Thursday July 18, 9:00 – 10:45pm > A PASSAGE by Pejvak, Screening, Hanover Drive-In
A PASSAGE (2019)
A Film by Rouzbeh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson
[17:00 min /Stereo/ Color/ DCP]
“A Passage” tackles the political economy and social ecology of border infrastructures in Southern Armenia. The film looks at how processes of rapid militarization and neoliberalization have restructured these border regions: namely the recent erasure of the historic Yerevan-Baku Railway, and the upcoming construction of an industrial Free Economic Zone planned precisely where the removed train infrastructure was housed.
Filmed as a hybrid genre vision in the sun scorched valleys of Southern Armenia, this film gives equal weight to gossip and myth as it does to factual events. “A Passage” meanders through dense sediments of history with the evacuated linkages of the Yerevan-Baku Railway as its guide, towards a future of Free Economic Zones and uncertainty.
Pejvak is the long-term collaboration between Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari. Through their multivalent, intuitive approach to research and living they find themselves in a convergence and entanglement with likeminded collaborators, histories and various geographies.
Rouzbeh Akhbari is an artist working in video installation and film. His practice is research-driven and usually exists at the intersections of political economy, critical architecture and planning. Through a delicate examination of the violences and intimacies that occur at the boundaries of lived experience and constructed histories, Akhbari uncovers the minutiae of power that organizes and regiments the world around us.
Felix Kalmenson is an artist whose practice navigates installation, video and performance. Kalmenson’s work variably narrates the liminal space of a researcher’s and artist’s encounter with landscape and archive. By bearing witness to everyday life, and hardening the more fragile vestiges of private and collective histories through their work, Kalmenson gives themselves away to the cadence of a poem, always in flux.
Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film 