What Become Living And Dying

A drama centered on an office worker on the verge of retirement who begins to relive both real and imagined memories.

The first narrative feature in seven years by the great Chantal Akerman is this adaptation of Joseph Conrad's debut novel, which concerned a Dutch trader living in Malaysia. Transplanting the story from the 1890s to the 1950s, Akerman has brought the history of an extra half-century of colonialism and foreign intervention to bear on Conrad's tale, a story of cultural conflict, desire, and despair. Having married the adopted Malay daughter of the wealthy Captain Lingard inorder to obtain an inheritance that has failed to materialize, Almayer has become isolated and bitter, trapped in his remote trading post, and investing all his emotional energy in his own beloved daughter, Nina. But, haunted byfeelings of racial and cultural alienation and harboring hatred towards her father, Nina has no intention of providing him with comfort or companionship.

Francisco Goya (1746-1828), deaf and ill, lives the last years of his life in voluntary exile in Bordeaux, a Liberal protesting the oppressive rule of Ferdinand VII. He's living with his much younger wife Leocadia and their daughter Rosario. He continues to paint at night, and in flashbacks stirred by conversations with his daughter, by awful headaches, and by the befuddlement of age, he relives key times in his life, particularly his relationship with the Duchess of Alba, his discovery of how he wanted to paint (insight provided by Velázquez's work), and his lifelong celebration of the imagination. Throughout, his reveries become tableaux of his paintings.

Essays at the intersection of philosophy and architecture explore how we understand and inhabit space.