HEGEL’S ANGEL at the Collected Voices Film Festival

Did you know there is no word for “you” in the Haitian language, only “we?” Simone Rapisarda Casanova’s masterful Hegel’s Angel, screening this Friday, October 13 at the Logan Center for the Arts as part of the Collected Voices Film Festival, is probably flying under the radar of most Chicago cinephiles but its Midwestern Premiere should be considered a must see for all local movie lovers. The theme of the fifth edition of this invaluable ethnographic film festival, the brainchild of filmmaker and programmer Ife Olatunji, is “Africa and her diaspora,” a concept embodied in Casanova’s experimental, richly lyrical portrait of the denizens of contemporary Haiti and their complex relationship to the outside world.

Hegel’s Angel provocatively combines fiction and non-fiction filmmaking techniques to capture the adventures of a boy named Widley as he traverses the Haitian countryside helping his father at work painting and hanging banners and visiting a local film editor in his leisure time. The editor is in the process of cutting a Haitian-shot film with an anti-“foreign charity” bent that was made by a foreign director who has since mysteriously vanished; and the meta-cinematic way that Casanova (an Italian filmmaker based in Canada) interweaves these two narrative lines adds up to a timely snapshot of a corner of the world that has traditionally been cinematically under-documented.

For more information about this screening of Hegel’s Angel, including ticket and venue info and showtime, please visit the Collected Voices Film Festival’s official website.