The Cancer Journals Revisited

The Cancer Journals Revisited

Lana Lin

US
2018
Documentary
98’
desired! – film lust & queer

Film-maker Lana Lin examines Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals, also from the point of view of her own experience of breast cancer. Together with many other participants in the project, she reads Lorde’s book from queer of colour perspectives, reenacting her thoughts and their relevance for all individuals. The film is an emphatic record of how we deal with bodies, pain and finality. The film is a polyvocal projection of the experiences Lorde describes in her journals, giving expression to the many different aspects of life with the illness and preoccupation with mortality. Visually, Lana Lin always finds new images. She makes associations and experiments in her filmic interpretation of Lorde’s writing. On this level, too, the film succeeds in relating the past and present to each other. Equally, the film is an autobiographical work, its starting point being the film-maker’s own personal experience. She contributes her experience to a collective understanding by connecting it to Lorde’s experiences and to her protagonists. Mechanisms of social exclusion in the form of misogyny and racism are reflected in the treatment of illness and death. The central issue here is the way bodies are dealt with as vulnerable bodies, bodies, however, which should not be visible as such.

Director

Lana Lin

Script

Audre Lorde, Lana Lin

With

Elizabeth Lord Rollins, Ericka Hart, Catalina Schliebener, Barbara Hammer, Sebene Selassie, Shay Sharpe, Eileen Z. Fuentes, Porochista Khakpour, Suleika Jaouad

Production

Lana Lin

Contact

Women Make Movies

WWW

wmm.com

Lana Lin

Die Filmemacherin, Künstlerin und Autorin Lana Lin lebt in New York. Sie macht seit den 1990er Jahren Experimentalfilme. In ihren Arbeiten untersucht sie die Fragilität und Widersprüche menschlicher und diskursiver Körper, wobei sie die konzeptuellen und poetischen Eigenschaften von Bewegtbildern betont. Seit 2001 arbeitet sie (als Lin + Lam) an multidisziplinären forschungsbasierten Projekten mit, die die Möglichkeiten und Potenziale von Geschichte und kollektivem Gedächtnis untersuchen. Ihre filmischen und künstlerischen Arbeiten wurden international gezeigt, etwa bei den Internationalen Kurzfilmtagen Oberhausen, beim Images Festival in Toronto, dem Taiwan International Documentary Festival, dem BFI London Film Festival, sowie im Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, im New Museum, New York, und im Stedeldijk Museum in Amsterdam.


Filme von Lana Lin
Moby Ovary or Madame Dick 2015 | Mysterial Power 2002 | No Power to Push Up the Sky 2001 | Taiwan Video Club 1999 | Almost the Cocktail Hour 1997 | Stranger Baby 1995 | Mizu Shobai (Water Business) 1993 | I Begin to Know You 1992 | Through the Door 1992 | Sphere:Circle:Round 1992