Screening: 27 years without images

From the organizer: 

"Who are May and Fusako Shigenobu? Fusako — leader of an extremist left-wing faction, the Japanese Red Army, involved in a number of terrorist operations — has been in hiding in Beirut for almost 30 years. May, her daughter, born in Lebanon, only discovered Japan at the age of twenty-seven, after her mother’s arrest in 2000.

"And Masao Adachi? A screenwriter and radical activist filmmaker, committed to armed struggle and the Palestinian cause, was also underground in Lebanon for several decades before being sent back to his native country. In his years as a film director, he had been one of the instigators of a ‘theory of landscape’ — fukeiron: through filming landscapes, Adachi sought to reveal the structures of oppression that underpin and perpetuate the political system.

"Anabasis? The name given, since Xenophon, to wandering, circuitous homeward journeys." (Jean-Pierre Rehm)

"In Eric Baudelaire’s Anabasis, filmed on super 8 and in the manner of Masao Adachi’s fukeiron theory, contemporary panoramas of Tokyo and Beirut are blended in which archival footage, TV clips and excerpts of Masao’s films as a backdrop for May and Adachi’s voices and memories. The two speak oof everyday life, of being in hiding, of exile, politics and cinema, and of their experiences. The film explores the importance of images in the construction of identity, both personal and collective. Because of the constant danger of living underground, May and Fusako Shigenobu could not keep photographs from the past. This meant that May, who was born in hiding, had no access to her family history until she travelled to Japan at the age of twenty-seven, after her mother’s arrest.

"Reflecting this aspect of their lives and true to Masao Adachi’s film theory, Baudelaire does not show images of the protagonists but instead films their surroundings: the landscapes." (MACBA Foundation)

Entry: VND50,000 ($2.2)