Closing Program: Let Each One Go Where He May April 4, 2011 6PM Johns Hopkins University, Hobson Hall, Room 110 Screening presented in conjunction with the exhibition, Where Do We Migrate To? About Let Each One Go Where He May Ben Russell 2009, 16mm, 135 minutes, United States Let Each One Go Where He May is the debut feature of Chicago-based artist Ben Russell. A portrait of two Saramaccaner Maroon brothers, the film captures their journey from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname across different rural landscapes, as they trace the route their ancestors had undertaken 300 years earlier as slaves, escaping their Dutch masters. Employing a carefully choreographed formal visual language (masterfully comprised of 13 ten-minute-long single shots), the work questions our understanding of the historical, political, and personal meanings of this trajectory, while implicitly addressing issues of ethnographic, documentary, and (self-)representation. About Where Do We Migrate To? This film program, curated by Sonja Simonyi and presented in partnership with the Film and Media Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University, presents a series of audiovisual materials, feature length fiction films, documentaries, as well as experimental videos. The selected films demonstrate the diverging ways in which networks of migration, experiences of displacement, and questions of belonging and rootlessness have been addressed by artist and filmmakers in recent years. While a selection of films engage with migratory practices as central to our understanding of the present-day self in increasingly globalized and multicultural settings, other works investigate the complex historical processes that frame these contemporary conditions. The program thus provides a rich sampling of ways in which the ongoing circulation of people across regions, nations and continents, is addressed and questioned from multiple political, social, cultural and historical perspectives in film and video art.
