Talk

MFA Art Writing presents its third Quijote Talk, featuring a screening of Suenos, an experimental film by anthropologist and filmmaker Alex Fattal of Harvard University, followed by a conversation between Fattal and author Michael Taussig. Filmed in the back of a truck acting as a pin-hole camera, Fattal's extraordinary 30-minute film portrays the soul-crippling nightmares and subsequent shamanic cure of a Colombian FARC gunman in his own words. Not least in importance is the sense of guilt that killing creates and the magical curing thereof.This experimental short film, a work-in-progress, is a surrealist portrait of a former guerrilla fighter from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Alex, who abandoned the rebels after fourteen years of fighting with them, reflects on the trajectory of his life. He tells of a troubled youth, his decision to join the movement, trials within the Marxist insurgency and his decision to leave and return to civilian life. The route of his narrative takes place as he moves incognito through Bogotá in a dark, mysterious space where the world appears upside down; it is an oneiric, psychoanalytic, even confessional space. Locked in the payload of a truck transformed into a camera obscura, the film’s form places viewers face to face with someone who has wandered between the worlds of perpetrator and victim, the guerrilla and civilian life, conflicts and their aftermaths. The intimate, upside down mise-en-scène reveals visions and insights into the struggles of Fattal's conscience and the legacies of war.