Double screening and discussion: Marwa Arsanios and Nele Wohlatz

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Saturday, February 25 at 5pm for a screening of Nele Wohlatz’s The Future Perfect (2016), and Marwa Arsanios’s Amateurs, Stars and Extras or The Labor of Love (2019), and a hybrid post-screening discussion with the artists.

This double screening playfully explores linguistic and filmic ways in which care and solidarity can be manifested. Both films featured in this program offer distinct perspectives on the complexities of self-identity and resistance within minor collectives (film extras, immigrants, migrant workers) exposed to institutional and cultural barriers within the dominant economic system.

This screening constitutes the second event of event of “Communities, Labor, and Class Relations,” the third chapter of the four-part series Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art taking place at e-flux Screening Room in monthly chapters between December 2022 and March 2023. Read more on the series here.

Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art is produced and organized by e-flux; with the support of the German Film Office, an initiative of the Goethe-Institut and German Films.

Marwa Arsanios, Amateurs, Stars and Extras or The Labor of Love (2019, 25 minutes) 
At a remove from cinema’s and television’s alluring veneer, there exists an exploited class of worker—relegated to the margins or hidden behind the scenes. In Amateurs, Stars and Extras or The Labor of Love, Arsanios furnishes us with an inversion of this dynamic in which she casts “amateurs” and “extras” in the roles of central characters. And like them, a group of domestic workers, whose care-work is often rendered invisible, is also brought to the fore to become central to the project. In Amateurs, Stars and Extras, migrant workers—most of them women of color—come to embody something beyond displacement or exploitation as subtle but no less trenchant forms of resisting the performance of labor are proffered. (Tendai John Mutambu)

Nele Wohlatz, The Future Perfect (2016, 65 minutes)
Awarded Best First Feature at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2016, The Future Perfect explores fractured relationships within class, culture, and language. Xiaobin is 17 years old and does not speak a single word of Spanish when she arrives in Argentina. But a few days later, she already has a new name, Beatriz, and a job in a Chinese supermarket. Her family lives in a parallel world in a launderette, far removed from the Argentinians. Xiaobin secretly saves money and enrolls at a language school. She tries out in the street what she learns there. After having learned how to “make appointments,” she arranges to meet a supermarket customer, Vijay. He comes from India, and although they can barely communicate with each other, they start a secret romance. And when she practices the condicional, the form of possibility, Xiaobin starts thinking about the future. What would happen if her parents learned about Vijay? The more she masters the Spanish language, the more she interferes in the scenario.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility             
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.  
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.           
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.