The Light & Shadow Salon

HOW TO RE-ESTABLISH A VODKA EMPIRE

Doors open at 7:30pm, programme begins at 8pm sharp

(£5 entry on the door)

Dear friends of the Salon,following an inspiring and thought-provoking Salon last month, in which we were all called upon to rekindle our own idiosyncratic thoughts, nurture our radical, independent and uncompromising visions and stand up to initiate change, I have the great pleasure to invite you all this month to a special screening of a fantastic film that, in both content and production, embodies all of these concerns. "HOW TO RE-ESTABLISH A VODKA EMPIRE" charts the journey of film director Dan Edelstyn as he tracks down his long-lost Jewish Ukrainian heritage, and then attempts to re-launch his great grandfather’s once glorious vodka empire. The film is a whirlwind journey back in time to the life of the director's grandmother Maroussia Zorokovich - writer, dancer, painter and romantic - and follows her exciting and turbulent journey during the 1917 Russian Revolution, out of Ukraine, across Europe and into exile in Belfast. But it is also a moving and comic account of a modern-day struggle to get a business started in the cutthroat world of the drinks industry. It is a meditation on loss and identity, and a celebration of family and life itself, cleverly disguised as a screwball business adventure. For more information about the film and the production (a truly inspiring roller-coaster journey!), visit http://www.myvodkaempire.com/

The night will also feature two new short films, freshly baked by the same team.

I hope you can all come and join this journey, be inspired by it and share your thoughts with us.

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The Light & Shadow Salon is a place for artists, writers and audience to meet and share ideas about the past, present and future of the moving image in all its forms. The Salon is a place for exchange, interaction and cross-pollination and it welcomes active contributions and interventions from all its participants. The Salon endeavours to support a structured and informed dialogue around film, the moving image and all that it involves: from magic to science, from sound to the eye, from ritualism to storytelling, from myth-making to hypnosis. The Salon intends to act as a temporary and ephemeral container  for all the work, ideas and people with an independent, radical and idiosyncratic nature, who renounce to find a home in existing movements/institutions but rather embrace the nomadic and transitory nature of art. The Salon supports individual thought, inquisitive minds and a desire to further knowledge through dialogue and exchange.

‘So when you hear yourself invited to ‘see’, it is not the sight of this eye (of the flesh) that I would have you think about. You have another eye within, much clearer that that one, an eye that looks at the past, the present, and the future all at once, which sheds the light and keenness of its vision over all things, which penetrates things hidden and searches into complexities, needing no other light by which to see all this, but seeing by the light that it possesses itself.’ (Hugh of St Victor)