News 2019

A flame that never burns out: the new opening sequence of the Venice International Film Critics’ Week is an homage to the work of Kevin Jerome Everson

To inaugurate this new triennial of the Venice International Film Critics’ Week, we decided to have a new opening sequence that introduces our screenings during the festival. A sequence that intertwines with our work of researching for the new and challenging the present. These images, that come from one of the acts of Erie by Kevin Jerome Everson (2010), one of his most radical and surprising films, see little Matilda Washington observe with great intensity the glimmering flame of a candle. Then, something off screen attracts the little girl, her eyes look elsewhere. In a few seconds we have the antipodes of “great cinema”. We liked this sense of a constant research, of constant watching and of a strong questioning towards the world that only cinema manages to grasp in these ways, so radical, ineffable and sublime.

Kevin Jerome Everson (Mansfield, Ohio – USA 1965) is an American director, sculptor, photographer and painter. His works have redefined contemporary documentary and experimental cinema. Author of over one hundred and fifty short films and nine long feature films, his works have been presented in numerous institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the REDCAT of Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art of New York, the Wurttenbergischer Kunstverein of Stuttgart, the American Academy of Rome and many more. His films have been presented at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Berlinale, Orizzonti – Venice Film Festival, Sundance and many others. The Swiss festival Visions du Réel dedicated a complete retrospective of Everson in 2012. Beholder of a unique gaze, Everson brings back at the center of the political and cultural debate the centrality of the African-American working class, overthrowing the margins between documentary, fiction and artistic installation.

Download the sequence: click here