Michel Henritzi

Together with director Truong Minh Quy, a Vietnamese veteran recreates the horrors of the Cambodian genocide in naive drawings in a lush calabash garden.

Details from a portrait of Kinbakushi Akira Naka, through the otherness of image and speech; broken up memory, fragmented time, reminiscences of places, moments, faces and bodies, during a back-and-forth between the recollections of a child and the aspirations of a man in his fifties...

In an uncertain future where Vietnam is on the verge of being submerged in water, a son, far away from home, remembers his family. By way of cinematic magical transformations, trivial stories and banal images suddenly become unreal, as if reflections of something beyond reality.

A found-footage détournement of retail-theft surveillance, in which the criminalizing gaze of the surveillance footage is subverted by recasting capitalism as an abusive, carceral parent. Quotes transcribed from YouTube creators, who were kicked out of their homes as teens, are repurposed to ‘speak back’, buttressed by ‘poor’ low-resolution videos of stealing. Hansel and Gretel Get Kicked Out allegorizes capitalism as an abusive parent by reconfiguring dissociated internet clips into a unified chorus of forlorn rage. Music from Flowers of Romance by Michel Henritzi.

Fragments of a journey, fragments of time, fragments of memories, places, ephemeral moments, images and sounds, faces, useless details… A descent into the depths of Tokyo’s night, the abstraction of its noises, dancing with its shadows.

Michel Henritzi plays with the energy of broken music from the 45 rpm "Brave Men Run (In My Family)" with a radical technique which intensifies the sound explosions and coordinates and accelerates the collision of the images drawn of the film. I used a scan to work on these images, filtering them in black and white, increasing the contrast and mixing them with my other reels made during my American travels. I was looking for construction lines revealing the chaotic rhythms of my visual experiences to assemble with that of this super8 of a Sonic Youth performance, it is a hymn to chaos but also to a rediscovered freedom. – Raphaël Maze