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L'eau de Vie, un film de Jean-Luc Godard

Bruce High Quality Foundation

Video

b&w super-8 transferred to DVD
74 minutes
Provenance: Gift of the artists, via Filip Noterdaeme
Acquired: 2007

Description

Shot on location in Miami, Florida during the 2005 Art Basel tradeshow, L’eau De Vie is the story of one woman (Aurora Pellizzi) and an international art fair. A bellicose actor (Karim El-Tanamli), hot on the trail of a painting he has never seen, brings his arm-candy girlfriend Aurora along for a weekend trip to Art Basel Miami. While the actor and a bumbling art consultant (Nelson Figallo) pursue the elusive painting “L’eau De Vie”, Aurora meets a homegrown revolutionary (Tonatiuh Pellizzi) determined to provoke a local uprising against the flood of cultural tourists. Aurora also meets a disenchanted French artist (Jeanne Detallante) showing at the fair in the midst of an existential crisis over her own relationship to the art world. Caught in the middle of this maelstrom, Aurora erupts in violence. Meanwhile, camera-wielding Native American Terrorists battle literary and filmic allusions against a tropical skyline filled with hurricane rubble and condominium development, art tourism and home-grown radicality.

A period piece set somewhere between May 68 and Contemporary gentrified Miami, and shot entirely on sound-synched black and white super 8, this fake-scathing Marxist critique mocks the contemporary commercial art world and the notion of artistic revolution at the same time.

Screenplay & Direction by the Bruce High Quality Foundation

Produced by Tom Healy, Vito Schnabel, Jan and John Leary, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation

Starring Aurora Pellizzi, Tonatiuh Pellizzi, Jeanne Detallante, Karim el-Tanamli

With Nelson Figallo, Lola Montes, Sascha Braunig, Danielle Frazier, Dave Karlin, Fiyel Levent, Nick Gaetano