The 13th Ubud Writers & Readers Festival is Southeast Asia’s leading festival of words and ideas. The Festival celebrates extraordinary stories, amplifies brave voices, and tackles global issues through the lens of literature and the arts. On 30 October Ivens’ Indonesia Calling! will be shown with a Q&A of Agung Rai, Anthony and Helen Liem and other guests from the Australian National Maritime Museum.
With the bulky book 'Saviour of the Tenth Muse. Jan de Vaal and the Netherlands Filmmuseum, 1946-1987' the European Foundation Joris Ivens is presenting the treasures of the national film archive of the Netherlands, as collected, presented and preserved by Jan de Vaal (1922-2001). Until now only sporadically has been published about the pioneering activities by its first director. He started in 1946 without anything, no film, no money, no housing, nog experience and no personnel. After 40 years he left the film museum with 15 Million meters of film, 300.000 photo's, 35.000 film posters, 10.000 film books, 220.000 clippings and other documents and 1.100 cameras and other film objects. For The Netherlands his work ment the saving of an art, the saving of the Tenth Muse. The presentation of the book is on 2 September in EYE Filmmuseum Amsterdam.
The director of the Vietnames Film Institute gave a precious present to the Ivens Foundation, when both FIAF-institutions met in Nijmegen on Thursday 30th of June. Mr. Dao Quoc Hung (on the photo: second from the left side) handed over the found footage of Ivens' visits to Vietnam when Ivens started filmmaking durign the war against the US in 1965. Most of the footage concerns outtakes of Le ciel, la terre (1966) and various meetings in North-Vietnam. Next year the Vitenames Film Institute will commemorate the 50th anniversay of The Threatening Sky (Le 17e parallèle) with a conference and retrospective.
Read more: Precious gift from the Vietnamese Film Institute: Found Footage of Ivens in Vietnam
Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid is presenting a film programme called “Por un cine imposible. Documental y vanguardia en Cuba (1959-1972)” (“For an impossible cinema. Documentary and Vanguard in Cuba (1959-1972)”), from 20 June till 9 July 2016. Curator is Cuban cinema specialist Michael Chanan, with support of the Cinemateca de Cuba. The two Cuban films of Joris Ivens: Carnet de viaje y Cuba and Pueblo armado will be shown, next to films of Santiago Álvarez, Sara Gómez, Octavio Cortázar and Julio García Espinosa.
The Sächsische Staatskapelle in Dresden will performing a live concert with film screening of Rain (Regen, Ivens-Franken 1929) during the 7th Shostakovich-Days. The Final concert programs Ludwig von Beethoven, Dmitri Shostakovich, Paul Dessau and Hanns Eislers Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain (1941) with the film.
Hannover based ensemble musica assoluta took Joris Ivens’ Rain as the starting point to combine two genres: music and film. They present pieces inspired by water or rain on Friday 20 and Saturday 21 May. Apart from the screening of Rain, the audience in Hannover and Göttingen gets to watch and listen to a new composition by Thorsten Encke and a new movie by Ali Mauritz and Bernd Wolter.
On 7 and 8 April 2016 a conference, organised by the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and the Swiss Film Archive (Cinémathèque Suisse), brought together international film scholars, discussing the history of film archives in various countries and continents, and their relationships with ciné-clubs. The conference was attended by Freddy Buache (91), the only surviving legend of the FIAF-pioneers, director of the Swiss film archive since 1952. André Stufkens lectured about the situation in The Netherlands in the framework of a book which will be presented in EYE on 2 September.
Read more: Lausanne: The history of filmarchives and ciné-clubs
The Vietnam Film Institute in Hanoi (with a sub-archive in Ho Chi Minh City) and the European Foundation Joris Ivens decided to strengthen their relationship. On March 11th Mr. Adrian Spijker, ambassador of the Ivens Foundation, visited the Vietnam Film Institute, and Mr. Dao Quoc Hung, director of this national film archive, will visit the Ivens archives in return in June. The purpose of this project is to deepen the research on the four Vietnam-films Ivens made during the second half of the 1960's: Le ciel, la terre (1966), Loin de Vietnam (1967, with Godard, Lelouch, Klein, Varda a.o.), Le dix-septieme parallele (1968, with Marceline Loridan-Ivens) and Recontre avec le président Ho Chi Minch (1970)
