An evening around the new fabel-documentary, The Shadow Workers, by Annelein Pompe with films by Chantal Akerman, the British experimental filmmaker Guy Sherwin and the touching, very last film of animal filmer and surrealist Jean Painlevé, but also early cinema by William K. Dickson and Segundo de Chomón.
In Ghent, a Dutch Good-for-nothing works in a honey store. She would have liked to live the life of an artist, but that fate is not hers. After all, you have to eat and pay the rent. The Dutch Good-for-nothing has a friend across the street, Usman, a Pakistani poet and pigeon lover. At night, when the people and pigeons are asleep, Usman works in his night store. There is also Clara (Clara Spilliaert), who lives in the Dutch Good-for-nothing’s dream, and the two all-knowing experts, Geert and Francesco. Geert photographs the eyes of pigeons and Francesco whispers in their ears. In The Shadow Workers, this whole story is told by a pigeon who listens to the name Lukaku. Lukaku may be a scatterbrain and never have been able to fly, but he knows a lot about these hidden workers also called artists.
“I’m looking forward to see the film finally coming home!” – Annelein Pompe
Annelein Pompe (1988) used to work as a projectionist at Art Cinema OFFoff, where she showed some of her earlier work and was part of our Moving Word series (2015−2019). She makes documentaries, writes poetry and prose and paints fictitious bird portraits. She lived and worked in Ghent, but moved to Brussels. There, she participated in the Sound Image Culture (SIC) program, a nomadic workplace for film and anthropology. She graduated from the Image & Language departement at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.
With a short foreword by the producer, Dany Deprez
In the presence of the cast & crew
Followed by a Q&A
Here you can read Luik, Ruit, Duif. Over Annelein Pompe’s De Schaduwwerkers [in Dutch] by Martijn Wallage.
