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Opening Date: April 3 2019
Asia House 63 New Cavendish St, London W1G 7LP

The UK premiere of The Deserted, Tsai Ming-Liang’s 2017 feature length virtual reality (VR) film, is one of the highlights of the inaugural Taiwan Film Festival UK. The initial screening is on 3 April 2019, at a specially designed VR pop-up cinema at Asia House in central London, and will then be open to the public from 4-8 April, with seven showings a day.

The Deserted tells the surreal story of a man living in a ruined house in the mountains with two ghosts and a fish. Recovering from an illness and unable to communicate with the ghosts, his only companion is the lone fish who swims with him in the bathtub.
A lauded master of slow cinema, Tsai Ming-Liang chose this film to open the retrospective that he curated in close collaboration with Festival director, Aephie Chen for the Taiwan Film Festival UK. This includes a selection of his fiction feature-length films and shorts showing at the Tate Modern’s Starr Cinema from 5 – 7 April and Tsai will participate in post-screening Q&As, as well as lead a filmmaking masterclass at the Tate. This is a rare opportunity to hear him in conversation as Tsai has not been to the UK for over a decade.

The VR cinema is in partnership with Art Cinema and sponsored by HTC Vive Arts and MSI, the Festival’s virtual reality partners. The UK premiere of The Deserted will be shown in 8K resolution, which is a significant improvement on the 4K resolution of the original world premiere at the 2017 Venice Film Festival.

Director Tsai Ming-Liang collaborated with Taiwanese architect Rain Wu to create the cinema, incorporating visual clues from the The Deserted’s film set – a rural ruin with lush tropical nature visible through the wall punctures. High performance gaming computers from MSI and HTC’s groundbreaking VR Theatre Management System will be used to create a synchronised, immersive cinema experience where 20 people can watch the film at the same time. This technology has influenced the design of the physical space which resembles the lobby of a cinema, typically seen as a waiting space. It represents the area in between constant reality (the outside world) and a temporal reality (the cinema screen), a Purgatory space between the living and the dead of the film.

“Art Cinema is thrilled to work with Taiwan Film Festival and help stage the UK premiere of The Deserted by the highly-acclaimed Director Tsai Ming-Liang. This installation aims to bring the most thrilling experience to an array of audiences ranging from Film d’Auteurs lovers all the way to the most savvy explorers of virtual reality realms. Such encounters establish what 21st-century paradigms of art display and engagement are all about.”
Art Cinema founder, Myriam Blundell Phillips

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Art Cinema and Marquee TV are proud to announce the digital release of War Work: Eight Songs with Film, Michael Nyman’s creation commemorating the centenary of the First World War. A total artwork, it combines various visual, poetic and musical archives.

Eight songs form a song cycle inspired by the Belgian Gaston de Ruyter’s Chansons Vieilles sur d’Autres Airs (old songs to other tunes). Poems written by poets who all died during the war, except David Bomberg, are set to music based on emblematic tunes by Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, Chopin and others.

Without a voice-over, War Work reveals the potency of images from German and French First World War film archives which have rarely been seen. The film element, edited by Max Pugh, unearths the bodies of war – mutilated and disfigured soldiers – which have too often been forgotten. War Work does not show the slaughter but the effects of war and its memory: the psychological trauma and the physical wounds caused by a humanitarian disaster after which nothing would be the same again.

“It’s a film without any dialogue, commentary or interviews, and it is basically raw visual material and raw sound material. It’s a thrilling way of making a film and a thrilling way of using images with intelligence. 

“This kind of stream of consciousness approach of being a quasi-documentary maker I think has been the most thrilling film project I’ve ever been involved with, and now I have a real appetite for taking this approach and making other films with available documentation.” Michael Nyman 2018

Digital release: Marquee TV, December 15th 2018

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Myriam Blundell Phillips the founder and manager director of Art Cinema. Her experience encompasses content development, curatorial advisory and talent management.  Since 2004, Ms Blundell Phillips has provided both commercial and creative guidance to an eclectic pool of artists, including internationally acclaimed British composer Michael Nyman for whom she acted as global manager and producer; Belgian artist, writer and theatre director Jan Fabre; British filmmaker Martha Fiennes, Canadian artist and filmmaker Jody Shapiro, and German conceptual artist Roland Biermann.

Since 2011, Ms Blundell Phillips produced and released two art house documentaries entitled: NYman with a Movie Camera and “War Work”. Her previous non-executive achievements include leading the Friends of Signy and Olaf Willums Foundation in Aix-en-Provence, sitting as the founding chair of the international collectors forum as well as joining the board of trustees the Contemporary Art Society in London.
myriam@artcinema.art

Dominique Païni is the former head of the Cinémathèque Française and director of multidisciplinary projects and Film at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He brings an extensive and wealth of knowledge of curating the intersection between visual arts and film. His expérience as a seasoned essay writer and publisher is a huge contribution to Art Cinema’s focus on producing the highest standards possibly achievable in the fields of writings and Publishing. Dominique Païni’s latest exhibition Godard- Picasso : Collages is currently on display at the Festival des rencontres Photogrpahique d’Arles until September 23rd 2018.
dominique@artcinema.art

Jan Stephan Hillebrand is a strategic advisor, film and theatre producer and marketing specialist. His strength lies in bringing together experts and artists with widely different talents and channelling their capabilities in order to produce compelling artistic content. He has advised a number of high profile corporations to support their mission statements through the promotion of the Arts. He has staged more than 250 business and arts events and has written, designed and produced more than 50 screen plays.
jan@artcinema.art

Alix Agret is an art historian. She holds a MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a PhD in Fine Arts from the Royal College of Art. Visual culture, representations of the body and eroticism were at the core of the MA in History and the MA in Film Studies she earned in France (Paris-Sorbonne University and Paris West University Nanterre la Défense). She has worked as an assistant curator on several exhibitions in France. She regularly writes articles for art magazines.
alix@artcinema.art

Elif Karlidag has a background in composition and music business with a classical music education in piano, composition and conducting. She has worked as a performer and she also has experience working with artists, musicians and establishments, planning, project managing and curating events. As Arts Cinema’s creative producer she is responsible to work within PR and marketing where she creates, develops and produces content and strategy across all media.
elif@artcinema.art