De Sidere 7
Film Artist Book
HD 2014, 38 minutes, Nicolás Grandi & Lata Mani
De Sidere 7 is an experimental work that interweaves performance, dance, poetry, storytelling and text to reflect upon aspects of desire. Shot in Bangalore and Delhi, the film scripts the work of five performing artists into a sensorially rich meditation on desire’s vexed status as at once, animating force, object of suspicion and ground of contention. De Sidere 7 is conceived as a videocontemplation: a formally plural, multilayered composition intended to be experienced as an integrated whole. The artist book plays with image, frame, text, process notes & artist-critic responses to stage an encounter with the film in print duration.
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De Sidere 7 is a stunning multi-genre meditation on the meanings of desire in all its valences. Lata Mani and Nicolás Grandi have created a work that is as theoretically rich as it is visually and sonically complex, one that explores the shapes and contours of queer embodiment in the rapidly shifting landscapes of urban India. Gayatri Gopinath, Gender and Sexuality Studies, New York University
What is desire? The scriptural trope of a question that demands not so much an answer as a profound reflection and revelation structures this fluid film, yielding creative responses from people open to desire’s many shades of significance. Against a global culture that saturates us with commodified and packaged “anatomical” desire, this film uses the camera’s vulnerability to its environments and subjects to give us a universe of alternatives through the intimacy of vision and sound, textures of skin, and rhythms of movement… This experimental piece by Nicolás Grandi and Lata Mani uses cinema’s ability to show and tell to deepen our perception and heighten our senses to desire’s unruly heterodoxy. It will be a valuable film in classes across the humanities that want to promote thoughtful dialogue and debate over questions of the self, queer identity, sexuality, desire, spirituality, culture and race. Priya Jaikumar, University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts
De Sidere 7 is a meditative inquiry of desire from the profound place of spirit. The ever-teacher, Lata Mani, suggests desire is not to be transcended but wholly embraced -- as an embodied god, the black and white solitude of almost still photograph, a woman in (re)pose and dance. Grandi's kaleidoscopic filmic work serves up a visual and aural feast that captures the lingering scent of such knowings within us. Cherrie Moraga, Acclaimed Feminist Poet, Playwright, Essayist
Screenings
University of California, Berkeley, May 1, 2014
University of California, Los Angeles, May 2, 2014
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, May 8, 2014
X Festival Transterritorial de Cine Underground, Buenos Aires, October 1, 2014
New York University, October 3, 2014
Brown University, Providence, USA, October 6, 2014
Goldsmiths, University of London, October 23, 2014
London School of Economics, October 28, 2014
National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru, January 10, 2015
India International Center, New Delhi, February 16, 2015
Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, February 24, 2015
Bangalore Queer Film Festival, February 28, 2015
8th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala, June 26-30, 2015
All Lights India International Film Festival, Kochi, November 18, 2015