KG

Director: Cynthia Madansky
Performer: Kleoni Manousakis
Music: Zeena Parkins
8 mm ◊ 10 min.

“Each day I learned to reject what I believed in yesterday” — Katerina Gogou

Born during the second World War, Katerina Gogou was an anarchist poet and actress whose lifelong commitment to politics and the rights of prisoners was cut short by her untimely death at age 53. In KG, Madansky adapts Gogou’s bold, piercing descriptions of violence taken from her collection Τρία κλικ αριστερά — translated as "Three Clicks Left" in English — with words from the poems structuring the movements of performance artist Kleoni Manousakis through Athens. Shot in Super 8mm, the film is equally hazy and harsh, appropriate for a film set in a city that is at once ancient and contemporary. The Athens we see is one whose walls are plastered with political posters, and whose streets host rallies, but whose ancient architecture suggests a sort of sombre permeance. The result is a quietly weighty rumination on antiquity, performance, and political engagement.

Part of the Feminist Writers Series, an ongoing suite of films, inspired by the words of radical international feminists. Ranging from canonized to little-known figures, and unbeholden by genre, the films cite and respond to works of poetry, novels, theatre, theory, political writing, and other nonfiction.