OUTLANDISH TRAILER GRAINDELAVOIX 12 Setembro 2020 Lisboa @ Appleton

OUTLANDISH
An Apocryphal Reading of Thomas More's Utopia
Appleton Associação Cultural
September 12 of 2020 at 21h in:
LNEC - Laboratório Nacional de Engenharia Civil
Main Building Conference Amphitheater

A film by Björn Schmelzer, Margarida Garcia, Koen Broos, Nuno Henriques, Alex Fostier, Bram Leys, Willem Van Vooren and Katrijn Degans

with Manuel Mota, Marius Peterson, Timothy Foubert, Bert Timmermans, Bregje Vivier

Soundtrack by Graindelavoix/Björn Schmelzer (dir.)
Music by Damião de Góis, Thomas Ashewell and John Browne

in collaboration with Les rencontres Inattendues Doornik, Stad Doornik, Hospital of Undersized Gestures Lisbon and with the support of the Flemish Community and Stad Antwerpen


A man in a small port embarks unseen on a stranger's boat. Once discovered, the eccentric but introvert owner lets him join his journey. Soon it's clear the trip is without end and without real purpose, and the boat itself seems to be their destiny. The unforeseen appearance of an island makes the man change his fate. In Antwerp he shows up as Raphael Hythloday meeting Thomas More and the city secretary Peter Gillis. A garden diner should bring them more close together, but things end up differently and Thomas More gives up on his book...OUTLANDISH can hardly be called an adaptation, let's say, it's a heretic mise-en-abyme of utopia itself.

Björn Schmelzer about the film:
OUTLANDISH started as an art project with live performed music for the music festival Les Rencontres Inattendues in Tournai and their question if I could make an adaptation of the book Utopia by Thomas More. I agreed, mainly because it would be an impossible, utopian challenge in itself, bringing back cinema to its essence, making possible what is impossible. The budget and time offered were very small: that was exactly how it should be, pushing the utopian dimensions and giving me the chance to focus on something purely cinematographic. In stead of thinking of a literal adaptation we had to strip the book of its rhetorics, lying representations, and look behind it, reveal a truth which would go to the core of every utopian project. And there was also the absurdity found in the book, a sort of slapstick in slow-motion: the main characters would almost be like allegorical figures, but in the way of Laurel and Hardy, connecting with an almost extinct cinematic experience, where extreme naturalism and allegorical mannerism could still meet, a joyful cinema as in the good olden days, nothing to do with contemporary irony.
So what if the Portuguese sailor Hythloday never discovered anything, but is rather a sort of stowaway, a nobody, challenging hospitality, friendship and property? What if the book would not be written in the end?

https://graindelavoix.be/
https://appleton.pt

Apoios:
LNEC - Laboratório Nacional de Engenharia Civil
Câmara Municipal de Lisboa - Fundo de Emergência Social - Cultural
addac systems
https://www.addacsystem.com/

Please make reservation has there are some covid limitations: [email protected]

LNEC - AV DO BRASIL 101 1700-066 LISBOA