Water Eyes: Avant-garde cinema in the garden III

Water Eyes

We bid farewell to summer with Avant-Garde Cinema in the Garden III

September 14 and 15, 2024

Three years ago, the Todolí Citrus Fundació began a series of avant-garde films in the garden. This year’s show is titled Water Eyes, and recovers a series of films by great figures of experimental and avant-garde cinema that explore the diverse poetic, formal and narrative possibilities of the liquid element.

On this occasion the project broadens horizons and the program will be repeated two consecutive days in two privileged places in whose gardens citrus fruits have a special prominence and where art is always present in the most unexpected places and forms.

The first session of Water Eyes will take place on Saturday, September 14 at El Bartolí, the citrus orchard of Todolí Citrus Fundació (Palmera, La Safor); the second session will be held on Sunday, September 15 in the gardens of the Hotel Montsant, in the historic city of Xàtiva (La Costera), with the same program on both days.

Aware of the value of water as an essential resource for our survival, this year’s program pays tribute to it and claims it as “an essential element in life and in art, where it has been the subject of study by painters, poets, photographers and filmmakers fascinated with capturing the colors it produces in contact with light, the sounds and effects of its passage through the landscape, or the feeling of happiness produced by the simple act of drinking or bathing in it,” writes the curator of the exhibition, Andrea Franco.

The selection consists of 9 works of varied genres and styles including hand-painted films, such as those by Stan Brakhage and Len Lye; artist’s films, such as the animation created by Polish painter Piotr Kamler; ethnographic films, such as Jean Rouch’s; scientific films, like Jean Painlevé’s, with an original soundtrack by the American indie band Yo La Tengo; film poems, like Ralph Steiner’s; formal experimentations like Julie Murray’s; or more playful and fun portraits, like those filmed by Klaus Telscher and Robert Todd.

Andrea Franco, researcher and audiovisual programmer, is the curator of this project that was born in 2022 with the intention of offering a cinematographic experience in dialogue with the Todolí Citrus Fundació orchard. After two editions devoted to gardens and botany, the project grows and explores new themes, always with the initial vocation of (re)discovering a cinema of great artistic and cultural value linked to the landscape in which it is projected.

The third edition of Cine de Vanguardia en el Jardín is once again supported by the City Council of Palmera and, for the first time, with the support of Turisme Comunitat Valenciana. Also, this year the sponsorship of INELCOM, a company founded by the Quilis family, whose collection of contemporary art is one of the most important private collections in this country, being also owners of the hotel-restaurant Montsant, in his hometown of Xàtiva.

The screenings will take place at 19:30 on Saturday, September 14 at the Huerto El Bartolí, headquarters of Todolí Citrus Fundació de Palmera (Carrer l’Església, 28) and on Sunday, September 15 at the same time in the gardens of the Hotel Montsant in Xàtiva (Subida al Castillo s/n).

Both sessions will be free of charge until full capacity is reached, although it is essential to confirm attendance by e-mail to cine@todolicitrus.org

Check program