30.03.2025
Architecture Through the Eyes of Bêka & Lemoine｜New collection on ARTS.FILM
Image from The Sense of Tuningby Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine
Recipient of the Tribute Award at the 43rd International Festival of Films on Art, Bêka & Lemoine are rare and precious filmmakers: this prolific duo, whose career began in the 2000s, has fashioned, film after film, an inquisitive and deeply attentive body of work. The first thing that’s often said about these artists is that they’re interested in architecture. They are.
But through their lens, architecture never exists in isolation; it takes shape in its interactions, its events, its relationship to the people who live in and through it. Bêka & Lemoine cultivate what might be characterized as an art of restlessness: the character in Selling Dreams, a short film at once riveting and disturbing, sleeps in a new hotel every night; the sick and wounded in Rehab learn to walk again; Big Ears Listen With Feet, The Sense of Tuning, and Tokyo Ride provide opportunities for the European filmmakers to shift their gaze, as these films take place in the streets of Thailand, Mumbai and Beijing respectively; the characters in The Infinite Happiness get lost in elevators and ride their unicycles on an endless path; in A Journey Around The Moon, Bêka & Lemoine set themselves intellectually in motion by seeking out diverse and complex men and women.In the midst of all this curation, Moriyama-San seems to stand out: “He’s spent his whole life in the same place,” as the film prefaces. And yet: we keep seeing this character go up and down stairs, lie down, get up again, open a window. Dreaming.
In motion and in dialogue, between indoors and outdoors, could this not be architecture as seen by Bêka & Lemoine?
Begin the month of April by checking out the first four films of the program, with more to coming weeks!
Architecture Through the Eyes of Bêka & Lemoine (I)
Rehab (from rehab) — Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine : free, starting April 1st
The Sense of Tuning — Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine
Big Ears Listen With Feet — Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine
The Infinite Happiness — Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine
