CINEMA PARENTHÈSE and iMAL present BEFORE WE KNEW NOTHING, a series of six film programs featuring the work of Mark Lapore, Chick Strand, Peter Hutton, Diane Kitchen, Naomi Uman, and Nathaniel Dorsky, whose varied practices are centred on ethnographic and anthropological studies. These programs of personal travels focus on the discovery and revealing of places, landscapes, people, and encounters with social, political and cross-cultural differences. The viewer meets an agricultural Mexican family in California, which struggles with economic difficulties while trying to navigate a complex environment of immigrant working life and cultural alienation (Naomi Uman), pictures of people, landscapes and urban places in Sri Lanka, Bengal, Calcutta and New York (Mark LaPore), a portrait of the Asháninka people who live in the tropical forest of eastern Peru, and a reflection on the experience of living and filming among those who continue to resist the standards of the modern world (Diane Kitchen). Extraordinary land, sea, and cityscapes and faces of working seamen in Thailand and New York (Peter Hutton), female factory workers and feminist reflections and stories of colonialism in Venezuela depicted from an older female Warao Indian perspective, a nun and the filmmaker herself (Chick Strand).

The camera positioning, the composition of the image space, the pro-filmic (everything that is in front of and recorded by the camera), things outside the frame (off-screen), the soundtrack and political and cultural discrepancies are crucial problems for these filmmakers' positions in the choice of representation. Dealing with history and freeing the binary opposition between me and you and us and them as something foreign, are also vital approaches in the production of these films.

FRIDAY 25.03

19:00 - PETER HUTTON & MARK LAPORE: BEFORE WE KNEW NOTHING I

21:00 - NAOMI UMAN: BEFORE WE KNEW NOTHING II

SATURDAY 26.03

19:00 - CHICK STRAND: BEFORE WE KNEW NOTHING III

21:00 - DIANE KITCHEN: BEFORE WE KNEW NOTHING IV

SUNDAY 27.03

19:00 - MARK LAPORE: BEFORE WE KNEW NOTHING V

21:00 - NATHANIEL DORSKY & PETER HUTTON BEFORE WE KNEW NOTHING VI