CICLO RÃETE MI AMOR / Laugh my Darling Cycle
Laugh, my darling. Humour in feminist / Queer contemporary cinema
A screening series curated by Laida Lertxundi
in conjunction with
ZineBi 51, Bilbao International Film Festival.
November 24-27th, 2009
Guggenheim Museum Auditorium, Bilbao, Spain
RÃete Mi Amor, A screening series at the Guggenheim Bilbao, curated by Laida Lertxundi in conjunction with ZineBi 51, Bilbao International Film Festival. Kaucyla Brooke, Jane Cottis, Sadie Benning, A.S.M. Kobayashi and Kalup Linzy, a wide cross section of American and Canadian directors who have been working for years in the field of experimental cinema, form part of this short season with their recent films, which are a genuine hybrid of genres that include fiction, documentaries and filmed performances. The common denominator in these extraordinary audiovisual pieces is laughter, which appears in all of them to provide support for a profound critique whose aim is to question what is called gender normality and to make humour the basic element of queer theory and post-modern feminist discourse.
As part of this season, a special retrospective of Peggy Ahwesh’s work is being screened. She is a member of the International Jury at this year’s 51st festival and is a pioneer in this kind of cinematic practice, whose work, accurately defined as being typical of a DIY artist, doesn’t hesitate to use a wide variety of technologies, ranging from utterly obsolete ones right up to those connected with digital art. Trained as an artist in the 1970s in the New York experimental Super8 cinema scene, the feminist avant-garde movements and underground punk, since then she has applied humour and her unique poetic art of the absurd to using images and sounds to analyse political and social themes, the problems of cultural identity and gender and individual subjective experiences connected with these. This retrospective will run through the most representative films in her long career, including Philosophy in the Bedroom (1987), Martina’s Playhouse (1989), She Puppet (2001), and Certain Women (2005).