Revolution’s A Lie

REVOLUTION’S A LIE follows Ele, a middle-aged actress navigating the precarious distance between artistic drive and economic survival in New York City. We first find her in an acting class, leading students through a dialogue that seems innocuous — until its words begin to unsettle the room in ways no one anticipated. After class, she rushes to a downtown gallery for a film screening about to begin.

What she watches stops her: a reenactment of the opening scene from Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko, transplanted from medieval Japan to the Colombian countryside. As the violence unfolds across the projected images, the boundary between observer and participant begins to dissolve. Ele’s whispered commentary — half reflection, half confession — reveals how deeply the images reach her.

The film holds these two registers together: Ele’s fragmented daily life and the brutal, mythic world on screen. What emerges is a question the film doesn’t answer — whether art can transform collective memory and historical pain, or whether it only continues them in new forms.

Technical Information

28 minutes long
2K color video
Stereo

Supported by

Revolution’s A Lie was made thanks to the timely support of the:

– Foundation for Contemporary Art, New York, USA
– Headlands Center for The Arts, USA
– MacDowell Colony, USA