Cinema Festival

Boris Lehman general tour!Spam organized a film festival around the Belgian filmmaker Boris Lehman who came May 20, 21 and 22 to present two feature films and 5 short films in four different locations. We were welcomed by the FJT The Birds, THE Scene and the Roommate from Jura.

Like Adrienne
16 mm – color – 115 minutes – Belgium – 2000

This film is a gift. A gift to a lady. A lady I love and who loves me. Adrienne is not my mother. She is not Jewish.
She is 77 years old, the age limit for reading the adventures of Tintin.

The film is divided into seven lessons and a few digressions: the swimming lesson, the driving lesson, the cooking lesson, the sewing lesson, the botany lesson, the etiquette lesson, and the cinema lesson, the only one given by Boris, while all the others are given by Adrienne.

Adrienne lived in Iran for fourteen years, with her husband, a surgeon.
working in the holy city of Meched. When her husband died, she
returns to Brussels to be with her children and grandchildren. Having learned the Persian language and having devoted herself to collecting and translating folk tales from the Khorasan region, she ended up putting a little bit of the Orient in her pocket and a lot of sunshine in her stories. If cinema may have changed Adrienne's life, Adrienne will have worked to change mine.

Dumb as a carp
16 mm – color – 38 minutes – Belgium – 1987

From the pond to the plate, the journey and destiny of a carp, among others. This one will be eaten stuffed during a festive meal. Stuffed carp "Polish style", also called "Gefilte Fish" in Yiddish, is a traditional dish among Ashkenazi Jews. It is prepared sweet and served cold at the beginning of the meal. The head of the fish is reserved for the head of the family.

Shot in Brussels at the time of the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah), the film focuses on showing the culinary preparations, as well as the ritual and prayers that accompany them, emphasizing the sacrifice of fish and death in the concentration camps.

“In your fishponds, in your ponds
Carp, may you live long
Does death forget you,
Fish of melancholy »
(Guillaume Apollinaire)

Things that connect me to beings
16 mm – color – 15 minutes – Belgium – 2010

The film presents itself as a Prévert-style inventory. His title
is inspired by the Bedside Notes of the Japanese writer Sei Shônagon who was in the first half of the 11th century lady-in-waiting at
service of Empress Teishi. We obviously think of Georges
Perec, major writer of the OuLiPo group, but also at Dada or Fluxus. The images and words follow one another like in a poem.

Since René Magritte's famous “ceci n'est pas une pipe”, we know well that the evidence is misleading, that words, like images, can be diverted from their primary function.

To name, to list, that is to say to invent the object by the image and the word, by filming it. Act of creation, as God did in the beginning with Heaven and Earth, with Adam and Eve.

I show the camera some objects from my daily life (which are also allegories) that belonged to others that I loved or
encountered to finally observe and conclude that “I am the sum of everything others have given me”.

Sentimental museum of which I would be the guardian. Each object, each “thing” has its story. What mysterious link can there be between these things? Between these things and me?

The last (s)scene, The Gospel according to St. Boris
16 mm – color – 14 minutes – Belgium – 2003

The dialogues are taken from the Gospel according to St. John.
The apostles are almost all filmmakers, friends (and disciples) of Boris Lehman who have come to perform in front of the last artist's house-studio, still standing facing the new buildings of the European Parliament. The role of Judas is played by Claudio Pazienza and Boris Lehman embodies Christ. The staging is inspired by the fresco painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.

The film was shot in a few hours, on a Sunday morning in front of an incredible, almost Hollywood setting, in a street completely razed by real estate developers, just before the police arrived.

Magnum Begynasium Bruxellense
16 mm – black and white – 145 minutes – Belgium – 1978

Living chronicle of the inhabitants of the Béguinage district, as well as
named by what it is located on the site of the former
Brussels beguinage. Conceived as an encyclopedic inventory, the film is made up of around thirty chapters nested within each other like so many pieces of a puzzle, or even like a termite mound with numerous and crossed galleries. It takes place in space and in the interstices of a day, beginning at dawn and ending at night.

A Beautiful cruise
16 mm – black and white – 35 minutes – Belgium – 2008

Filmed in Paris and St-Denis s/Seine.
A boat trip to celebrate a birthday with friends
becomes the pretext for a film shoot. Family film which very quickly turns into a fable and a biblical tale. This is the story of Noah's Ark, braving the flood and saving some remains
of humanity, which washes up on the Mounts of Ararat.

With a host of stars and the author himself, in the role of Noah. HAS take in the first and second degree. With humor and
gravity.

Red MUDH
16 mm – black and white – 35 minutes – Belgium – 2006

Return of the son (Julien) to his father (Arié), who offers him rabbit as a meal, but the son only wants honey. The father goes to look for some in the hive but gets stuck inside. Fairy tale or pastiche, it will all end badly. By the murder of the father. Then comes a hunter who will try to bring some order and who will end up praising chocolate.

Piece by Claude Schmitz created at the sponge factory in 2006.