Volcano Cinema: Of Eruptions and Other Stories, a season showcasing the diverse ways volcanoes have been documented and reimagined through film. Displacing the central role of the disaster movie, the programme approaches volcanoes and their metaphoric power, from different landscapes, cultural mythologies, and with political potency and provocation.

📅7th December, 7.30pm (screening starts at 8pm)

📍St Peter’s Church, Lutton Pl, Edinburgh EH8 9PE

Films:

🌋My Dad and the Volcano

Gavin Reid | 2024 | Scotland | 15 mins | English with captions

Gavin built a giant volcano sculpture that’s now in his dad’s shed. Gavin seeks his dad’s understanding but he’s uninterested in modern art and refuses to participate in the documentary.

🌋Puede una montaña recordar / Can A Mountain Recall?

Delfina Carlota Vázquez | 2021 | México/Argentina | 20mins | Spanish with English subtitles

The diary of a period lived in Mexico and a portrait of Popocatepetl, an active volcano. During the conquest, the Mexican revolution, the uprising of the EZLN and today the feminist outbreak.

🌋Dark Paradise: Humans in Galápagos

Paul Rosero Contreras | 2016-19 | Ecuador | 18mins | Spanish with English subtitles

Contreras’s project investigates the first settlements in the archipelago as a paradigmatic social experiment. Dark Paradise brings together historical archeology and mythological narrative to develop a metaphor about resilient underwater species and their seemingly paradisiacal appearance.

🌋Montañas ardientes que vomitan fuego / Burning Mountains That Spew Flame

Helena Girón & Samuel M. Delgado | 2016 | Spain | 14 mins | Spanish with English subtitles

A mysterious voyage down into the depths of one of the longest volcanic tunnels in Europe in order to excavate an idiosyncratic history of resistance.

🌋Pompeia

Maria Castan de Manuel | 2022 | Spain | 10’

A young just-married couple enjoys their honeymoon in a Mediterranean paradise. Around them, the atmosphere keeps changing.

About the programme

Volcanoes have persistently ignited the imagination and have been construed filmically since cinema’s beginnings. In 1902, Georges Méliès recreated an eruption in the actuality film Éruption volcanique à la Martinique, a 1-minute simulation of Mount Pelée built from cardboard and flashing lights. A recent cycle of theatrical releases, including Into the Inferno (Werner Herzog, 2016) and Fire of Love (Sara Dosa, 2022), exploring volcanoes, their enthusiasts, and audiovisual traces invites us to contemplate them anew.

This season of films initiates a reflection on the relationship between humans and volcanoes, their agency, and resistant ways of envisaging their power and eruptive activity. The programme features highly metaphoric and figurative explorations to explicit engagements with the scientific, political, and territorial discourses of living within a volcano’s reach.

This series of events takes place in Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh, between the 25th of November and 7th of December 2024. The season is a collaboration between CinemaAttic and the “Ixchel” project, sponsored by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and hosted at University of Edinburgh.

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Each screening will feature a trailer for the upcoming feature film Cordillera, co-produced by the Ixchel project, in collaboration with the Guatemalan production company La Casa de Producción, and director Jayro Bustamante.

This screening will be accompanied by delicious food from SABOR AL TOQUE, a Colombian family business.

Accessibility:
SDH captions
English subtitles
Wheelchair accessible