May 7, “History’s Future,” by Dutch director Fiona Tan, will be screened at the Panorama Europe Festival at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.
May 7, “History’s Future,” by Dutch director Fiona Tan, will be screened at the Panorama Europe Festival at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.
Part fiction, part documentary, part speculative essay on the contemporary world, History’s Future is about one man’s odyssey through a Europe in turmoil – and through his own mind. Losing his memory after a mugging, a man known only as ‘MP’ (Missing Person) leaves his home and sets out on a journey – in search not only for his memory but perhaps also for a new identity.
MP finds himself confronted by a world in which there are no longer any certainties; an era of crisis on many levels. On his travels from country to country, through a series of strange, illuminating, sometimes comic encounters, MP attempts to gain insight into the complexity of life in the 21st -century West – into what commentators have called an age of ‘rolling catastrophe’.
With “History’s Future,” Fiona Tan asks the question: “Are we living at the end of an era?” via the story of an amnesiac man’s odyssey through the contemporary West – a social landscape plunged into economic and philosophical crisis. This film will be Tan’s personal attempt to map some key features of the early twenty-first-century Zeitgeist – the moods, fears and hopes of contemporary Europeans and Westerners. The journey of protagonist MP is a personal search, but at the same time, a search for the answer to a question that concerns us all: “What are these times we are living in?”
May 7, 3:00 PM – Museum of the Moving Image
New York, NY.
Director Fiona Tan will attend the event for a Q&A after the screening.
The festival kindly offers the readers of Dutch Culture USA the code PANEUROPE2016, to receive 20% discount on tickets at checkout.
Fiona Tan is an artist working primarily with film and video. She is best known for her skillfully crafted and intensely moving installations, in which explorations of identity, memory and history are key. Both poetic and subversive, Tan’s work is characterized by great attention to detail, accomplished editing of sound, word and image and the careful use of the sculptural space and architecture in which a piece is presented. These elements combine to produce a sensory experience equal to its intellectual content.
Fiona Tan lives and works in Amsterdam. She is represented by Frith Street Gallery, London and Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.
Panorama Europe 2016, the eighth edition of the essential festival of new and vital European cinema, co-presented by Museum of the Moving Image and the members of EUNIC (European Union National Institutes for Culture), returns to the Museum and the Bohemian National Hall from May 6 through May 22 with a slate of nineteen exceptional new feature films. From mind-bending genre experiments that reinvent the musical, sci-fi film, and horror movie, to gripping dramatic features and documentaries capturing the tenuous nature of modern life for a variety of wanderers and refugees, Panorama Europe 2016 is a vibrant selection of some of the finest and most riveting films coming out of Europe today.