Photo © 2016 Deborah Stratman
Tuesday 28 March 2017
Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH
6:30-8:30 | Cinema 1 | [Book here]
Filmmaker Deborah Stratman will be in conversation with critic and film essayist Kevin B. Lee.
Described by the artist as “a suite of Midwestern parables that question the historical role that belief has played in ideology and national identity”, The Illinois Parables proposes a critical and timely reflection on history and the landscape. Arranged into 11 chapters, spanning migratory settlements in 600CE to European colonisation and the political struggles of the 1960s, this exemplary essay film excavates fragmentary histories and collective memories of exodus, forced displacement and natural disaster. Stratman unearths the metaphysical themes of the American sense of self, to reveal the tangled, but rearticulated histories of the dispossessed buried deeper in the layers of the Midwestern soil. “A dense weave of found and original sights and sounds, […] at once an experimental documentary, a work of historical excavation and an insistently moral ideological critique” (Manohla Dargis).
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT DEBORAH STRATMAN
The Illinois Parables, Deborah Stratman, USA 2016, 16mm, 60 mins