STRONG ISLAND
ISLA SANTA MARIA 3D
DIRECTOR Yance Ford PANORAMA DOKUMENTE USA/Denmark 2017 107’, English
DIRECTOR Oliver Husain CAST Liz Peterson, Naishi Wang VIDEO INSTALLATION 3D 18’, English
12.02. / 17:00 CineStar 7 13.02. / 22:00 CineStar 7
08.02. / 19:00 Akademie der Künste / Opening
14.02. / 13:30 International
09.02-20.02 / 11:00 - 21:00 Akademie der Künste
16.02. / 17:15 CineStar 3 18.02. / 17:30 Cubix 7
© Yanceville Films
© Oliver Husain
In a phone call at the beginning of Yance Ford’s film an employee for the district attorney refuses to make any more statements regarding the murder of William Ford and declares herself unwilling to take part in his documentary. William was Yance Ford’s brother; his murder in 1992 threw his family into a state of shock. Their devastation came about not just because this young Afro-American man was shot and killed by a white car mechanic for an apparently trifling reason, but also because of what was to follow. Ford’s subjective camera tells the story of a black middle-class family in America, a country which was, and still is, characterised by injustice and racism. His film is a puzzle, the pieces of which cannot be put together. Interweaving personal essay, detective investigation and documentary interviews with friends and relatives, he succeeds in painting a personal and political picture of the mood of this unequal country during the Obama era. Ford’s concentrated, often minimalistic cinematic language describes simmering anger, grief and his own transgender coming out – as well as the relativity of equal opportunities.
Isla Santa Maria – according to myth – is an island formed from the wreckage of a replica of one of Christopher Columbus’s ships, created for the World’s Columbian Exposition 1893 in Chicago. Based on this myth, Isla Santa Maria 3D draws together the violent colonialist legacy of Columbus with developments of perspective drawing and stereoscopic image-making as two histories that reordered the way we see the world. The film’s cast of characters – a dancing conquistador, an oracle appearing as a floating hologram, a group of representatives from another planet, and a flock of Victorian era revelers on a beach – are pulled out of time into a nonlinear narrative that overlaps histories, truths, and fantasies to re-imagine possible futures.