Between politics and art, between Trotskyism and surrealism, between Lebanon, Palestine and Japan, between yesterday and tomorrow, between beauty and determination – director of the memorable film A Lake from the 9th NH, Philippe Grandrieux, known for his visual extremism, follows the story of Masao Adachi, another extreme filmmaker. Adachi, co-author of the Japanese new wave, eschewed filmmaking in 1971 to join the leftist militant Red Army and devoted the next 35 years of his life to fomenting revolution. In 2000, after 30 years of voluntary exile, he was arrested in Lebanon and deported back to Japan. Grandrieux’s nocturnal psychological portrait parallels Adachi’s dark mind, where Buddhist calm, surreal imagination and constant rebellion cross paths. This literally and figuratively dark film turns the cinema into a psychological darkroom with a fervent discussion on radical choices, extreme situations, transgression, the avant-garde and revolution. Revolution is also an image. The question is how to make it reality.
CPH:DOX 2011 – New Vision Award
Philippe Grandrieux was born in 1954 in France and studied at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle in Belgium. In the 1980s, he worked with the French National Institute of Visual Arts and the TV channel La Sept/Arte. He makes experimental films, installations, documentaries, videos and full-length films primarily concerned with the search for new forms of expression, which are frequently compared with the works of the most famous creators of French avant-garde, namely Jean Epstein, Luis Buñuel and Marcel L’Herbier.
1996 Retour à Sarajevo / Return to Sarajevo (doc.)
1998 Sombre
2002 La vie nouvelle / A New Life
2008 Jezioro / Un lac / A Lake
2011 Być może piękno umocniło naszą determinację – Masao Adachi / Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution – Masao Adachi / It Maybe That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve – Masao Adachi (doc.)
2012 White Epilepsy