Bob Quinn, The Atlantean Quartet (Episode One), IRE, 1981, 56′

In Bob Quinn’s trilogy The Atlantean, Celtic mythology is revisited from the humorous and provocative hypothesis that the Irish descend from Arab sailors from North Africa. He deconstructs the Eurocentric hegemonic worldview by examining the role that North African cultures have played in shaping Irish culture. He questions Irish nationality and refutes the idea that the Irish are exclusively Celtic. In Quinn’s research, a rich tapestry of ethnicities that have shaped the identity of the island over the centuries passes by.

Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, One Hundred Steps, IRE/FR, 2021, 32′

One Hundred Steps is a collaboration with around 20 musicians and dancers from Ireland, France, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. The film tells the story through two separate and seemingly mirrored chapters. The first takes place in a sumptuous 17th-century Anglo-Irish colonial mansion of the landlord class, located in the south of Ireland, and the latter in a 19th-century stately mansion built by a bourgeois French family, located in the center of Marseille. Both houses carry the weighty atmosphere of their privileged history in their architecture and decor – a history now preserved and, as both have become museums, open to the public.

One Hundred Steps unfolds through a hybrid language between documentary and fiction. Here, museum visitors transform into performers, with musical contributions serving as ephemeral occupations of these charged environments, denying a simplified binary relationship between source and extrapolation, or European and Other, and reversing the power dynamics of who tells the story and who must listen.

Bob Quinn’s The Atlantean was a direct reference in the making of One Hundred Steps. It is the first time both films will be shown side by side.