Histoire de mes cheveux ended with a shot where I found myself locked in a concentration camp. I had said shortly before that I was glad I finally arrived home. A song of hope, however, echoed with a fantasized happy ending (Hollywood kiss) and a song that heralded spring. In reality the film did not end there. There was a second part to this story. The first tells the story of the condemned man, the second that of the survivor. And so the film had to start with a scene that could never be shot where I was escaping from the camp.
A day in the life of director Boris Lehman: he wanders from cafe to bookshop, cinema to museum, writer to musician, and into the storeroom of the film archive... He celebrates his birthday in an alleyway, with a friend, and finishes his journey with an escapade to Bruges and a stroll by the North Sea. The camera plays dirty tricks and the sound recorder gets carried away, to the point that both are clearly telling Boris to stop filming. Yet he persists…
Knokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice and Cannes, the posh casino hosts the second ‘World Festival of Film and the Arts’ in 1949, organised in part by the Royal Cinematheque of Belgium. To celebrate cinema’s 50 year existence, they put together a side program showcasing the medium in all its shapes and forms: surrealist film, absolute film, dadaist films, abstract film,… The side program would soon become a festival in its own right: ‘EXPRMNTL’, dedicated to experimental cinema, and would become a mythical gathering of the avant-garde…
Seven apartments, seven times of life: one film. A classic diary film, Boris Lehman intimately chronicles his own existence and that of objects and places that became an essential part of his life. A truly cinematic experience that gives us a highly European sense of space, time and history itself.
Boris Lehman, born March 3rd 1944 in Lausanne (Switzerland), is a Belgian filmmaker whose work is oriented towards experimental cinema, cinematographic essay, filmed news and documentary.
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