Premiere of Karim Aïnouz’s Domingo (Sunday)
www.videobrasil.org.br
On October 4, Instituto Moreira Salles (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) hosted the premiere of Domingo (Sunday), the new film by Karim Aïnouz, the Ceará-born filmmaker who has directed Praia do Futuro, O Céu de Suely, Madame Satã, among others. Domingo is a short film that adopts an artistic and poetical approach to reflect about potential connections between the works of Danish visual artist Olafur Eliasson and public spaces in the city of São Paulo, exploring the sensory experiences that the combination of these two elements can elicit. The film was featured in the official program of the 2014 Rio Film Festival, one of Latin America’s most highly acclaimed film events. Karim Aïnouz, chairman of this year’s Festival jury, attended the screening. Domingo is the seventh title of the Videobrasil Authors Collection (VAC) series, produced by Associação Cultural Videobrasil in partnership with Sesc São Paulo, which have also commissioned Eder Santos’s first feature film, Deserto Azul (Blue Desert). Santos’s film was shown at a special guests-only session in November 2013, during the 18th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil.
Karim Aïnouz and Olafur Eliasson met in 2011, when the Danish artist had his first solo show in Brazil. The exhibition Your Body of Work was held in parallel with the 17th edition of the Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, at the São Paulo State Art Gallery (Pinacoteca), Sesc Pompeia, Sesc Belenzinho and public spaces throughout the city. The show featured major works like Waterfall (1998) and Take your time (2008), as well as previously unseen projects created especially for São Paulo, such as Your Empathic City (2011), created in collaboration by the two artists. In the piece commissioned by Videobrasil, Eliasson superimposed colorful lights onto footage taken by Aïnouz of São Paulo’s Minhocão (a major downtown viaduct), creating filters and textures for the video installation shown at Sesc Pompeia’s Galpão.
To Ainöuz, “the path for [the project] was affinity, the potential associations between concepts. Although the film is also about organizing this meeting and my own experiences with Eliasson’s work, it was important to keep both our voices present.” The short film transcends the status of a mere video recording through its freedom of interpretation, the creation of new images, textures colors, and its hinting at new meanings to the relationship between Eliasson’s work, the city of São Paulo and its population.
Towards the end of October, Domingo will be featured in the city where it was produced, in a special screening during the São Paulo International Film Festival. The screening will happen outdoors, in a square in the city center, one of the film’s main locations, on October 26 (no other then a Sunday), 8pm.
Videobrasil Authors Collection (VAC)
The films released under the Videobrasil Authors Collection series are intended to afford visibility to the thoughts and work processes of prominent international contemporary artists, from the perspective of guest directors. Documentaries have been released about William Kentridge, Akram Zaatari, Coco Fusco, Rafael França, Chelpa Ferro and Mau Wal (Maurício Dias & Walter Riedweg), directed by Carlos Nader, Wagner Morales, Alex Gabassi, Fabiana Werneck and Marco Del Fiol.
Videobrasil: The boundary between cinema and the visual arts
In 2013, Videobrasil celebrated the 30th anniversary of its Festival, a platform that emerged as the first alternative for screening and encouraging video production in Brazil. Since its inception in 1983, the Festival has become established as a forum for language experimentation and paradigm-breaking. From the start, it featured productions connected with experimentation and video art, alongside documentary-like pieces that were closer to cinema, including the early productions of filmmaker Fernando Meirelles (City of God, Blindness), such as Garotos do Subúrbio and Marly Normal, both of which were produced by Olhar Eletrônico in 1983, awarded prizes at the Festival, and incorporated into the Videobrasil Collection.
Over the years, the Festival went international, keeping up with (and often anticipating) the dynamics of contemporary art production, and incorporating electronic art and performance. In 2011, the event embraced all artistic languages. Throughout this entire period, Videobrasil remained a space for exhibiting artworks that straddle the lines between cinema and the visual arts. Hybrid artworks, the outcomes of an expanded cinema, created by artists like Cao Guimarães, Carlos Nader, Kiko Goifman, Wagner Morales and Gabriel Mascaro, among others, have been shown at various editions of the Festival and are now part of the Videobrasil Collection.
