The Beyond Film program at California’s Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center will host celebrated Brazilian filmmaker and artist, Sandra Kogut, on March 26, at 7 pm, in Venice, in the Greater Los Angeles.
Kogut will present two of her award-winning films: Adieu Monde or Pierre and Claire’s Story, a short and spirited take on “authentic” rural life in the Pyrenees, and A Hungarian Passport (Um Passaporte Hungaro).
A Hungarian Passport is a moving film diary account of Kogut’s quest to obtain a Hungarian passport, a journey that challenges notions of identity and nationality while uprooting a family history of forced emigration and anti-Semitism.
Sandra Kogut has been making videos, films and installations in France and Brazil for twenty years.
Her work has appeared in and won prizes at numerous festivals and events worldwide, including a recent retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive.
An Associate Professor of Visual Arts at UCSD, Kogut is currently working on her first feature-length fiction film, which she will shoot in Brazil during the summer of 2005.
Adieu Monde
Adieu Monde offers a loving yet tongue-in-cheek reflection on the quest for “authenticity” in the Pyrenees, especially as this is absorbed and reinterpreted by the oft-photographed inhabitants themselves.
Butchers, mechanics, farmers, and bystanders in the picture-postcard Aspe and Ossau valleys delight in recounting variations on the pastoral tale of a young shepherd who vanished and the shepherdess who followed him into the woods.
A profoundly poetic work, infused with the ludic culture and storytelling traditions of the Pyrenees, Adieu Monde explores its subjects’ nostalgia for the past as well as their joie-de-vivre in the present.
A Hungarian Passport
Speaking over the telephone with the Hungarian consulate, Brazilian filmmaker Sandra Kogut asks, “Can someone who has a Hungarian grandfather get a Hungarian passport?”
The challenges of the administrative process of obtaining a new national identity document becomes the narrative thread of this disarmingly unaffected film diary.
Kogut creates a private journal of her trips to and from Brazil, Hungary, and France, recording the Kafkaesque experience of her frustrating and often hysterical attempts to jump through endless bureaucratic hoops.
On the way, she explores a painful family history of forced emigration and a hidden legacy of anti-Semitism as she confronts some essential questions: What is nationality? What is a passport for? What should we do with our heritage? How do we construct our history and our own identity?
General admission $7, students/seniors $5
Beyond Baroque
681 Venice Boulevard, Venice, California
www.beyondbaroque.org