Spazio Murat continues its multidisciplinary research and promotional activities in Bari by presenting the second edition of Àngoli – International Art Festival from December 27 to 29, 2024, at its headquarters and the Kursaal Santalucia cinema hall. Under the artistic direction of Massimo Torrigiani, the festival invites audiences to repopulate the cinematic space with the sights and sounds of artist cinema. It does so with SAVE ME FROM TEARS, a Christmas-themed program dedicated to fluidity and bodily fluids, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, a duo renowned for their long-time exploration of the intersection between independent cinema, visual arts, and digital media.

Hosted in the majestic Kursaal Santalucia theater, recently reopened to the public, the lineup establishes a new end-of-year tradition for experiencing moving images. Notable guests of the program include New York artist Cheryl Donegan, a pioneer of post-digital feminist cinema and painting since the early 1990s; two pillars of Berlin’s trans-identitarian art scene, Annette Frick and CHEAP Collective; and the Italian artist duo Invernomuto, known for pushing anthropological research into territories of sonic and multimedia experimentation.Their works will be showcased on December 28 and 29 through a series of screenings in the cinema hall, accompanied by three live conversations.

Alongside the works of Donegan, CHEAP, Frick, and Invernomuto, three contemporary masterpieces will be shown in Bari for the first time. Originating from vastly different geographical and cultural contexts, these works share a common thread: the ability to bring to light underground rituals and forms of life that, navigating the political, the ecological, and the fantastical, redefine human matter and transcend it. The featured works are Dance to the End of Love by Lebanese archival artist and filmmaker Akram Zaatari, Green in the Grooves by Canadian sculptor and filmmaker Tamara Henderson, and On Venus by British artist and director P. Staff.

Two films that made the history of cinema serve as guiding lights for the program, embodying the spirit of a flaming Christmas: Fireworks (1947) by Kenneth Anger and Christmas on Earth (1963) by Barbara Rubin. These works subvert traditional imagery, unleashing on-screen the overwhelming and liberating power of sexual desire. Anger (1927–2023) and Rubin (1954–1980) do more than depict the upheaval of domestic order driven by lust; they lay the groundwork for a new poetic language, where images are infused with rhythm and musicality. Shot by enfants prodiges who were not even of age at the time, both films played a pivotal role in shaping queer and feminist aesthetics, establishing themselves as programmatic manifestos of a new, visionary, and independent cinema.

Fireworks and Christmas on Earth respond to the stereotypical sentiments of commercial cinema by asserting deeper impulses that relate to life in its unpredictable fragmentation. For this reason, they are the films that inspired SAVE ME FROM TEARS, but they are also essential cornerstones of the New American Cinema, a movement for the liberation and expansion of cinema led in the 1960s by a Lithuanian poet and director who had relocated to New York as a refugee: Jonas Mekas (1922–2019). The scope of the revolutions led by Mekas, Rubin, and Anger, alongside Warhol, the Velvet Underground, Yoko Ono, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Smith, and many others, will be explored through the screening of two documentaries, shown for the first time in Bari. The first is Fragments of Paradise by K.D. Davison, a feature film dedicated to Mekas’ remarkable biography, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2022. The second is Barbara Rubin & the Exploding NY Underground by Chuck Smith, awarded in 2019 at the DART Film Festival in Barcelona for its unprecedented portrait of the director and her influence on American avant-garde movements.

SAVE ME FROM TEARS traces a subtle yet profound continuity across generations, historical, geographical, and social contexts, highlighting a shared sense of community. The curatorial duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi comments on the selection: “Like the filmmakers of the New American Cinema, also Cheryl Donegan, CHEAP Collective, Annette Frick, Akram Zaatari, Tamara Henderson, P. Staff, and Invernomuto are advocates of a do-it-yourself cinema that affirms its inalienable vitality. These artists spare themselves and the audience the pathos of complacent representations, choosing instead to inhabit screens, theaters, and bodies as spaces of desire and transformation.”

The audience is invited to participate in this transformative process not as spectators or learners, but rather as bearers of questions, experiences, and new perspectives. For this reason, Àngoli has joined forces with two other festivals that have made overcoming identity barriers their hallmark: the Bari International Gender Festival and the queer culture festival Sherocco. Alongside them, Àngoli 2024 will be enriched by the participation of another notable local institution: the Accademia del Cinema Ragazzi, a pioneering school that has been working for nearly twenty years to use moving image education as a strategy for social regeneration. For the full festival program: www.spaziomurat.it

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