On the 25th of June at 7:30 pm Supernova invites you to the screening of Blow Up by Michelangelo Antonioni.

Blow-Up  is a 1966 psychological mystery film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, co-written by Antonioni, Tonino Guerra and Edward Bond and produced by Carlo Ponti. The plot was inspired by Argentine-French writer Julio Cortázar’s 1959 short story “Las babas del diablo”, which was later retitled “Blow-Up” to tie in with the film.

Plot:

Antonioni’s screenplay for Blow-Up is a “thriller-suspense” story revolving around the efforts of a young and successful fashion photographer in his struggle to determine whether a series of snapshots he takes at a public park contain evidence of a murder. As Thomas persists in his role as amateur detective, his quest leads him initially to question his technical mastery over the “hidden truth” recorded by his camera, then toward a confrontation with the realities of his life of “material advantages, gained at the expense of ideals”. Finally, he questions the reality of his own existence.

Biography:

Michelangelo Antonioni (29 September 1912 – 30 July 2007) was an Italian director and filmmaker. He is best known for his “trilogy on modernity and its discontents”—L’Avventura (1960), La Notte(1961), and L’Eclisse (1962)—as well as the English-language film Blowup (1966). His films have been described as “enigmatic and intricate mood pieces” that feature elusive plots, striking visual composition, and a preoccupation with modern landscapes. His work substantially influenced subsequent art cinema. Antonioni received numerous awards and nominations throughout his career, being the only director to have won the Palme d’Or, the Golden Lion, the Golden Bear and the Golden Leopard.

To reserve your seat please RSVP to:

info@spazio-supernova.com

Supernova invites you to Films for The Solstice a night of films selected and introduced by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art.

Three recent films by artists Seba Calfuqueo, Clarissa Tossin and Tuan Andrew Nguyen explore Mapuche and Maya cosmologies, the supernatural, and storytelling.

Seba Calfuqueo’s ‘Tray Tray Ko’ (2022) invites us to embark on a journey into the heart of the Mapuche cosmovision. In a video performance, the artist interweaves her own body into a sacred landscape. The Mapuche people have lived in the south and central regions of Chile and Argentina for thousands of years, and believe that the flow of water – especially waterfalls -has medicinal and healing properties. Draped in a long electric blue fabric, the artist pulls it through the forest, acting as a conduit between the tangible and the spiritual. By highlighting the inter-connectedness between her own personhood and the landscape, Seba Calfuqueo resists the dominant forces that threaten the area, including the Chilean government’s efforts to destroy Indigenous homelands for commercial use, and situates her own identity as a trans person within the natural world.

In Clarissa Tossin’s ‘Ch’u Mayaa’ (2017), Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, built in 1921 at the height of the Maya Revival style in Los Angeles, is re-mapped as Maya space through a sonic and haptic transformation of the building by a series of dance movements performed by Crystal Sepúlveda across the surface of its exterior. The film features a soundtrack of birds, cicadas, wind, drums, a heartbeat, thunder, and music played on a clay jaguar flute by Maya elder Xavier Quijas Yxayoti. The healing ritual inscribed in these evocative sounds and movements, based on gestures found on ancient Maya pottery and murals, transforms the building into an uncanny echo of the site of its quotation – the ancient ruins of Uxmal in Mexico. This symbolic reclaiming of the borrowed indigenous cultural motifs of Wright’s building re-signifies it as belonging to a pre-Columbian heritage beyond Modernism, and to the present cultural life of Los Angeles and its Maya community.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film ‘The Boat People’ (2020) is set in an unspecified time in the future, at a moment on the edge of potential extinction. The film follows a group of children, calling themselves the ‘Boat People’, as they travel across seas and land, gathering objects, artifacts and stories from a fragmented past world of human civilization that they never knew. They encounter a place formerly known as Bataan, and discover on its coast traces of war, a refugee crisis, and evidence of some of the earliest migrations in human history. Ideas of precarity, history and cultural memory are woven together in this existential, post-apocalyptic poetic film that invites us to re-imagine both the past and the future.

