Silver Prints Program 2020

Stories of people living at the bottom, excluded from society, beyond the norm and its language, combine into a narrator’s letter to his unborn son—an intimate and philosophical message raising anew some of the key questions regarding human life on planet Earth. Artur Aristakisyan’s visually radical yet ultimately delicate film fuses document with fiction, and dream with revelation. The picture will be screened on 35mm film.

Chris Marker shot La Jetée and Le Joli Mai simultaneously in Paris in 1962. The former became a classic avant-garde and sci-fi movie, the latter turned into a paradigmatic example of new documentary filmmaking and cinéma vérité. Despite their differences, both movies operate as "time machines," sending the viewer into the post-apocalyptic future (La Jetée) or deep into the explosive present (Le Joli Mai). They will be screened on 35mm film.

On a film set in postwar Hiroshima, a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) meets a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). For two days, they walk around the city, make love, and talk. Although both have personal war experiences, they gradually open up to each other through entangled conversations about time and memory. What was originally conceived as a documentary about the atomic bomb turned into French classic Alain René's feature-length debut—an outstanding meditation on love and one of twentieth-century cinema's top achievements. The film will be screened on 35mm film.