Reversible. Super 8, B/W. Original version with Spanish subtitles.
18:30 – 20:15 h
In Lua Plazt (97 min, 2018, France), directed by Jérémy Gravayat. Video and 16 mm, color. Original version with Spanish subtitles.
20:15 – 21:00 h
Colloquium with Pilar Monsell, Jérémy Gravayat and members of the Collective Reversible Laboratory.
