Projects matching: Louis Henderson

Synopsis

Moving from the frozen landscapes of the Jura mountains to the urban centres of Port-au-Prince, Ouvertures brings the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture back to life. In France a Haitian researcher tries to read the past within the stratigraphic layers of Jurassic limestone, whilst in Haiti a group of young actors translate and rehearse scenes from 'Monsieur Toussaint', a play written by Édouard Glissant, that recounts the last days in the life of Louverture dying in exile in a prison cell in the Jura, 1803. Ghosts from the pantheon of Haitian history visit Louverture on his deathbed and put him to trial. As the play proceeds the actors become possessed by their characters, and eventually the ghost of Louverture joins the group and takes them on a voyage for a new kind of exile.
Official Selection Berlinale 2020 - Forum - World premiere

Synopsis

Made in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, a free adaptation of the poem 'The Sea is History' by Derek Walcott as a materialist and animist critique of the monumentalisation of European colonial history and its ripples into the present.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand

Synopsis

"'Black Code/Code Noir' unites temporally and geographically disparate elements into a critical reflection on two recent events: the murders of Michael Brown and Kajieme Powell by police officers in the U.S. in 2014. Archaeologically, the film argues that behind this present situation is a sedimented history of slavery, preserved by the Black Code laws of the colonies in the Americas. These codes have transformed into the algorithms that configure police Big Data and the necropolitical control of African Americans today. Yet how can we read in this present? How can we unwrite the sorcery of this code as a hack? Through a historical détournement the film suggests the Haitian Revolution as the first instance of the Black Code’s hacking and as a past symbol for a future hope." Louis Henderson
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Experimenta Strand

Synopsis

A technographic study of e-recycling and neo-colonial mining filmed in the Agbogbloshie ewaste ground in Accra, Ghana. The video constructs a critique of the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology - thus revealing the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins.