Fillip

E.S.P.: BeDevil
November 13th, 2019

Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society
#300-1131 Howe Street, access via the back alley
Vancouver, BC

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Cineworks and Fillip are pleased to present the fourth screening in E.S.P, an ongoing film series looking at the relationship between film and speculative modes of visuality.

This screening celebrates the 26th anniversary of Tracey Moffatt’s film BeDevil – the artist’s first and only feature film, and the recipient of the Cannes Film Festival Official Selection (1993). BeDevil is a three-part horror film that delves into racial inequalities by way of ghost stories told as a supernatural trilogy. Each story tells of peculiar characters, haunted by a past memory of tragedy. Moffatt skillfully plays with literal and figurative horror tropes, layering BeDevil with different temporalities of hauntings. These hauntings create meaningful disruptions to linear colonial histories, and Moffat’s cinematic form shows the deep influence of the Australian landscape and oral storytelling. The release of BeDevil marked the first feature film directed by an Aboriginal Australian woman.

E.S.P.: BeDevil continues our investigation into the interdisciplinary space between documentary, narrative, and formalist film, presenting work that complicates notions of science and fiction and the binary systems of knowledge they have come to represent.

Tracey Moffatt is an acclaimed Australian artist who has produced experimental and risk-taking video and photography works for the past 30 years. In 2017, she was appointed as the Australian representative at the 57th Venice Biennale with her solo exhibition ‘My Horizon’. Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe, Canada, the United States and Asia Pacific. Aside from BeDevil, some of her other works include several short films such as Nice Coloured Girls (1987) and Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989), which was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990. Moffatt’s works are currently held in collections at the Tate (London), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide) and Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney).