Seventh Cinema: Fantastic Planet and Contos do Esquecimento (Tales of Oblivion)

Fantastic Planet (1973) 1h 12m. Directed by Rene Laloux. 

Rene Laloux's mesmerising sci-fi animated feature won the Grand Prix at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival and is a landmark of European animation. Set in a distant world, the 'Fantastic Planet', where tiny humans, or Oms, are kept as pets by large alien creatures, the Draags, the film travels through a strange and beautiful world. Soon, one Om absconds with a Draag knowledge device, using the tool to instigate a wild Om uprising against his captors. Inspired by the Russsian invasion of Czechoslovakia in the late '60s, Laloux's breathtaking vision immediately drew comparisons to Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Planet of the Apes. Today, the film can be seen to prefigure much of the work of Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away) due to its political and social concerns, epic imagination and animation techniques.

Contos do Esquecimento (Tales of Oblivion) (2023) 1h 2m. Directed by Dulce Fernandes.

On a hot summer morning in 1444, in the fishing village of Lagos, southern Portugal, a group of African people disembarked. In the field next to the port, they were given away as slaves to the local noblemen and merchants. For the next 400 years, more than six million Africans would be trafficked in Portuguese ships to Europe and across the Atlantic.

On a rainy winter afternoon in 2009, in Lagos, archeologists excavating the site where an underground parking lot was under construction, began to find human skeletons. Working on the site for the following five months, as the parking lot was being built around them, the archeologists uncovered the skeletons of 158 enslaved African men, women, and children. Their bodies had been dumped in a XV-century landfill.

Intertwining these two storylines, Tales of Oblivion threads tales of violence and brutality from the past with sights and sounds of the present. Evoking what took place in these sites and conjuring memories from the past, Tales of Oblivion is a film-territory where we have no choice but to look at how the present continues to be shaped by the history we carry within us.

Concerning Violence 

We are pleased that Seventh Cinema is back for a second season! 

This year's curated film program is anchored in Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon’s often-misunderstood and overly read essay Concerning Violence from his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth. For this season, we have curated films that engage with Fanon’s work in the spirit he intended - not as an endorsement of violent action, but as a confrontation of the processes that drive the colonised to employ violence. This season includes seminal films such as The Battle of Algiers, one of cinema’s great political masterpieces, which charts the Algerian national liberation movement from its beginnings in 1954 through to independence in 1962. Also featured is Embrace of the Serpent, a visually stunning work filmed on 35mm in the Amazon, set against the violent backdrop of the colonial rubber trade. Dulce Fernandes' film essay Tales of Oblivion by offers a meditative reflection on the physical and cultural remnants of colonial atrocities in our present landscapes  - a 15th-century landfill turned car park and mini golf course, museum artefacts - capturing the haunting echoes of the horrific trade in human beings. 

We welcome you to join us in viewing these important films and reflecting on their profound relevance to the present. This season invites a critical examination of colonialism within our local context and the atrocities unfolding further afield. In engaging with Fanon’s work, we are called to consider the responsibilities of Western intellectuals and nations in perpetuating or dismantling colonial systems. Most importantly, these films challenge us to ask: what is our role in the revolution?

Screenings are free to attend, and all are welcome.