Culture

From November 10 through November 13, Flanders House co-presented three documentaries by Flemish directors at the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. One of the films, Grande Hotel, is the inaugural selection of the festival and Flanders House offered a private reception at the museum afterwards. Grande Hotel, by Lotte Stoops, is a movie about a hotel in the West African seaside town of Beira which stands as testament to the grandeur and folly of Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique. Filmmaker Lotte Stoop circles around and weaves in and out of the 120-square-meter complex while, offcamera, former residents and revelers recount their experiences of the hotel’s brief but storied past as the Pride of Africa, the continent’s most luxurious resort, and its later use as a headquarters in the country’s revolutionary war. The memories clash with the black-and-white visuals as the camera exposes the living conditions of the hotel’s new residents.

The second movie, by Sofie Benoot, is called Blue Meridian. The film follows the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois to Venice, Louisiana. Blue Meridian is a captivating journey through the dilapidated and worn out Deep South of the United States of America. A cinematographic encounter with people living among the traces of natural disasters, economic decline and a turbulent history. The Mississippi River flows both through the Deep South and the imagination of the American nation; it draws the border between the East and the West of the country, but also the division between the North and the South. As a blue meridian, it represents the complex relation between place and identity in North America.

The last film called White Elephant (Nzoku ya Pembe) by Kristof Bilsen tells the story of Kinshasa's central post office, an ossified remnant of the Congo's colonial past, where employees sit idle in vast rooms built for more bustling times. Sixty years since achieving independence from Belgium, and the country's hopes for a prosperous and just future are unrealized but not abandoned.

http://www.amnh.org/programs/mead/2011/