Maïder Fortuné

Apprentice director Emmanuel Mouret submits a group of apprentice actors to a series of experiences: to what extent are they ready to expose themselves, either physically or psychologically, in the eyes of their director first, and then of the viewers?

The Canebière building in Marseilles unfolds to the rhythm of its everyday spaces and sounds, while James Baldwin’s words evoke the impact of colonialism on French identity.

An art professor tells the peculiar story of her student E., a strange young woman whose conceptual performance pieces and singular existence leave the professor increasingly adrift. Combining fictional narrative, personal anecdote and private conversation, Communicating Vessels explores how we influence each other in ways that are sometimes good, sometimes bad, yet always urgent and necessary. An unusual tribute to art and its creation, channelling seminal performances by Joan Jonas and Lygia Clark.

Sitting at a table in an empty room, a man listens to an interrogation tape. It relates to how the man was found in Turin, doesn’t know his name and was locked away in a psychiatric institution. Characters from his possible past are used to find out who he is. He is taciturn, mumbles an answer now and then, and gives the impression that he actually knows some of the details, but quickly forgets others. We are shown photos of places where he may have been and follow him being given a number of simple language and maths tests which the detective employs to solve this mystery.

After 'Communicating Vessels' (FID 2020), the artist-filmmaker duo Annie McDonell and Maïder Fortuné are back. Once again, the question is that of art, its teaching, the painful articulation between thought, practice and the living shell that embraces and brings it to life. An affair as ancient as the first Romantic period, its complexity fully intact, the challenge here is multiplied by the study of an extremely singular and insufficiently known figure of 20th century history: Lee Lozano. Painter, particularly radical conceptual artist and then recluse, for many years this woman filled similar small coloured spiral notebooks with her thoughts and plans for her work.

Cosmic revolutions beget earthly revolutions in a film about the 2024 solar eclipse, ecstasy, ghosts, birth, death and the English poet and preacher John Donne.