-1287 + Q&A with director & Mourning School
 

Together with Asian Movie Night based in Arhem, Filmhuis Cavia will screen selected films for two nights. In this year’s opening programme titled Songs of Mourning, Asian Movie Night presents four films that take us on a poetic journey into questions that art has been trying to grasp since the beginning of time, meditating on death, mourning and loss, or even healing, strength and joy, each in its own unique tune. 

Coming spring, let’s talk about death. Yes, death. Though we rarely put its name in our mouths, it follows closely behind our every mundane action, in the news, on our table, the edges of our bodies, as an inseparable part of life.

How do we encounter death?

In the magical realist short Together Apart (2019, CN), a woman finds her husband wandering around their house soon after his funeral. In the feature film Ode to Nothing (2018, PH), we follow an embalmer and her unusual encounter with an older woman’s corpse. -1287 (2014, JP) is a moving documentary that follows Kazuko as she comes to terms with her oncoming death and her thoughts on life, love, and money. Finally, Jinpa (2018, CN) is a Tibetan-language film on a stoic truck driver and his fateful encounter with a goat and a hitchhiker on a morbid mission. The four selections encounter death in the face of diverse cultural contexts and narratives, going beyond the taboo.

Together Apart, Jinpa, -1287 will be screened in Amsterdam’s Filmhuis Cavia on May 19th and 20th, and Ode to Nothing will be shown in Arnhem at Focus Filmtheatre on May 31st. Join us after the screening of -1287 in Amsterdam on May 20th, where there will be a talk with Mourning School’s initiator Lucie Gottlieb.
 

Friday May 19th:

https://radar.squat.net/en/event/amsterdam/filmhuis-cavia/2023-05-19/asian-movie-night-presents-songs-mourning-1

Saturday May 20th:

-1287
Ian Thomas Ash | 2014 | Japan | 70’ | EN subs

During deeply intimate conversations with the filmmaker after she learns she is going to die, Kazuko challenges cultural and social norms speaking candidly about her own life and death while she grapples with what it means to be honest and live happily. As she nears the end of her life, through observations about love, money, marriage and death, Kazuko develops a deeper intimacy both with herself and the filmmaker, while inviting the viewer to deeply consider their own life. And death.

Afterwards there will be a talk with a director of the film, Thomas Ash, and Mourning School’s initiator Lucie Gottlieb.

Mourning School is an artistic study program on the notion of being in grief as the stuff of our everyday life, initiated by Lucie Gottlieb and Rosa Paardenkooper. In a series of exhibitions, public programming and publications, we imagine new ways of collective mourning to give name to, and make space for the feelings that come with death, dying, loss and mourning. The vulnerability of life – threatened by climate, health, political, social and economic crises resulting in inequity and precarity, loneliness and isolation – makes the proximity to death and loss more tangible. Central to Mourning School lies the question: who gets to live and die, who is remembered and who is deemed ungrievable? In response, Mourning School proposes queerness, in its most expansive form, as a method and framework to subvert and unsettle Western understanding and norms of death and mourning – as an individual problem or medical diagnosis – and the stigma that surrounds them.