The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) annual international film festival dedicated to the cinema of the real FRAMES of REPRESENTATION 2022 (FoR22) returns to the ICA from 5th May to 12th May 2022.
The seventh edition of FoR has been conceived around the theme of Communality. The festival includes eight days of screenings, discussions, workshops, experiments in sound, live performances and other activities that all explore the idea of communality through different fields of practice.
Highlights include:
Dry Ground Burning (Mato seco em chamas) by Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta, which opens the festival on Thursday 5th May. This pulsating TerraTreme film explores the turbulence of contemporary Brazil through the prism of a women’s gang in a favela.
When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories, by Éric Baudelaire, which closes the festival on Thursday 12th May. This essay work brings together avant-garde composer Alvin Curran with footage of the armed struggle of far-left movements in Italy.
Saturday 7th May presents two films composed primarily or exclusively of archival and found footage: Riotsville, USA by Sierra Pettengill, which highlights the gradual militarisation of the American police; and Journal of America (Journal d’Amérique) by Arnaud des Pallières, a dreamlike, wistful view of 20th-century life in the USA.
New works from Latin America: Eduardo Crespo’s The Delights (Las Delicias) (Saturday 7th May), an immersion into life among 120 teenagers at an Argentine agrotechnical boarding school; and Lina Rodríguez’s My Two Voices (Mis dos voces) (Sunday 8th May), which addresses migration through the experience of three women who have relocated from Colombia and Mexico to Canada. The two filmmakers will also deliver a workshop on filmmaking practices in the context of the region’s turbulent political times (Friday 6 May).
Brotherhood by Francesco Montagner (Wednesday 11th May), an intimate work shot over four years portraying the aspirations of three Bosnian brothers to escape traditional values – and winner of the Golden Leopard at the most recent Locarno Film Festival.
FoR22 investigates how filmmaking can provide both foundation and inspiration for collective action. The 14 premieres address the cinema of the real and its practice as spaces within a larger community that encompasses both filmmakers and their audiences, considering the place and responsibilities of the filmmaker within that community. The festival continues to address film presentation as a space to rethink the terms of engagement and collaboration through forms of imagination, care and solidarity.’
Nico Marzano, the ICA’s Head of Cinema and Festival Curator
FoR22 celebrates collective action and artistic endeavour. Through the focus on communality, it offers a stage for both engagement and reflection, and looks at documentation and representation as an ensemble of practices through which audiences can shape and elicit their own meanings, causes and effects. The festival shows how interaction with others can provoke the proliferation of new communal spaces, allowing each and any person to find their own space, form of representation and means of artistic production while in conversation with other members of their communities.
Sound will find a newly curated space within the festival through a second collaboration with Bethlehem-based Radio alHara, a global collective of sound artists and musicians who have come together to unify their sound for Palestine. The collective will experiment, create and produce a radio programme responding to the theme of communality with a week-long residency in the ICA Studio, streaming live on their online global platform
