Radio Papesse

Film Festival comprises 70 films - produced for educational programs in North American and British public schools and libraries between the 1950s and 1980s - that revealed different ways of seeing culture. The films were originally commissioned from various agencies including advertisement firms, tourist boards, various universities, United Nations, US Department of Education and others. 

Here, we realize the ways in which this education was developed within specific references and framed to a particular view of the world. Thus, Film Festival questions the concept and image of the other. This piece discloses the mechanisms of cultural production as reflecting the identity of the dominant group that, through different practices of representation, defines the general pattern of culture and establishes the regulation of social conduct.

The work presents an overarching program with several sub programs that, through the relationships established between the films, deconstructed the films’ original cultural context. This is not just about showing these contents as found documentation or as representational exploitations of folklore. Rather, it intends to suggest multiple relations and comparisons created by the juxtaposition of the films to raise new and more ethical approaches regarding the same contents.

Film Festival is not an appropriation of documents, but a representation of today’s reality. [Ricardo Valentim]

During the last fifteen week Radio Papesse has produced Film Festival Radio Program, a daily radio news introducing the films scheduled to be projected at Manifesta7 and accompanying them with few curators' notes. Here you can listen to the full series.