Events

Eric Baudelaire, Letters to Max at GFF15

27 February 2015
8.30–10pm

Glasgow Film Theatre

Eric Baudelaire, Letters to Max, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.

For me Letters to Max is about dystopia: when you go back to year zero — and that only happens rarely, when there’s a revolution or a civil war — you look towards the future with an utopian eye. 20 years later you’ve had enough historical time pass to realise the dystopia within the utopia. – Eric Baudelaire, 2014

When filmmaker Eric Baudelaire posted a letter to Maxim Gvinjia, Abkhazia’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, he expected it to be returned destination unknown’. To his surprise, he received a phone call from Max. So begins a conversation between them, chronicling the contested state of Abkhazia, which seceded from Georgia during the 1992 – 93 civil war, and whose independence is recognised by few countries. Among recent questions of self-determined statehood, Letters to Max (2014) is a timely meditation on a country’s physical and legal space, and how new nations might be imagined into existence.

Eric Baudelaire was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and now lives and works in Paris. An artist, photographer, writer and filmmaker, recent work includes Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011), and narrative feature The Ugly One (2013).