Admission:
General $10
Student $7
July 8, 2025, 8:30pm
Brooklyn 11205
USA
Join us at the e-flux Screening Room rooftop for The Staged Return, the first of the four-part series Decision Moment, presenting artists' films and cinema features that reflect on historical moments of action and inaction and examine cinematic ways of approaching them.
At the core of each screening lies a past event shaped—knowingly or not—by a decision pursued, postponed, or left unmade, whose consequences continue to linger. Rather than reconstructing the past events as heroic acts, the films presented in this program embrace the limits of linear narration as ethical commitment to the complexities of historical decisions, and encourage viewers to reflect on their own actions and decisions in the present.
Screenings take place on Tuesdays from July 8–29, 2025, and begin after sunset.
I: The Staged Return
Tuesday, July 8, 2025, 8:30pm
Can reenactments create new spaces for critique and self-reflection? Chen Chieh-Je’s The Route (2006) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence (1996) illustrate the ethical and aesthetic implications of cinematic reconstructions of past events.
Chen Chieh-Je, The Route (2006, Taiwan, 16 minutes)
The Route revisits a 1997 incident when fired dockworkers in Liverpool protested the unloading of a ship by global strike-breakers. Chen combines archival footage of the original dockers’ strike with newly staged scenes. In haunting silence, Taiwanese workers enact the roles of their Liverpool counterparts, creating a phantom protest across time and space.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf, A Moment of Innocence (1996, Iran, 78 minutes)
In a deeply self-reflexive film, Mohsen Makhmalbaf casts himself and his former adversary—a policeman he stabbed in his youth—as directors of parallel reenactments of the event. The film folds autobiography into fiction, revolutionary fervor into post-revolution disillusionment, and reopens the wound it cannot heal. Cinema for the Iranian director becomes the site of unfinished business, where memory is reconstructed not to settle the past, but to examine its enduring claims on the present.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
