BEFF6 Raiding the Archives

[caption id="attachment_6255" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Ghost in the Classroom (Ukrit Sa-nguanhai)"][/caption] 6th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival ‘Raiding the Archives’ (24 January – 5 February) is presenting in Thailand for the first time a poetic documentary made in the country in the early 1950s for UNESCO. World Without End (1953) was partly shot in Thailand by British experimental filmmaker Basil Wright, and captures with unusual lyricism a landscape on the cusp of modernisation. Paul Rotha, one of cinema’s first theorists, also directed this very special documentary. Other confirmed archival line-up in BEFF6 includes a rare programme of pioneering female amateur filmmakers in New Zealand, who took up 16mm cinematography in the late 1920s and 1930s. The programme will juxtapose this archival material with examples of the same footage repurposed by contemporary film and video artists. Over the past two years, the curatorial team has visited institutional and independent audio-visual archives in Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Great Britain, Holland and including Thailand’s very own film archive. From our archive adventures we have curated programmes that present revealing views of everyday life, street encounters and bohemian sub-cultures in Asia. [caption id="attachment_6257" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Sack Barrow (Ben Rivers)"]

[/caption] BEFF6 will be presenting two special programmes which examine the origins of Thai experimental practices in home movies and video art. We’re also thrilled to have on board special programmes, selected for BEFF, from artists groups and independent artists’ cinema archives in Asia and Europe, including KL Experimental Film Festival (KLEX), Hanoi Doclab and Experimenta India. BEFF6 screenings will start from 12pm at the Festival’s main venue, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), between January 28-29 and February 4-5. On January 24-25 at the Thai Film Archive, we will be co-organising a symposium exploring what film archives are for in the present age, and a workshop on curating and exchanging artists’ cinema in Asia-Pacific. BEFF6 will be presenting a selection of European experimental work at the Goethe Institute, Bangkok, on 1-2 February. During the festival, there will also be a conversation with leading historians and cultural commentators on experimental uses of footage in political filmmaking and a masterclass on curating artists’ cinema. The research and curatorial process of BEFF6 was done with the support of the Asia-Europe Foundation through its Asia Europe Cultural Partnerships Initiatives (AECPI): Film in 2010.