Six Films, from Rwanda and Beyond: Week 5
Artist Cinemas is pleased to present an online screening of Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s Promised Lands (2015–18), the fifth installment of École du soir, on view from Wednesday, May 27 through Tuesday, June 2, 2020, and featuring an imagined interview between the filmmaker and Andros Zins-Browne.
École du soir is a six-part program of films, video works, and interviews from Rwanda and beyond put together by Christian Nyampeta. It is the first program in Artist Cinemas, a long-term, online series of film programs curated by artists for e-flux Video & Film.
Artist Cinemas presents École du soir: Six Films, from Rwanda and Beyond
Week 5: May 27–June 2, 2020
Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, Promised Lands (2015–18)
20 minutes
“People only know where one country ends and another begins because people have said it is so. The land doesn’t know. The land probably doesn’t care. Words kill.” So begins the narration of Promised Lands, as the artist tries to make a film but is interrupted by family conversations in rural Uganda.
Excerpt from Andros Zins-Browne’s imagined conversation with the filmmaker
Andros Zins-Browne (AZB):
The film references Yvonne Rainer’s “No Manifesto” (1965), which is especially eerie in our current situation of pandemic. I start to imagine the Nos that our planet would say if it had the privilege to be postmodern.
The film begins by evoking a speculative subjectivity of land. Does land know or care about borders? What does it care about? What might it refuse? In these pandemic times, it feels like we’re experiencing something like nature’s No Manifesto.
Watch the film and read the full interview here.
About the program
Presented a week each, the six films in École du soir are not direct points of comparison to the current crisis but reflection devices that draw from localized specificities and historical events, in order to make a linking with the pandemic. The sense of isolation, alienation, and despair felt today finds echoes in these films, as their makers navigate the afterlives of the crises that still shape their present. Effectively, although the geographic and economic scales of the current pandemic are unprecedented, the films bring home the fact that some members of the societies in which the films are located feel or have felt as though their existence is a form of quarantine, characterized long before this moment by trans-generational trauma, the disappearance of habitable environments, exile, and even genocidal brutalities that take away the ability to mourn. Each film is accompanied by a newly commissioned dialog that loosely relates the film to the ongoing pandemic.
École du soir is convened by Christina Nyampeta.
About the series
Artist Cinemas is a new e-flux platform focusing on exploring the moving image as understood by people who make film. It is informed by the vulnerability and enchantment of the artistic process—producing non-linear forms of knowledge and expertise that exist outside of academic or institutional frameworks. It will also acknowledge the circles of friendship and mutual inspiration that bind the artistic community. Over time this platform will trace new contours and produce different understandings of the moving image.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
