« The 1002^nd night » is a series of screenings and meetings with artists conceived in connection with the exhibition Scheherazade, at night. The first session brings together the films Nosferasta: First bite (2021) by Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer and La Cellule (2020) by Samir Ramdani. From a group of children with strange powers taking control after a devastating pandemic to Christopher Columbus becoming a vampire crossing time to bring his new colonial world to fruition, these two films play with the codes of genre cinema with a jubilant formal and narrative inventiveness. Echoing recent events, their “récits infectés” address the relationships of domination, inequality and systemic racism in our society by proposing new ways of writing History.

The screenings will be followed by a discussion between the directors Adam Khalil and Samir Ramdani and Yoann Gourmel, curator of the exhibition Scheherazade, at night.

Spanning 500 years of colonial destruction, Nosferasta tells the story of Oba, a Rastafarian vampire, and Christopher Columbus, Oba’s original biter, as they spread the colonial infection throughout the “new world”. Formally a vampire film and series of installations, the stylistically impressionistic Nosferasta examines the guilt of being complicit in imperial conquest, while also acknowledging the difficulty of unlearning centuries of vampiric conditioning. At its core Nosferasta asks, how can you decolonize what’s in your blood?

33 minutes long

Today, it’s the apocalypse. And it’s at Charles Peguy high school that the future of the world is being decided: a group of children with strange powers are taking matters into their own hands.

50 minutes long