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A Glimpse of Brazil’s Filmmaker Kogut in Los Angeles

The Beyond Film program at California’s Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center will  host celebrated Brazilian filmmaker and artist, Sandra Kogut, on March 26, at 7 pm, in Venice, in the Greater Los Angeles.

Kogut  will present two of her award-winning films: Adieu Monde or Pierre and  Claire’s Story, a short and spirited take on “authentic” rural life in  the Pyrenees, and A Hungarian Passport  (Um Passaporte Hungaro).


A Hungarian Passport is a  moving film diary account of Kogut’s quest to obtain a Hungarian  passport, a journey that challenges notions of identity and nationality  while uprooting a family history of forced emigration and  anti-Semitism.


Sandra Kogut has been making videos, films and installations in France  and Brazil for twenty years.


Her work has appeared in and won prizes at  numerous festivals and events worldwide, including a recent  retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive.


An Associate Professor of  Visual Arts at UCSD, Kogut is currently working on her first  feature-length fiction film, which she will shoot in Brazil during the  summer of 2005.


Adieu Monde


Adieu Monde offers a loving yet tongue-in-cheek reflection on the quest  for “authenticity” in the Pyrenees, especially as this is absorbed and  reinterpreted by the oft-photographed inhabitants themselves.


Butchers,  mechanics, farmers, and bystanders in the picture-postcard Aspe and  Ossau valleys delight in recounting variations on the pastoral tale of  a young shepherd who vanished and the shepherdess who followed him into  the woods.


A profoundly poetic work, infused with the ludic culture and  storytelling traditions of the Pyrenees, Adieu Monde explores its  subjects’ nostalgia for the past as well as their joie-de-vivre in the  present.


A Hungarian Passport


Speaking over the telephone with the Hungarian consulate, Brazilian  filmmaker Sandra Kogut asks, “Can someone who has a Hungarian  grandfather get a Hungarian passport?”


The challenges of the  administrative process of obtaining a new national identity document  becomes the narrative thread of this disarmingly unaffected film diary. 


Kogut creates a private journal of her trips to and from Brazil,  Hungary, and France, recording the Kafkaesque experience of  her  frustrating and often hysterical attempts to jump through endless  bureaucratic hoops.


On the way, she explores a painful family history  of forced emigration and a hidden legacy of anti-Semitism as she  confronts some essential questions: What is nationality? What is a  passport for? What should we do with our heritage? How do we construct  our history and our own identity?


General admission $7, students/seniors $5


Beyond Baroque
681 Venice Boulevard, Venice, California
www.beyondbaroque.org

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