Cosmos Cinema educational film program

Cosmos Cinema Educational Program develops the dynamic between cinema and cosmos that is at the core of the 14th Shanghai Biennale. Divided into nineteen weekly segments, this program presents screenings and discussions at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, as well as an online platform for global audiences.

Taking inspiration from André Malraux’s line that “what interests me in cinema is its way of linking man to the world (as a cosmos) in a way that differs from language,” the program of weekly screenings in Shanghai encompasses an array of modern and contemporary, cosmological, and cosmogonic films. Collectively they demonstrate the many ways that cinema can forge new connections between humans and their environments. Whether in the space travel poetics of Artavazd Peleshian, the reflections on mundane cosmos of Jia Zhangke, or the ontological transformations of Ciro Guerra, the program challenges conventional perceptions of time, memory, and identity. 

Cosmos Cinema invites viewers to consider their position within broader cosmic orders. The program opened at PSA on November 9 with “The Imagination of Space Travel in Early Cinema,” a curated screening and discussion of early short films that explore humanity’s fascination with space travel and the mysteries of the cosmos. It continued on November 18 with “Freedom of Interplanetary Movement: Cosmic Adventures,” a double-bill screening of Afronauts (2014) directed by Nuotama Bodomo and The Lebanese Rocket Society (2015) directed by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, and will be followed on November 25 by “Mindscapes of the Unknown,” a screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris introduced by Bogna Konior.

Upcoming weekly screening events—featuring films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Bi Gan, Kidlat Tahimik, Fern Silva, Artavazd Peleshian, Krzysztof Zanussi, Patricio Guzman, Jia Zhangke, Xu Bing, and many others—will be announced soon.

Complementing the screening series in Shanghai, the Cosmos Cinema website launched on November 20. This specially commissioned online platform is the place where the histories of cinema excavated in the weekly screenings at the Power Station of Art meet the moving-image works of contemporary artists represented in the exhibition of the 14th Shanghai Biennale. Each week, in alignment with one of the nine thematic palaces that define this year’s biennale, a selected moving-image work by one of the artists featured in Cosmos Cinema will be screened online together with recorded introductions and contextualizing information making them available to watch globally. 

Cosmos Cinema website will feature work by artists including Itziar Barrio, Yin-Ju Chen, Saodat Ismailova, Deimantas Narkevičius, Liu Xin, Maha Maamoun, Agnieszka Polska, Raqs Media Collective, Ho Rui An, Liu Yujia, He Zike, Julieta Aranda, Jakub Štourač and Anna Lunakova, and Zhou Xiaohu, among many others. 

Cosmos Cinema Educational Program and online platform are made possible by .ART Registry. It is also co-sponsored by Aesop and Humanities Research Center, Division of Arts and Humanities, and DKUNST Art on Campus of Duke Kunshan University.