LABoral Centro de Arte organises a series of French cinema on education
LABoral organises for the first time this activity that includes screenings of documentary films – ‘La Cour de Babel’, ‘Ce gamin, là’; and ‘Le tombeau d'Alexandre’- that will be followed by a debate panel
La Cour de Babel
LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial – in partnership with the French Institute of Bilbao and the City Hall of Gijon- organise from Thursday 5 until May 13, at 7 p.m, a Cinema Cycle of films that address issues like liberty and life in society, authority and behaviour, creativity or the role of teachers. This is the first time that LABoral organises a Cinema cycle that will consist of a feature film, work with different texts to contextualise the film and a debate session.
This initiative is mainly aimed at fostering an open and critical perspective in film making, disseminating film making works that document the educational practice and generating a space for debate and exchange of educational models.
This cycle will take place in Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto de Gijón.
The screening programme is as follows:
Thursday, May 5. Cinema and Classroom
Screening: La Cour de Babel (Julie Bertuccelli, 2014). Language: French, Spanish subtitles.
Moderated by: Cecilia Argüelles Cañedo, psichologist, Gijón.
Related text: Excerpt from La hipótesis del cine, by Alain Bergala.
This documentary shows the everyday life -along a whole year- of a class hosted in school in Paris, made up by students from different countries. It shows the experiences and concerns of these youngsters that are forced to learn French against the clock in order to follow the regular lessons.
Julie Bertuccelli -director also of films like El árbol (2010), nominated to three Caesar Awards- brilliantly portraits the topic of immigration, as well as the management of human and social values.
Monday May 9. Image and clinical practice
Film: Ce gamin, là (Renaud Victor and Fernand Deligny, 1976). Language: French, subtitles in Asturian dialect.
Conversation with Guillermo Rendueles, psychiatrist and essayist, Moderated by Alfredo Aracil, cultural worker.
Text for discussion: Semillas de un crápula, Fernand Deligny.
The film is about autism in children from a paradoxical perspective, on the one hand there is the desperate effort of the teacher to reduce the weird personality of the child; on the other hand, there is a methodology based on a quite noble ideal. In this documentary, Fernand Deligny leads a group of educators that contact autistic children in a hamlet in the region of Cévennes. The success of this film has made it one of the main documents of anti-psychiatry.
Friday, May 13 Cinem and agitation
Screening of Le tombeau d'Alexandre (Chris Marker, 1993). Language: French, Spanish subtitles.
Moderated by: Nacho Muñiz, Sociedad Cultural Gijonesa and Diego Díaz, historian and social activist.
Text for discussion: Trenes y barcos de agitación (1918-1921), Carlos Valmaseda.
This documentary portraits the figure of Aleksandr Ivanovich Medvedkin, a Russian film maker born in 1900, a true-blue communist whose films were banned on several occasions in his country.
At age 17 he saw the Bolshevik revolution; at 20 he took part in the civil war, in the ranks of the Red Army with Isaac Babel; at 38 he lived through the Stalinist purges and saw his best film, Happiness, banned because it was influenced by Bujarin. Having fought on the front line in WWII, he died in 1989 during the "perestroika", convinced that the communism he had lived for, was about to be culminated. The film reflects upon ideologically free and independent film making, and includes testimonies by students of the time and contemporaries of his life and work.
