The Cultural Workshop Agion Omologiton, in collaboration with the French Institute in Nicosia and with the support of The Department of Contemporary Culture of the Deputy Ministry of Culture is organizing the screening of the important documentary LETTER FROM SIBERIA, in the special film-essay style of the great Chris Marker.

The film will be introduced by Cypriot director Longinos Panagi.

The introduction as well as the film will be in English. Suitable for persons over 18 years old.

Free Entrance

Original title : LETTRE DE SIBERIE

Documentary | 1957 | 62′ | France

Director: Chris Marker

A documentary about this vast and in those days very mysterious soviet area. Above all as André Bazin wrote “A Human and political geography essay about siberian reality vivid writting inlighted by the camera work. The author always holds together intelligence, poetry and whimsical imagination.”

”One of Chris Marker’s earliest documentaries (1957) and probably one of his best, the hour-long Letter From Siberia mixes new and found footage with inventive commentary, and is especially memorable for a passage in which footage is repeated while the offscreen commentary transforms its meaning with a different ideological interpretation. It is perhaps the earliest example we have of Marker’s inimitable essayistic manner, hence an indispensable work.” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader).

This early feature from Chris Marker is a key touchstone in the evolution of his distinctive essayistic style, in which he combines footage shot in the barren reaches of Siberia with his typically idiosyncratic musings. Animated mammoths, a humorous comparison of communist and capitalist values, and even a “commercial” for reindeer all feature in this alternately witty and philosophical travelogue that reveals as much about the history and culture of its subject as it does about the inner workings of its maker’s mind. (Criterion)