Artist and queer cinema pioneer Barbara Hammer premieres her new performance and multi-disciplinary work “Evidentiary Bodies”.

Armed with portable, fixed and live projectors and cameras, the artist moves about the space projecting video onto inflated balloons, photographic prints, x-ray scans of her own body, as well as onto the bodies of the audience members. One person extends to many and many people extend to one, challenging the concept of the proscenium screen and the stable audience. The performance also includes live sound by Norman Scott Johnson on cello.

Since 1995, the Périphérie association organizes the Rencontres du cinéma documentaire (Meetings of Documentary Cinema), and since 2005 presents each October a one-week long non-competitive festival at the cinema Le Méliès of Montreuil. Open to diverse audiences, the festival brings together heritage films and recent works around a cinematic theme.

"Barbara Hammer paints a colorful portrait of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, from her childhood to her death in 1979. Bishop described herself as “timorously kicking around the coastlines of the world,” and the film is loosely organized around her stays in Nova Scotia, Key West, Brazil, and Cambridge—the homes she made for herself and the lovers she took. Never “out” as a lesbian—the concept would have been foreign to the writer who graduated from Vassar in the thirties—Bishop nonetheless actively pursued women, from her first summer-camp crush to her last affair. Hammer examines Bishop from all angles, interviewing everyone from literary luminaries like Marie-Claire Blais and Edmund White to Lota’s aged former maid. Hammer pulls the viewer into Bishop’s world, blending present day footage of each location with archival photos, and recreating moments in the writer’s life." Adapted from text by Monica Nolan (Frameline)