Last May in Theaters – Films

Arief Budiman
Indonesien, Südkorea | 2025 | 22 min
European Premiere
Sprachen : Indonesisch, Koreanisch
Untertitel : Englisch, Französisch

Kinos verschwinden normalerweise in der Dunkelheit, um Platz für die Vorführung auf der Leinwand zu machen. Hier dagegen stehen sie selbst im Rampenlicht. Mit Mitteln, die von Archivbildern bis hin zu täuschend echt wirkender generativer KI reichen, wird untersucht, wie ikonische Filmpaläste in Südkorea und Indonesien von den 1970er- bis 1990er-Jahren zu Protagonisten tragischer oder heiterer historischer Momente und Bewegungen wurden.

Cinemas usually disappear into the darkness to make way for the on-screen show. Here, on the contrary, iconic movie palaces in South Korea and Indonesia, where military dictatorships ended in 1988 and 1998 respectively, take centre stage in an analysis, ranging from archive images to a dazzling use of generative AI, of how cinemas became the protagonists of tragic or exhilarating historical moments and movements between the 1970s and 1990s. It could only be May, the most revolutionary of months, to intertwine the releases of iconic films from those decades, from La Nuit américaine to Titanic, from Taxi Driver to The Taste of Cherry, often delayed by years due to censorship, with the riots and uprisings that invaded those cinemas, defining them as social and political spaces akin to streets and squares. The ticket sellers, projectionists and ushers whose voices we hear thus become witnesses to a cultural, architectural and historical reappraisal, which refuses to accept that struggles are destined to fade away, just like light beams from projection booths. Dans la rue! Au cinéma!

Sergio Fant

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