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Gray Wielebinski’s Film Club
Institute of Contemporary Arts

Tuesday 3 Oct – Tuesday 12 Dec 2023

A white man leans thoughtfully against a post. The background is red, orange, yellow - similar to a sunset
Querelle, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany / France 1982, 104 min., English, 18


Gray Wielebinski:
The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low


‘Cinema has been one of the most significant influences on The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low thanks to the exhibition’s engagement with science fictional ideas and aesthetics, as well as the importance of the sun and artificial and alien sources of light. Of the films I’ve selected for this screening program, only one, Sunshine (2007), would straightforwardly be considered science fiction; the others blend genre in surprising ways. Tangerine (2015) can be considered an existential Western set on the streets of central LA, Safe (1995) is a domestic drama with science fictional overtones, and Querelle (1982) is a kitsch pornographic thriller with a noticeable lack of urgency.

‘Each film foregrounds the question of paranoia. Some characters, such as the elderly patriarch at the centre of Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear (1955) or Julianne Moore’s troubled housewife in Todd Haynes’ Safe, are so tormented by apparent apocalyptic threats in their day-to-day life that they are judged by others (including, perhaps, the viewer) to be insane. Yet each film invites us to question the point at which conspiratorial thinking might actually be logical, particularly for those pushed to society’s margins. The polarity of private and public creates worlds riven with secrets, as Huw Lemmey and Onyeka Igwe’s Ungentle (2020) shows. In all of these films, moments of beauty arise and disappear, as everything is not quite what it seems.’ 
– Gray Wielebinski

Tickets £12, £5 if you’re 25 or under.
Free for Red Members, half price for Blue Members. Join today

Event ticket includes free entry to the exhibition that day.
 
Programme

Two white men sit leaning against a wooden beam. One wears a sailor hat and is polishing a boot. They are both topless and sweating.

Tuesday 3 October, 8:45pm
Querelle
Fassbinder’s striking final film centres a handsome sailor on shore leave in the port of Brest.


A white woman with curled hair looks at herself intensely in a bathroom mirror, she holds a small handbag

Tuesday 17 October, 8:45pm
Todd Haynes’ profoundly unsettling drama about a troubled housewife suffering from a series of intensifying chronic afflictions.


A man stands silhouetted against the sun's surface

Tuesday 31 October, 8:45pm
Sunshine
Danny Boyle’s space odyssey is a dazzling exploration of the sun and our relationship to it.


A deck chair floats in water, surrounded by algae and small bits of rubbish

Tuesday 14 November, 8:30pm
Huw Lemmey and Onyeka Igwe’s investigation of the historical convergence of British espionage and homosexuality.


Seven Japanese people sit around a wooden table, the man in the foreground has a stressed expression. The image is in black and white.

Tuesday 28 November, 8:45pm
I Live in Fear on 35mm
Akira Kurosawa’s haunting exploration of life in the atomic age is as profoundly moving as the filmmaker’s best known works.


Two women cross the street in LA), blue sky and palm trees in the back

Tuesday 12 December, 8:45pm
Sean Baker’s iPhone-shot L.A odyssey follows two trans sex workers in a plot of intrigue, jealousy, revenge, humor, survival and sisterhood.