Cinema

(de voertaal van deze avond is Engels).

Jeffrey's Underground Cinema has been showing neglected and forgotten films for the last decade. This night:  

LOST IN PARIS  2016
(Paris pieds nus)
Directed by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon
83 minutes
In French with English subtitles

Since our world seems to be getting so desperately narrow-minded these days, perhaps what we need more than anything else is the opening up of new possibilities. The films of Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon (Iceberg, Rumba, The Fairy) offer a visual humor that has its roots in the past—a bit of Buster, Keaton, a bit of Jacques Tati—yet create their own wit and imagination, which can flicker between light and dark but is always illuminated.

This cinematic duo have been making zany films for decades, and this was one their most recent. These two do it all—write, direct, choreograph, and perform in their own movies (accompanied by collaborator Bruno Romy). This one focuses on a librarian in Canada who gets a cryptic message from her aunt, so she races across the ocean to Paris to help her, only to not find her at home. So she wanders the streets of the City of Light, in search of her. Lost in Paris, like all of Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon’s films, is about surrendering, letting go, and allowing yourself to be lost in the magical, anything-can-happen world they have created. Their movies are often interpreted as fantasies, but that’s not actually the case. In our society most people live their lives locked in repetition, in a set of routines… and their films are simply about what happens when that routine is broken.

There is the plot about the missing aunt and being a fish out of water in a strange new city… but what’s really important is the visual accent… the almost surrealistic situations, the absurd and oddball/existential situations that pop up. They are committed to poetic physical effects rather than computer-generated ones, and that’s what sparks the magic. As I said above, in most of their projects Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon carry all the weight, doing everything themselves. But in this one they have someone totally unexpected helping them…. the renowned French actress Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima mon amour), in one of her final roles… she would die less than a year later.

With a short introduction by Jeffrey Babcock

20:30 (doors and bar open at 20:00)
Free entrance / no reservations
We advise you to come early: max. 70 people /
no admittance after 20.30