PORTALS CINEMA FORUM: The Pearl Button

Portals is an experiment in curating, distributing and, above all, exhibiting international arthouse, non-english language, and independent world cinema for African audiences. Following a lineage of cinema as witness and imagination through resistance, we welcome you to our first edition in Joburg, a port without a sea. People arrive here carrying everything they have. We invite you to gather with us, as a way of crossing borders, encountering other lives, and thinking about power across past, present, and future through film.

Booking: Purchase a "R20 Cafe Voucher" to reserve your seat for this screening. This will get you R20 off your Bioscope Cafe bill on this day.

The Pearl Button

The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds the voices of the Earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water forms the longest border in Chile and the ocean holds the secret of a mysterious button discovered on its seabed.

Chile, with the largest archipelago in the world, is a supernatural landscape of volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. In it are the voices of the Patagonian Indigenous peoples, of the first English sailors and of its political prisoners. Some say that water has memory. This film shows that it also has a voice. Guzmán listens to what history tried to erase and gathers what has been overlooked into something whole, a mirror for a more just world.

Patient, poetic and political, carrying the long memory of colonial violence across a border that is also an ocean. Following a sonic lecture on the hidden archives of Johannesburg’s music, it asks what we hear when we listen to the past, and whom we owe that listening to.