Amnesia + Breathe In/Breathe Out: Film Screenings | The Fruit of my Deeds: Reading | Guests: Beth B, Nick Flynn
Now Wave: Beth B – Glowing
Amnesia
1993 / 1 min / U.S. / OV / Beth B
Originally conceived as a project co-produced by the Whitney Museum and the American Center in Paris and aired on MTV, AMNESIA is a one-minute video that compresses with an economy of time and textual editing a direct assault on the languages of hate and intolerance. We hear spoken, "They spread disease. They smell bad. They take our jobs." The hate conveyed through the invectives (along with Europe’s fascist past) is a reminder of the collective hysteria that can always recur in the language and institution of racism and violence.
Breathe In/Breathe Out
2001 / 70 mins / U.S. / OV / Beth B
Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2001, Breathe In/Breathe Out bravely brings three severely traumatized Vietnam war veterans and their adult children back to Vietnam to explore rebirth and the reconciliation process. Reflections of their lives before, during and after the war are challenged with a new understanding of Vietnam, its people and places, once seen and preserved in their memory, as pure horror. Using raw, intense and often revelatory scenes of the journey, captured in a verité style, braiding them with intimate, one-on-one interviews shot in a traditional essayistic format, this documentary takes the Veterans, their families and the viewer, on the healing road to confront the troubled past.
The Fruit of my Deeds
Reading by Nick Flynn
Nick Flynn (writer, playwright, poet) will read from a selection of his published work, focusing on The Ticking is the Bomb, where he chronicles his time spent with Beth B in Vietnam filming the documentary film Breathe In, Breathe Out. This is a memoir of profound self-discovery ―of being lost and found, of painful family memories and losses, of the need to run from love, and of the ability to embrace it again. Nick Flynn has published thirteen books, most recently a hybrid memoir, This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020). He is also the author of six collections of poetry, including I Will Destroy You (2019). He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston. His NYTimes bestselling memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), was made into a film starring Robert De Niro, and has been translated into fifteen languages.
Monday, August 19
7.30 pm
Kuppelhalle
Tickets
15.–25.8. Exhibition I Betonhalle
Opening hours: Mo–Fri, 2 pm–8 pm / Sat–Sun, 11 am–8 pm, free admission
Special opening hours: Sat, 24.8., 11 am–2 pm (as part of the silent green summer festival)