VIET≈NAM ≈ HANOISE

Khamsin(fr)

Lebanon today. The traces of the civil war are all too tangible as government corruption becomes unbearable. In a country where conflict and peace are caught in an endless cycle, musicians from different backgrounds pool their talents to create an underground music scene. Each evokes his or her representation of Lebanon: its shifting geographical, political, historical and social borders, its painful passage through conflict and instability. A touching portrait of a young generation trying to build an oasis in a hostile environment where the forces of destruction continue to wreak havoc.

Change Itself – An Art Apart: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge(en)

To sum up the life and work of British artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is close to impossible. Not only because of the wide range of artistic disciplines, but also because of the timespan, since the mid 1960s to the present day, that has been saturated by hundreds of records, thousands of concerts, exhibitions, interviews, videos, spoken word performances, collages, sculptures, philosophy, cultural engineering, occultism and radical transgender concepts. A couple of descriptions are still valid after these 50 years of active creativity and provocation. P-Orridge is a romantic existentialist and a cultural engineer. Everything is both work as such and seed for cultural and behavioural change.

Time(en)

Then, now, where? how?

Sound Pictures by Music(en)

The Lucky Woman(vi)

This film follows the lives of undocumented Vietnamese workers in Taiwan doing odd jobs to survive, after having been forced to flee their employers due to harsh working conditions and lack of medical care. How will living this way for more than a decade shape their lives?

PEOPLE 2018 ★ THE FILM(en)

PEOPLE - THE FILM Vincent Moon’s journey through our magical PEOPLE Festival 2018. These moments out of time, in between spaces, the ritual, the coming together of 200 musicians to create and share to an audience of 5000 people. …all of these communal experiences that we cherish. To help us get through this winter, to remember how great it feels to be close, to sing loud, to cry together, to dance… to joyfully discover what waits behind the next door. For those who experienced this memorable week, those of you who have heard of it and for those who are curious.

GUTTER: Girls of Noise(en)

In April 2008, LRS toured across the USA and met some amazing female noise artists. This is what it is like to be a girl of noise.

To B or to B Flat - the composer Boudewijn Buckinx(en)

Who gets the idea to write “Nine unfinished symphonies” - one of them perhaps the shortest Symphony in music history? Or "1001 sonatas’ - each lasting about a minute but in total being one of the longest pieces ever written? Like a postmodern Erik Satie the Belgium composer Boudewijn Buckinx is using music history as a playing field. The classical music audience is irritated, the avant-gardist wrinkles his nose... "Daisies in a Meadow" - that's how Buckinx described his "1001 Sonatas” for violin and piano, They play a leading role in our film, in the supporting roles the Spanish sun and the Belgian rain. The latter, however, did not show up at the set - just as you always have to be prepared for surprises with Boudewijn Buckinx. "Why is my music so simple? - Why is my music so complex?" With a wink, Buckinx gives various answers to these recurring questions. The portrait of an immensely productive artist who is radically taking his own path.

Electronic Vibrations: A Sound Changes the World(de)

The amazing story of electronic music: its epic journey from its origins in Europe, at the hands of the great artists of the post-war classical avant-garde, to the great post-industrial cities of the USA, where this genre of genres took over music stores, shady clubs and, eventually, the big stages.

Phantasia(xx)

X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

Saigon, U.S.A(en)

Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, Vietnamese refugees have built the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam, in Orange County, California. In 1999, "Little Saigon" burst onto the national stage when a store owner displayed a poster of Ho Chi Minh, triggering protests by Vietnamese Americans struggling to reconcile their past demons with their present lives. Saigon, U.S.A. uses this moment to examine this community's changing identity and growing empowerment.

Moonwalk(es)

This short documentary film captures the natural movement of the moon mixed with an experimental musical track that accompanies the rhythm of the "walk" on the stage that the protagonist occupies, the sky.

Day Trip Maryanne(en)

Day Trip Maryanne captures the collaboration between legendary sound sculptor Maryanne Amacher and guitarist Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth at her house last autumn. In this very visually honest presentation, the musicians make heavy drones until the speakers explode.

47 Days, Sound-less(en)

47 Days, Sound-less by Vietnamese artist Nguyễn Trinh Thi is a film that explores the relationships between sound and silence, vision, language, colours and their absence. Nguyễn identifies “peripheries”—including natural landscapes used as backdrops, uncredited characters and soundtracks from American and Vietnamese movies—that reveal more-than-human perspectives. Offering new ways of looking and listening, 47 Days, Sound-less invites audiences to reflect on the inextricable relationship between a place and its inhabitants.

Landscape of our Body(vi)

As queer trans and gender non-conforming children of the Vietnamese diaspora, we are fragmented at the crossroads of being displaced from not only a sense of belonging to our ancestral land, but also our own bodies which are conditioned by society to stray away from our most authentic existence. Yet these bodies of ours are the vessels we sail to embark on a lifetime voyage of return to our original selves. It is our bodies that navigate the treacherous tides of normative systems that impose themselves on our very being. And it is our bodies that act as community lighthouses for collective liberation. Ultimately, the landscape of our bodies is our blueprint to remembering, to healing, to blooming.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Write Your Own Code(en)

As Genesis and I were working on the documentary film "Change Itself” (released in 2016), we agreed that it would be great to also have Genesis reading poetry in the film. One clip was eventually used. "Write Your Own Code" contains all of the material we shot in Oslo, Norway, 2014. These sessions also became the creative ignition for the spoken word album we made together in 2017, and which was released in 2019 by Ideal Recordings: "Loyalty Does Not End With Death." I have left the casual tone of the sessions, including some mishaps, as untouched as possible. Write Your Own Code! – Carl Abrahamsson, 2021

Latvian Coyote(lv)

An absurd game of “finding happiness” is being played by local Latvian coyotes* and illegal immigrants on the Russian and the European Union border. It is a game with no winner – all participants are driven to play by the sense of despair. While one side leaves home and undertakes a perilous journey to the other side of the globe, hoping to spend the rest of their lives in a free country, the other side risks their freedom to earn a chance to stay right where they are, in their homeland. *coyote – someone who smuggles illegal immigrants

124X(sq)

(In production) Explore Kosovo's tumultuous history in an experimental, music-driven voyage, intertwining past wounds and future aspirations through innovative 3D technology.

OHM+: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music : 1948–1980(en)

Over two hours of rare performances, interviews, animations, and experimental video. Milton Babbit’s discussion of the difficulties of working with archaic synthesizers in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in the 1950s and ’60s is a firm reminder of just how foreign electronic sounds were to even the academic community only 40 years ago. Likewise, Paul Lansky’s private lesson with theremin inventor Leon Theremin is an example of how non-user friendly electronic musical instruments could be, even to people who should have the best sense of how to approach them.

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye(en)

An intimate, affecting portrait of the life and work of ground-breaking performance artist and music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV) and his wife and collaborator, Lady Jaye, centered around the daring sexual transformations the pair underwent for their 'Pandrogyne' project.