Film Screening “Letters to Max”
Sat 30 Sep 2017, 7 pm
Six Space
From the organizer:
The Onion Cellar presents a screening of LETTERS TO MAX (Vietnam premiere).
Eric Baudelaire, 2014
103 minutes
English with subtitles in Vietnamese
“The thought that [the letter] would arrive never truly crossed my mind. I expected to see it come back… with a notice saying, “Return to sender / country doesn’t exist.” But apparently the impossible is possible.” (Eric Baudelaire)
“Abkhazia is something of a paradox: a country that exists, in the physical sense of the word (a territory with borders, a government, a flag and a language), yet it has no legal existence because for almost twenty years it was not recognized by any other nation state.
And so Abkhazia exists without existing, caught in a liminal space, a space in between realities. Which is why my letter to Max was something of a message in a bottle thrown at sea, a wink to the world of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi that Maxim Gvinjia seems to inhabit. But my letter arrived, and somehow fiction has penetrated the real.” (Eric Baudelaire)
“And so Eric Baudelaire launched on a letter writing campaign, 74 letters sent over 74 days, a script for a voiceover to a film in which Maxim Gvinjia, former Foreign Minister of the unrecognized state of Abkhazia, becomes the narrator. The film is structured by this exchange: letters that should not have arrived and yet somehow reached Max, his recorded responses, and images that Eric Baudelaire filmed in Abkhazia once their correspondence ended.” (Poulet-Malassis)
“Letters to Max is a curious kind of landscape documentary: one that maps both inner and outer spaces, each of which is a mix of the concrete and the imaginary. Such, of course, is the very formula of nationhood.” (CinemaScope)
Entry: 50,000 VND / 30,000 VND (students)
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| Six Space 6th floor, 94B Tran Hung Dao, Hoan Kiem, Hanoi |
