Gawan Fagard in dialogue with Vincent Meessen

Artists: Alain Resnais and Anand Ghandi

Le Chant du Styrène (The Chant of the Styrene)
Alain Resnais
France, 1968. 35 mm. 14 min.
OV French, ST English

Commissioned by the Société Pechiney, Le chant du styrène was shot in the Pechiney polystyrene factories. It features boldly abstract colour images accompanied by a voice-over text by Raymond Queneau.

The Ship of Theseus
Anand Ghandi
India, 2012. HD Video. 143 min.
OV English, Arabic, Swedish, Hindi, ST English.

This original, idiosyncratic debut of philosophy graduate Anand Gandhi is a contemplative quest involving three parables. Plutarch’s paradoxical question of whether Theseus’s ship, when restored by replacing all of its parts, still remains the same ship, is applied to contemporary life issues.

The first story focuses on a blind photographer who captures the essence of life through intuition, but faces an existential crisis when eye transplants restore her sight. In the second, a monk dedicated to animal rights, non-violence and beliefs about cause and effect, refuses a life-saving transplant when faced with a lethal disease. Ethics and life-and-death decisions are the focus in the third tale about a stockbroker tracking down the culprits of an organ theft committed on a poor man in surgery. The stories, done in a cinematically refined manner, connect at the end in an ironic moment of belonging.

Language English