About Cinema Obscura "The City Of the Lost Children"
Cinema Obscura is our once a month filmprogram, curated in relation to our festival theme “Dream No Return”. With 10 + screenings over the year, we are looking how various filmmakers approached the notion of dreaming and its multiple possibilities to translate it to the screen.
Cinema Obscura nights are meant to be moment where we watch movies together in an immersive set-up supported by a side program. Our intention is to stimulate reactions, discussions, ideas to reflect together on “Dream No Return”. Participation is encouraged and new references or ideas for following screenings are also welcome. Don’t hesitate to share your dreams, your strangest film taste or your creative skills!
With our first Screening we showed the movie The City of Lost children from Jean-Pierre Jeunet et Marc Caro from 1995. In a dystopian future Dr. Krank, unable to dream himself, is kidnapping young children to steal their dreams. Angelo Badalamenti (also known for Twin Peaks) made the music of the film. The film was released 4 years before The Matrix and we all felt there was strong connections between the two world through the cyberpunk vibe, in the brain connectors designs and in the digital vision grafted onto the blind characters.
More than the story, the strange atmosphere and the blurriness of the spaces, very close and very far at the same time, is what interested us most in relation to dream worlds.
Before the screening we hosted a crafting activity, asking the visitors to create their own “brain connectors”. These devices that we could wear during the projection, would connect our consciousness with one another. While in the cinema we joined our brain connectors and Marie hosted a small collective nightmare seance. The intention was to come together in an imagined world and let prompts guide us in the dark… If most of the time we dream alone, a point of attention this year for Sickhouse is looking into collective ways to navigate liminal world in dreaming states. After the dreamwalks hosted by Jana Romanova, the exhibition “Another End to Another Story” from Sondi in the corridor of the Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Cinema Obscura nights want to open the chapters of our nightmares…
Cinema Obscura wants to be a collective experience. It is not only about the screen, it is about the specific people with us in the room watching, reacting, feeling for the character of these world. After the film a part of the visitors shared their feeling connected with their device!
We look forward to welcoming you to the next experience!
