#anaconda-film

#anaconda-film

The planet's most powerful landscapes rarely announce themselves with trumpet blasts and celeb-drenched opening ceremonies. They are places shaped slowly, by water, wind and ice, and are best understood through patience rather than spectacle.

There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know. It seems very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla as a symbol of all that is violent and fearsome, when in fact, it is a peaceable and gentle creature.

The sad-eyed research scientist might be, as the title suggests, some kind of spy, perhaps working to undermine the U.S.-backed military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. The film's amber light and ample bell-bottoms situate it firmly in the late 1970s, a time of repressive dictatorships and jittery paranoia, triggered by political malfeasance and instability across the world.

Harman Projects, in conjunction with Spoke Art and Deadly Prey Gallery, is pleased to announce an exhibition of hand-painted movie posters from Ghana. The origin of this artistic movement has its roots in the 1980s with the rise of mobile cinemas across the country of Ghana. Promotional posters were created to support these traveling VHS screenings, and were painted on recycled flour sacks by local artists who freely reimagined films through bold colors, exaggerated action, and inventive (and sometimes made-up) visual storytelling.

Despite its lurid poster art, as an ursine rampage film this falls closer to the serious Grizzly Man/Timothy Treadwell end of the scale, rather than the Cocaine Bear one. Based on a freak August 1967 tragedy in which two women were separately mauled to death by grizzlies in Montana's Glacier National Park (described here as a trillion to one occurrence), Burke Doeren's debut grips in tooth'n'claw terms, but is considerably less sure-footed when it comes to people.