Black Sun Cinema Notes & News

On Friday May 31st, Black Sun Cinema, in partenrship with Triskel Christchurch, will present a head-spinning programme of experimental science fiction.

The End Of The Earth Is My Home (Alan Lambert, Ireland, 2012, 75 mins)

We are delighted to welcome Alan Lambert, who will be present to introduce and discuss his new film, The End Of The Earth Is My Home. One of the first Irish feature films to have been made through crowd funding, TEOTEIMH has emerged as quite unlike anything produced previously in Ireland. Set in a futuristic Asia of the mind, it is a trippy, visually audacious modern fantasy that takes inspiration from the Asian Monkey King stories and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as the writer/director’s own travel experiences. Although rooted in a sci-fi thriller premise involving an order of immortals and multiple time zones, and replete with car chases and assasinations, TEOTEIMH is more a sensory experience than a narrative. A pulsing kaleidoscsope of shifting visual and sonic rhythms, this 21st century phantasmagoria is one of the few films to truly explore the visionary potential of science fiction beyond the boundaries of traditional storytelling.

Its international cast, headed by Junshi Murakami, Dominique Monot and Mona Gamil, also features Black Sun’s own Vicky Langan in a pivotal role as the goddess Yama. The original soundtrack is by European Sensoria Band.

Click here to view the trailer.

Revisiting Solaris (Deimantas Narkevicius, Lithuania, 2007, 18 mins)

Selected by Alan Lambert to accompany TEOTEIMH, Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius’ Revisiting Solaris presents another poetic approach to science fiction material, albeit in a more contemplative, essayistic register. As the title suggests, this film references Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Solaris (1972). An aged, wonderfully melancholic Donatis Banionis reprises his as role as the lead character in Solaris, forty-five years on. Narkevicius' film is an exploration of the final chapter of Stanislaw Lem's original novel, omitted by Tarkovsky from his film adaptation, which visits the surface of the planet Solaris.

For screening details and to book tickets, please visit:

http://triskelartscentre.ie/events/2339/the-end-of-the-earth-is-my-home/

In other news, Ed Krčma has written a terrific review of one of our earlier programmes, 'White Noise' curated by Florian Wüst, which appears on the front page of issue seven of Enclave Review, Cork's contemporary arts review sheet. From this screening, based around Wilhelm and Birgit Hein's materialist '70s filmmaking, Ed concludes:

While the early works, necessarily perhaps, cannot shock in the same way today as they did upon their initial reception, they remain potent and unexpected for other, perhaps more compelling reasons. Their mixture of weirdness and conviction still provides the potential for genuinely differential experience; and these enlivening opportunities are arguably less available today than they were in 1970, now that the effects of corporate media are even more pervasive, and the drive to instrumentalize experience even more powerful.