8:30 pm - Rediscoveries and Restorations
FEN DOU [Struggling] (CN 1932; 85’)
by Dongshan Shi
Pianoforte: Maud Nelissen

The Chinese film Fen dou (Struggling) was considered lost for decades. First, the narrative is structured upon the dialectical “struggle” between two friends: Zheng, a courageous, handsome, manly, romantic working-class man, and Yuan, another working-class man, who is corrupted by middle-class craving for money and sexual desire, and bullies his own kind but turns frail when he is called to arms to fight the Japanese... The aesthetic sophistication of Fen Dou is unmatched by most of the extant films from Shanghai during this period.

10:15 pm - Rediscoveries and Restorations
EL ÚLTIMO MALÓN [The Last Uprising] (AR 1918; 63’)
by Alcides Greca
Pianoforte: José Maria Serralde Ruiz

On 21 April 1904, after decades of repression, members of the Mocoví tribe attacked the white population of San Javier, in the northeastern Santa Fe province of Argentina. The uprising, or “malón”, was violently put down, and more than fifty indigenous people were slaughtered. Thirteen years later, the local writer and politician Alcides Greca (1889-1956) brought together a group of survivors to participate in a filmed re-enactment. The result was El último malón, an exceptional film that not only carefully reconstructs the massacre, but also illustrated now vanished Mocoví customs.