Sunday 15 March 2009, 15.00

Riyo, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, 1999, 35mm, 10 min

Riyo was shot in Kyoto, on the banks of the Kamo River between Shijo Bridge and Sanjo Bridge. A telephone conversation between a young couple transforms an anonymous urban backdrop at sunset into a biographical site of encounter and flirting. A totally different city seems to emerge beyond what can be seen of it: emotional, fleeting, immature and open.

 'Riyo … is a picture of a place …overlaid with the invisible cartography of the human mind and heart… For every building, there's a building that wasn't built; for every plan, a plan abandoned, for every friend, a stranger; for every sign, an empty sign. Gonzalez-Foerster brings a lot of things to the topographies she films: fine writing, feeling, conceptual sophistication and a grasp of beauty that extends to the bend of an old man's elbow or pink ferry's blowzy, wedding-cake bridge. Most of all, however, she brings the understanding that representation, to really succeed, must represent everything, must wish itself away.'

- Tom Morton, frieze, October 2003

Still Life, Jia Zhang Ke, 2006, 35mm, 111 min

Still Life meditates on moments of stillness caught between the past and the future. Presenting the parallel lives of two people who arrive in the disappearing town of Fengjie to find their pasts, Still Life is a story of lives suspended in a moment between nostalgia's regrets for the past, and hope's fears for the future. As construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River nears completion, progress is weighed against loss. Originally titled in Chinese as 'Good People of the Three Gorges', the film considers the inter-linking desires, necessities and gestures that shape our decisions or perhaps even our destinies. Shot entirely in High Definition, the film is in itself both tribute to a new technology and homage to the scope and beauty of a lost cinema.

Programme duration 120 minutes.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£5 (£4 concessions), booking recommended

    

This event is related to the The Unilever Series: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster exhibition