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.

Excavations in the southern Portuguese city of Lagos unearthed a huge 15th-century landfill site a few years ago. Alongside a variety of implements, the archaeologists found human remains. There were more than 150 skeletons in all, of men, women and children—and some of them were tied up.

Genetic analysis confirmed that they were the skeletons of Africans who had been enslaved by traders and brought to Portugal. Perhaps they died during the voyage or shortly after their arrival; in any case, they were not given a proper burial. This shocking discovery exposed the concealed history of Portugal. Over the course of four centuries, six million people were transported in this way under the Portuguese or Brazilian flags.

In Tales of Oblivion, Dulce Fernandes investigates the traces left in today’s landscape by this horrific trade in human beings. The calm camera tracks steadily from site to site—the former landfill is now a parking garage topped by a minigolf course—and museum objects bearing witness to the history of colonialism. In a quiet but thorough way, this essayistic film reveals a hidden past.

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.