The Middle East, unrecognised countries, radioactive or forbidden zones seen as “unintentional natural parks” are all territories that Louis-Cyprien Rials has explored or inhabited. From these zones marked by violence or whipped up by great conflicts, the artist delivers a silent, sometimes mystical image, using video and photography. His moving pictures made up of still shots, which are often long and devoid of human presence, talk of the impossibility to grasp such abandoned, transformed spaces, filled with beliefs and run through with stigmata.

Louis-Cyprien Rials is presenting at the Palais de Tokyo a film and a series of objects made with Ramon Film Productions. This production company, set up by Isaac Nabwana I.G.G., brings together Ugandans from various origins in a studio not far from the Wakaliga road, in a ghetto in the suburbs of Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Together, they have been writing and producing successful, low-budget films for over ten years. Their feature-length movies are inspired from Chinese Kungfu films and convey the violence of American action movies.

With Louis-Cyprien Rials, they produce an adaptation of Rashomon (1950) by the famous Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. The result is hybrid: it mingles filmic and cultural references, while leaving open the reality of Ugandan ghettos while, via a fiction, narrating how viewpoints and truths can be varied.