For his second appointment at Supernova, Damien Chazelle presents a selection of movies that explore the debut and the subsequent uses of sound in films.

Film lineup:

Walter Rutmann “Weekend” (1930)

Finding his voice (1929)

Scene from Blackmail Hitchcock (1929)

M of Fritz Lang 3 scenes (1931)

Scene from Enthusiasm by Dziga Vertov (1931)

Black and Tan Fantasy (Dudley Murphy) (1929)

Opening scene of Love Me Tonight Rouben Mamoulian (1932)

Battle on the Ice of Alexander Nevsky (1938)

On Tuesday, April 9th at 7:30 PM, Spazio Supernova invites you to the screening of the film “Dante y Soledad,” directed by Alexandra de la Mora, one of our Supernova team members, at Cinema Troisi. A Q&A session with the director will follow.

Plot

When her first daughter, Inés, is born, a successful and independent woman discovers that her previous life is slipping away from her grasp, without clarity on whether what awaits her in the future is better. Dante and Soledad, a couple of saltwater fish, will serve as both the mirror and witnesses of her transformation. It is through their reflection that Inés will understand what she must do to face her new life.

We invite you to the film screening of Heliconia by Paula Rodriguez on the 25th of January at 6:30 pm.

Heliconia, Paula Rodríguez Polanco, Colombia/France, 2020, 27’

SYNOPSIS

Heliconia is the portrait of three young people in search of an earthly paradise. It is the story of their journey, their desire for freedom and their emotional ties through the multifaceted landscape of the tropics.

BIO

Paula Rodríguez Polanco (Bogotá, 1994) is a filmmaker, researcher and curator. She studied philosophy, art history and cinema in Paris, where she has lived for the past ten years. She directed the short films Camposanto in 2019 (Festival Tous Courts) and Heliconia in 2020 (FID Marseille, IndieLisboa, Jihlava, Mar del Plata IFF, Documenta Madrid, Beldocs…).

Her films are closely linked to her research work, in which she questions the materiality of celluloid film in contemporary practices and the image’s relationship with history and individual and collective memory. She is currently preparing a PhD thesis on Super 8 and 16mm practices in contemporary cinema, and is writing her first feature film Malpaís, produced by mutokino (Colombia) and L’Heure d’été (France).

AWARDS

Special Mention First Film Prize – FIDMarseille 2020
Special Mention Altered States Competition – Mar del Plata IFF
Special Mention Best Short – FICCALI
Best International Short Film – Lima Alterna
Best Character – Festival Laberinto

FESTIVALS

FIDMarseille, FICValdivia, Jihlava IFF, Festival Cámara Lúcida, Zinebi, Amiens FIFAM, Mar del Plata IFF, Documenta Madrid, IndieLisboa, Shorts Mexico, Beldocs, Festival internacional de cine de Cali FICCALI, Las Palmas IFF, Festival Obskura, Festival internacional de cine de la isla de Chiloé, Panorama du cinéma, Colombien à Paris, Daimon Muestra de Cine, Dresden Filmfest, Leiden Shorts, Festival de Cine Independiente Laberinto, Cinemancia Festival Metropolitano de Cine, Lima Alterna, Dhaka IFF and Panorama of the European Film in Cairo

Supernova opens its first night of cineclub with a selection curated and presented by Damien Chazelle that explores the cornerstone of cinema, starting from the Lumière brothers and arriving to Chris Marker’s photo-roman.

FILM LINEUP:

La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon

Le Débarquement du congrès de photographie à Lyon

La Voltige

La Pêche aux poissons rouges

Les Forgerons

Repas de bébé

Le Saut à la couverture

Place des Cordeliers à Lyon

La Mer

L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat

Life of an American Fireman 

The Great Train Robbery

Ballet mécanique

All My Life

La Jetée

Damien Sayre Chazelle is an American film director, screen-writer and producer. He is known for directing the films Whiplash (2014), La La Land (2016), First Man (2018) and Babylon (2022).

For Whiplash, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. His biggest success came with La La Land, which was nominated for 14 Academy Awards, winning six including Best Director, making him the youngest person to win the award at age 32.