FILM

Sedition Books and SKYDIVE ART SPACE present a Screening Of Thomas Harlan’s Torre Bela (1977), a documentary of a group of workers that take over of a privately owned estate to start a collective farm. Presented by Jose Filipe Costa in collaboration with SKYDIVE ART SPACE and SEDITION BOOKSTORE In conjunction with EXHIBITION OF PROPOSALS FOR A SOCIALIST COLONY  on view at the Eldorado Building at PROJECT ROW HOUSES from March 27 – May 22, 2010

Jose Filipe Costa is an artist and filmmaker living and working in Lisbon, Portugal. He is visiting Houston to take part in Exhibition of Proposals for a Socialist Colony at Skydive. For the past year he has been working on filming and interviewing the participants of theTorre Bela Cooperative. Tonight we will screen the original and famous documentary Torre Bela.

A few years after the Carnation Revolution, that ended the longest running dictatorship in Europe, the populations from a group of villages in central Portugal, proceed to the neighboring Torre Bela, the largest walled manor in the country. Their leader is the charismatic Wilson, a young man of 25, just out of prison for robbing a bank. Motivated by the country's political context, the people demand that the owner, the Duke of Lafões, descendant of the Portuguese royal family, provide them with jobs. The Duke refuses, and soon the crowd longs for not only jobs, but also the ownership of the land and the "palace", where the aristocrat's family resides.

The plan is to transform the Torre Bela into an agricultural cooperative, with no single owner, in which everyone earns the same salary, both men and women, with a day care centre and a cultural centre. The first movements of the occupation are filmed by Thomas Harlan's crew, recently arrived from Chile. Harlan, the son of Veit Harlan (the director of the Nazi propaganda film Jew Suss, 1940), had contacted in his childhood with Goebbels and Hitler, and had traveled and contacted with the left wing movements of the 60's and 70's. When arriving at the Torre Bela, Harlan only intended to capture the events to show them in other neighboring cooperatives, but he ended up making a film that premiered in the Cannes Film Festival in 1977.