Biennial / LUX programme 3

Running time: 89 minutes

Listing features: FACT Film Screening

Three artists film screenings around the idea of bad guests programmed by LUX

The films range from a fictional story about a half-constructed house occupied by squatters (who may also be ghosts), to a video diary by a Czech filmmaker living with his parents, and a damning documentary portrait of tourists in Papua New Guinea. What they all have in common are people who, deliberately or otherwise, are stretching hospitality to its limits.

The Mendi

Steve Reinke / USA / 2006 / 9mins
Over found footage from The Mendi - an ethnographic documentary made in Papua New Guinea for the CBC's Man Alive television show in the 1970s - the narrator gives a spurious account of his summer supposedly spent as a teenage assistant to the filmmakers.

Cannibal Tours

Dennis O'Rourke / Papua New Guinea / 1988 / 80mins
O'Rourke's documentary follows a number of European and American ecotourists as they travel from village to village throughout the Sepik River area in Papua New Guinea, driving hard bargains for local handcrafted items, paying to view formerly sacred ceremonies and taking photographs of every aspect of "primitive" life. With some prodding, the tourists unwittingly reveal an unattractive and pervasive ethnocentrism to O'Rourke's cameras. The tourists thus become somewhat dehumanized by the camera, even as the tourists themselves are busy exoticizing even the most mundane aspects of Sepik River life.

lux.org.uk

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