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Amarandos

Director: Iokasti Mantzog
Greece, Germany, 28 minutes, 2024, experimental documentary

“Amarandos,” the flower whose colour lasts eternal, is a messy vase of memory, dealing with transitions to other realms, while in the incomprehensible process of mourning, making worlds out of loss and time. It is a celebration, that attempts through the story of my Pontiac grandmother and her gradual fade out of her physical body due to Alsheimer illness, to weave through our songs and dances, the spaces we make to meet each other. Through this experimental short documentary, cultural and intimate narratives bring up collective questions around vulnerability, resilience and survival, affectionate strategies. Can dancing and singing our sorrow, create spells to disrupt the normative linear narrative of memory and channel ancestral storytellings of empowerment and togetherness to now?

Trigger warning: description of death
Film screening dates: 23.11.2024 — 8.12.2024
Close-up, portrait. A person with long dark hair, shaved at the forehead, turns slightly to the side, gazing deeply with their brown eyes into the camera. They are wearing a black top with exposed shoulders, their ear is accessorized with a large earring and piercing.
Director
Iokasti Mantzog is Greek-Pontiac artist, activist and witch based in Berlin. In their practice they move between mediums of movement, choreography, text and video, attempting to create chaotic poetic containers, often through femme hyperbole and disturbing personas. Their work has been presented in Germany, Greece, Switzerland and France, in places like Tanztheater Mainz, L’Usine, Tanzfabrik Bühne, Uferstudios, Theater of Greek School of Arts etc.They are particularly interested in methodologies of field research, specifically in collecting diverse oral and embodied histories of marginalized groups as long as nonhuman encounters, in order to create counter memory dances and other speculative fabulations. At the moment, in their artistic process, they are curious, researching states of urgency, transformative queer practices, compasses of the dream through the collective unknown and grieving lullabies.