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Ali Cherri: The Watchman & The Dam
It’s The Real Thing – Basel Documentary Platform
Costs: Free admission
Boris Nikitin, director of It's The Real Thing, will introduce Ali Cherri's film work together with the artist himself.
Ali Cherri works in the fields of video, installation, drawing and performance. But it is above all his more recent film works that make the Lebanese artist one of the most interesting exponents of contemporary art, with exhibitions in Vienna, Paris, Basel and the Venice Biennale. With «The Watchman» and «The Dam», the Museum Tinguely is showing two works at the Basel Documentary Platform that merge documentary and fiction into a hypnotic intermediate space. Filmed in real locations with the people who actually live and work there, Cherri's films – masterfully shot and with an idiosyncratic rhythm – shift reality so far into the realm of fiction that they take on the character of a hallucination.
THE WATCHMAN
It is one of those countless dividing lines that have been left behind in time: the border between Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. A young soldier dutifully keeps watch on a remote watchtower. Night after night, he scans the horizon, waiting for the enemy who never appears. One evening, while on duty, he observes strange things happening on the southern side of the hills. Preparations for an attack, perhaps? When the soldier plucks up his courage and decides to investigate, he encounters an army of soldiers who have fallen on this front. Ali Cherri's short film The Watchman is a ‘cinematographic poem’ about the absurdity of a cold, endless war. Cherri shot the film with villagers and soldiers who live along the border and serve in the military.
Duration: 25 minutes
THE DAM
A dam in the middle of the desert in northern Sudan. The structure is being built by a Chinese company and now stands in the breathtaking landscape like a colossal abstract spaceship. One of the bricklayers on the construction site is Maher El Khair. Together with other workers, he makes hundreds of identical bricks from wet mud every day and drifts further and further into another reality. El Khair is not only the fictional protagonist of the film, but also its real-life leading actor. A doppelganger playing himself. What could be a conventional documentary film becomes, in Ali Cherri's hands, a poetically radical feature film that reflects reality and dissolves it.
«A visually impressive, mysterious work, a kind of magical social-realist vision.» - The Guardian
Duration: 80 minutes
It’s The Real Thing – Basler Dokumentartage 5 is supported by: Swisslos-Fonds Basel-Stadt, Swisslos Basellandschaft, Pro Helvetia, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Stanley Thomas Johnson Stiftung and Christoph Merian Stiftung.