Workshop & Talk by Filmmaker & Artist Johan Grimonprez

"Maybe the Sky Is Really Green, and We’re Just Colorblind."

Join the Film Studies Program for a talk and workshop with Johan Grimonprez, the Oscar-nominated director of Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat.

Following the workshop, join us for a screening of Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat and a filmmaker Q&A will start at 6:30 p.m.

Who owns our imagination in a world of existential vertigo where truth has become a shipwrecked refugee? Is it not the storyteller who can contain contradictions, who can slip between the languages we have been given and who can become a time-traveler of the imagination? Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once coined that we are not made of atoms as scientists say, but that we are actually made of stories. Stories are what holds us together, — or tear us apart, shaping our very idea of belonging. Ironically writer Maurice Blanchot called language an act of murder, because naming things would be identical to killing them. But novelist Alfred Döblin claims exactly the opposite: language, he says, is a form of loving others, language lets us know why we are together. But maybe a more pertinent depiction is Vietnamese filmmaker Trin-Min Ha’s idea of language as a 'leaking boat'. A lifeboat we are all stuck on together. It’s the disappearing meeting place, but also the same dire biosphere we all share.

By dialoguing about countercultural applications, including our own storytelling in our very art and/or film practice, in what writer Rebecca Solnit claims the "duty of delight', to find new joyful ways of telling,” figuring out how we belong together while choreographing new stories we share. Not as victims of the future paralyzed by dystopian nihilism, but to garner new metaphors and untold stories generated by better questions that can invent new languages, "tools for the amazing wonderful possibilities for the terrible realities we face.”

Johan Grimonprez’s latest feature Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat was Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary Feature and premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Cinematic Innovation Award and further garnered the Persistence of Vision Award at SFFilm and the Audience Award at Thessaloniki Film Festival. Included as part of the “25 greatest docs of the 21st Century” by Documentary Magazine, and lauded as one of the “31 best doc of all time” by Harper’s Bazaar.

Grimonprez’s curatorial projects have been exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and MoMA. His works are in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and Tate Modern, London. His artwork is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery (New York).