02.04.25 – 06.04.25, Courtisane Festival

Courtisane is a platform for film and audiovisual arts. Through a yearly festival, film screenings, talks and publications, we research the relations between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement.

Undercurrents

Courtisane is a platform for film and audiovisual arts. Through a yearly festival, film screenings, talks and publications, we research the relations between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement.

Derek Jarman: Archaeologies of Sound and Soul
Derek Jarman liked to use archaeology as a metaphor in his work. It was a striking metaphor for the work of an artist who was tirelessly and uncompromisingly searching to reassemble the fragments of a world he saw falling apart, including his own private world. Shortly after being diagnosed as HIV positive, he transformed a small piece of land in Dungeness into a symbolic garden of resilience. Like his film, the garden was refined and subversive, without walls or fences, a celebration of growth and existence, beauty and resilience. This programme honours his cinematic work and collaboration with composer Simon Fisher Turner.

Still There Are Seeds to Be Gathered
A series of films that deal with the practices of gardening, cultivation, wildcrafting or foraging, while challenging the dominant politics of extraction and extinction associated with the imperatives of continuous growth and expansion. Cinematic works that evoke adventurous, intertwined histories that we must imagine in order to become of the world once again — to sow worlds beyond oppressive limitations and divisions.

Sanrizuka Notes
This programme presents two films by Fukuda Katsuhiko, a member of the film collective Ogawa Productions. He worked with the group from 1968 to 1978 and documented the farmers' resistance movement against the construction of Narita International Airport. His films offer precise and nuanced portraits of the community and reflect his deep involvement in their struggle and way of life.

Domestic _graphies
Do our gestures have a precursor? Human bonds with the inhabited environment are pre-eminently formed by the sense of touch and time. Weeding, pinching, kneading, building, returning, caring. As a reflection of a memory handed down by hand, this programme focuses sharply on questions about space, outside and inside, freedom, contradictions, threats, possibilities and passing on our life experiences.

In the Midst of the End of the World
In the context of the publication of the book In the Midst of the End of the World: António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro (2024), Courtisane presents their second feature film Ana in a new digital version. The title character is a young Portuguese girl who lives with her grandmother. Through their relationship, we witness the cycle of life: Grandmother takes care of her granddaughter until the granddaughter is obliged to do the same for her grandmother.

Diego Marcon
Two short film programmes in dialogue with the work of Diego Marcon. His films are based on different cinematic vocabularies from various genres, including musicals, melodrama, horror and slapstick comedy. His uncanny, idiosyncratic images make use of various techniques such as robotics, prosthetics and CGI. Words, sounds and gestures contribute to the unsettling uncertainty or ambiguity that underlies Marcon's work.

Album release Là
Là is a compelling, politically charged sonic journey — a lament for the Naqab desert in Palestine. The result of a collaboration between Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Eitan Efrat, Laszlo Umbreit and Ot Lemmens. In this live concert, Laszlo Umbreit and Eitan Efrat further develop the sound formations from the album with acoustic and electronic instruments.