Shangri-La, Paradise Under Construction, is screened as part of the Film Club during Mirka Duijn and Nina Spierings ongoing exhibition Paradise Pt. II at Röda Sten Konsthall. The screening is followed by a conversation between Mirka Duijn and Nina Mangalanayagam on archive, moving image, and film within the exhibition context.
Title: Shangri-La, Paradise Under Construction.
Duration; 96 minutes.
Director: Mirka Duijn and Nina Spiering.
In this film, Mirka Duijn traces the history of Shangri-La, the famous imaginary paradise from the novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton 1933. Two decades ago Deqin, a Tibetan region in China, uncovered evidence proving that it was the original Shangri-La of legend. This is quite impossible because Shangri-La is a fiction.
Her curiosity aroused, the filmmaker travels to the mountains of Tibetan-China with the intention to uncover the truth behind this evidence. But instead of getting answers, the maker gets entangled in a web of facts and fictions, truths and falsities about the place and its colonial past. By picking apart the many strands to this surprisingly rich and complex story, this film trains a critical eye on tourism, media, and even documentary film making itself.
The subsequent conversation takes its point of departure in the film’s engagement with archives and examines the moving image as an artistic and spatial medium in relation to an exhibition and gallery context. Through a series of reflections and “interventions”, a discussion is developed around how film can be activated and interpreted within a contemporary art institution.
