Screening of Kwai Shing West Estate by Pascal Greco

1 year ago

Fonction:cinéma

MAPPING FESTIVAL

  We are delighted to invite you to the screening of the film Kwai Shing West Estate by Geneva-based director and photographer Pascal Greco on Monday December 11, 2023 at the Fonction:cinéma screening room at the Maison des arts du Grütli (16 rue du Général Dufour, 1204 Geneva). The screening will be followed by a reception.   This film was co-produced by the Mapping Festival, with the support of the City and Canton of Geneva. It was presented as an audiovisual performance with the participation of New York musician Léa Bertucci at the Geneva International Film Festival 2021.   Hong Kong. A film, a portrait, a tribute to the atypical architecture of public housing - in particular Kwai Shing West Estate - and its streets. But also to the loneliness experienced in these complexes, where around half the population lives.   The camera moves across a concrete monster. The slow motion of its peregrination through the asphalt tunnels, skimming what encircles it like a prison or a tomb, seems to be watching for something in the corridors: a presence? A way out? Walls, staircases, boxes, cables, pipes, neon lights, and nothing, nobody. And yet, discreetly, life pulsates: a cat, trickling water, voices, a plant between the cracks. In subtle complicity with the image, the sounds dig into the ear a three-dimensional mimetic survey of the granular, drawing us even deeper into a sensitive immersive experience.   Between March 2019 and January 2020, these streets were the site of demonstrations attended by Pascal Greco. They were carried out by black protesters, mainly young people, defending their rights to democracy in Hong Kong. Out of a total population of 7.4 million, some two million demonstrators took to the streets on a Sunday in June.   The sound captured in the streets and at Kwai Shing West Estate has been modified and processed to become a raw sound material, in the image of these places where concrete is omnipresent. It's the theater of a living environment and it was the theater of protest, which is now punishable by life imprisonment in Hong Kong since a law came into force on July 1, 2020.