March 20, 2025 at 7:00 PM
e-flux Screening Room
Economies of Love. Part 1: Virtual Desires
172 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205
Tickets
e-flux Screening Room presents a screening of A Short Film About Love (1988, 86 minutes) by Krzysztof Kieślowski, and First (2019, 11 min) by Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew.
Urban spaces shape one’s body language, virtual connection brings people into proximity without collapsing distances, and longing takes new forms—unspoken, deferred, and refracted through various optics. If modern love is no longer an immediate event, as Alain Badiou once argued, what new forms of intimacy emerge when the distance between bodies becomes the defining structure of desire?
This screening inaugurates Economies of Love, a series that examines how love is shaped by labor, technology, and power—structured by economies of care and exchange, mediated through digital and urban infrastructures, and regulated by shifting social and political contexts—while also being a force for subversion and transformation within these very structures.
Krzysztof Kieślowski, A Short Film About Love (1988, 86 minutes): Tomek, a 19-year-old postal worker, spends his nights watching Magda, an older woman in the apartment across the courtyard. What begins as quiet fascination turns into a confrontation with intimacy, power, and the limits of looking. As their private worlds briefly collide, the film exposes the fragile boundary between distance and connection, desire and surveillance.
Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941–1996) was an influential arthouse film director and screenwriter whose work redefined the possibilities of cinematic storytelling. Emerging from Poland’s documentary tradition, Kieślowski first gained recognition for his incisive explorations of everyday life before transitioning to fiction with films that examined fate, chance, and moral ambiguity. He is known internationally for his television series The Decalogue (1989), and his feature films The Double Life of Véronique (1991) and the Three Colors trilogy (1993–1994). Kieślowski received numerous awards during his career, including the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize (1988), FIPRESCI Prize (1988, 1991), and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury (1991); the Venice Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize (1989), Golden Lion (1993), and OCIC Award (1993); and the Berlin International Film Festival Silver Bear (1994); and has been nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Writing (1995).
Lead Image: Krzysztof Kieślowski, A Short Film About Love (still), 1988.
Photo: Krzysztof Kieślowski portrait by Alberto Terrile, taken at the Venice Film Festival, 1994, Wikipedia
