Event: 'MA: Oliver Laxe, You Are All Captains' Print
  Greater Boston
Events taking place in the Boston area.
Date: Monday, November 14, 2011 At 07:00 pm

Location: Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

Description: You All Are Captains begins as a fairly straightforward film about filmmaking, following Laxe as he tries to shepherd his young students through the process of shooting a movie. But the film quickly establishes a mise-en-abyme wherein it becomes genuinely difficult to tell what is real and what is fiction. Laxe presents himself as well-intentioned but cynical, willing to play the paternalistic European to get the shots he wants. Meanwhile, the film raises serious questions about colonial relations and filmmaking, beginning with an early sequence in which the boys train their cameras on a group of European tourists. Thus from a deceptively simple premise springs a barbed allegory about power relations not just on either side of the camera but geopolitically. The result is something of a game of mirrors with the happy outcome of encouraging viewers to see cinema with the entirely new eyes of these children.