The Spirit of Place: Simone Rapisarda Casanova
January 24 – 25 | The Cinematheque (1131 Howe Street, Vancouver)
Tickets
Please join us for a two-night, three-film celebration of the work of the SCA's Simone Rapisarda Casanova, co-presented with The Cinematheque.
El árbol de las fresas
The debut feature of Rapisarda Casanova is an ethnographic documentary uniquely aware of its own epistemological limitations.
Thursday, January 24, 2019 – 6:30pm
Zanj Hegel la
CANADIAN PREMIERE! Set and shot in Haiti, Rapisarda Casanova's latest is another beguiling experiment in inside-out ethnography.
Thursday, January 24, 2019 – 8:15pm & Friday, January 25, 2019 – 8:30pm
La creazione di significato
Rapisarda Casanova’s universally acclaimed sophomore feature is part treatise on the spectre of history, part portrait of a vanishing way of life.
Friday, January 25, 2019 – 6:30pm
The Cinematheque introduces the screenings this way:
DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE! A nomadic film artist whose work evades easy classification, Italian-Canadian director (and SFU instructor) Simone Rapisarda Casanova has received international plaudits for his poetic and principled brand of “meta-documentary.” His trio of features — each shot in a different country, each concerned with a culture on the edge of erasure, along with the ethics of documenting it — deftly blend (and blur) narrative, non-fiction, ethnographic, and avant-garde approaches in an attempt to reveal what Rapisarda Casanova calls the “spirit of place,” a soul that remembers what occurred there. His first film, the Cuban-set El árbol de las fresas (2011), was named one of the Best Undistributed Films of 2012 by Film Comment; its much-admired follow-up, La creazione di significato (2014), garnered Rapisarda Casanova the prestigious Best Emerging Director prize at Locarno.
We are honoured to premiere Rapisarda Casanova’s new film Zanj Hegel la (2018), shot in Haiti and co-written with its cast and crew, alongside screenings of his acclaimed previous features.
With support from the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography and the Institute for Performance Studies at Simon Fraser University.