5:00pm Part 1: Lisbon
6:30pm Part 2: Angola

Tickets must be reserved for each individual performance.

Artist’s Description: The Angola Project playfully straddles the worlds of performance and film-making as the audience watches a movie being constructed from fragments of film and narrative right before their eyes, only to crumble again into disarray. Based on Jeremy Xido’s true life adventures of trying to make a feature film in Angola, The Angola Project takes us on a dizzying journey through the history of colonial Portugal, the Travelogues of Burton Holmes, the films of Bruce Lee and Jim Kelly, the Detroit race riots/rebellion, Berlin documentary film crews in Africa and the blood-thirsty mechanisms of international film finance. The Angola Project is a funny and moving investigation into global events and the complex unexpected polycultural mash-up identities emerging in the 21st century. (Maria Matos Theater, Lisbon / Tanzfabrik Berlin / Studentski Centar Zagreb / Kaaitheater Brussels / Scene Salzburg / ArtsAdmin London / Impulstanz Vienna)

PART I - Lisbon (2008) In 2008, Jeremy Xido arrives in Lisbon and is immediately mesmerized and bedazzled by the gas lamps that flicker on all over the city each night at sunset. For six weeks straight he wanders around at midnight and slowly a gauzy idea for a film begins to take shape around historical tidbits, horticultural facts, random encounters and a slew of interviews he makes with the vast array of people in a world where things are simply not what they appear to be.

PART II - Angola (2010) As one young woman in Lisbon explains, “Europe is lost, the future is Angola,” and Xido wants to see for himself. So in September 2009 he makes the trip to Angola to travel along the Benguela Railway and write his film script. The world proves to be way more complex and surprising than anything he could have ever imagined. Part 2 of The Angola Project is structured around a constantly evolving pitch for a feature film as the lived complexities of this World are squeezed through the brutal and unforgiving logic of international film finance.

PART III - China (2012) In Development. The false promise of true origins and the slippery notion of authenticity. A parallel journey into Jeremy Xido’s own physical heart and the center of the Yunnan Province, China. A confrontation with issues of mortality, the deadly-unknowable and harrowing half truths at the very heart of any Shangri-la.