MALAURY ELOI PAISLEY AT KINO ARSENAL

01.07.2026 - 02.07.2026
With Malaury Eloi Paisley

Filmmaker and visual artist Malaury Eloi Paisley (Fellow 2026) from Guadeloupe gives an introduction to her work via two films which connect the body with urban space and convey both loneliness and pain as well as beauty and poetry: her feature-length documentary debut L’homme-vertige: Tales of a City, (2024) and The River (1997) by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang.

Wednesday, 01.07., 8:00 pm
L’homme-vertige: Tales of a City, Malaury Eloi Paisley / France 2024
93 min. / Original version with English subtitles (Original language: French, Guadeloupean Creole)

Decay, neglect and destruction as far as the eye can see: Pointe-à-Pitre, the largest city in the small Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, is in a state of disrepair. The diggers belonging to the demolition firm ‘Avenir Déconstruction’ are tearing down blocks of flats that no longer have one important thing: a future. The filmmaker spent six years drifting through her lethargic hometown to present it to us as a city of ghosts captured in precisely composed images and heightened by the sound design. In its empty streets, she encounters people teetering on the brink of the abyss, yet refusing to admit defeat, including former freedom fighter Ti Chal, drug addict Eddie and the fish scaler Kanpèch. And the poet Eric, who recites texts by Joël Beuze and Amílcar Cabral. She engages with them with great empathy, revealing their wounds and their daily struggle for survival – and thus ensures that their memory is preserved through this film.

Followed by a discussion with Malaury Eloi Paisley, moderated by Birgit Kohler
Tickets

Thursday, 02.07., 8:00 pm
The River, Tsai Ming-liang  /  Taiwan 1997
115 min. / DCP / Original version with English Subtitles (Original language: Mandarin)

So uncommunicative that it feels like afundamental state, Hsiao-Kang lives under the same roof as his parents, who are strangers to one another. He frequently has sex with casual acquaintances. His mother is having an affair, while his father spends his free time seeking anonymous sex in Taipei’s gay saunas. He is also busy trying to plug an unstoppable water leak in the flat. After Hsiao-Kang plays the part of a drowned body as an extra on a film set, he feels an inexplicable, stabbing pain in his neck and sets off with his father in search of a miracle healer. A visually stunning, tragically beautiful and unsettling portrait of deep isolation within a family.

Introduction (in English): Malaury Eloi Paisley
Tickets

Kino Arsenal, Plantagenstr. 30, 13347 Berlin