Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.
— Martin Heidegger, Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?

What surrounds death? Our phantasmic journey derives from it: searches in the dark-green foliage of the hot jungle; the tattered patches of the friar’s cloth. Death motivates life, quietly, gently. Some say it anchors the creative act. Others that it is where the ghosts and lovers we summon sleep. These films by Weerasethakul and Rossellini stoke the subterranean feeling that there is more than we can merely sense or think—an untouchable, unknowable, yet always present other. That void agency, beside time, showing itself to us only when we are desperate, hopeless, fearful and naïve. That with enough longing we can transcend into the magical-gentle and for a while, forget, and remember, this passing and vivid nowness with our convenient, contingent faith.

The event was free and open to all.

Syndromes and a Century (Weerasethakul)
1 August 2015, 7:00 PM, Saturday
2006, 105 minutes, colour

In a rural Thai hospital, awkward love stalks the hallways. Logic dissipates as the country days vibrate with longing and slowness. Everyone is in on the act as they wait to be treated. The film restarts and retraces its own steps. Now in the city the cold modernity holds magical machines and enigmatic actions. We witness the world sleeping, until it wakes to the beat of mass aerobics

Stromboli (Rossellini)
2 August 2015, 7:00 PM, Sunday
1950, 107 minutes, black and white

A woman whiles away time at an internment camp. Boredom pushes her towards a man. They want to use each other. They marry. Then a journey to an island under the shadow of a volcano. The fisherman’s way of being is archaic, nearly geologic and she rattles against her self-made cage. She blasphemes and debases herself. The surroundings are indifferent to her unmoored dissolution. She feels that only the volcano will provide solace and escape. It does not.

Bengal Cinematheque aimed to present the films and ideas of cinema’s greatest auteurs, at the highest quality, to build a community of emerging film-makers, writers and programmers in Bangladesh.

This cycle was programmed by Omar Chowdhury.