Clément Cogitore “Pale Nights”

Clément Cogitore offers, on the borders of documentary cinema, fiction and video creation, one of the most accurate, most inspiring and most sublime outcomes to the new relationship to the image and to film writing.

True to its vocation of highlighting new artistic and cinematographic forms, the Cinéma Galeries is honoured to offer you, around the release of the film “Braguino” in Belgium, a focus on the work of director and artist Clément Cogitore.

• Braguino – every day in theatres & retrospective of Clément Cogitore’s filmography – Screenings and events
• An original exhibition by Clément Cogitore – In the exhibition space of the Cinema Galeries.

Braguino tells the story of the lost paradise of a community in the Siberian Taiga. Clément Cogitore went to Braguino in 2016 to try to understand and highlight the impossibility of people living together. This documentary, of rare beauty, explores mythological spaces where the characters, disarmed in the face of too great a danger, are unconsciously sucked into a pure tragedy.

In the middle of the Siberian taiga, 700 km from any village, two families, the Bragin and the Kilin, have settled. No road leads there. Only a long journey on the Yenisei river by boat, then by helicopter, allows to reach Braguino. They live there in autarky, according to their own rules and principles. In the middle of the village: a barrier. The two families refuse to talk to each other. On an island in the river, another community is being built: that of the children. Free, unpredictable, fierce. Between the fear of the other, of wild animals, and the joy offered by the immensity of the forest, a cruel tale is played out in which tension and fear draw the geography of an ancestral conflict.

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Clément Cogitore – studied at the Ecole supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, then at the Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains where he developed a practice halfway between cinema and contemporary art. His work is based on a clever mix of film, video, installation and photography which tend to question the relationship between people and their images. This body of work questions notions such as collective memory, archaic patterns, imagery of the sacred and the illusion of fallen worlds.

Dominique Païni – Curator I Most of Dominique Païni’s professional life has been devoted to the dissemination of film culture and its relationship with the other arts. In 1991, he was appointed director of the Cinémathèque française, then was called to direct the Centre Georges-Pompidou. At the same time, he has curated exhibitions of international importance in France and North America. He is also the author of reference books on the relationship between cinema and the other arts.

Practical information

CLEMENT COGITORE: PALE NIGHTS

DATE | 30.11.2018 / 20.01.2019.

BRAGUINO I Every day at the Cinema Galeries.

EXHIBITION I Free. Tuesday to Sunday from 14:00 to 20:00
(Closed 14.12 I 19.12 I 25.12)

CURATOR | Dominique Païni

BOOKSHOP | @Cinema Galeries