The Chaire AMidex ANFAA and IDEAS (CNRS/AMU) are honored to welcome Japanese filmmaker-anthropologist-poet Itsushi Kawase, professor at the National Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU) in Osaka.
Thursday December 11 at 2pm at the MMSH in Aix for a presentation (in English) entitled:
Cine Improvisation: Orchestrating Lived and Relational Forces Before the Lens
For over twenty-five years, filmmaker and poet Itsushi Kawase has been roaming the backstreets of Addis Ababa and Gondar, Ethiopia. There, he listens to and films the voices of the seldom-heard: the azmari, poets and troubadours, but also beggars, the possessed, rogues and madmen - figures of mischievous wisdom and poetic survival. Through her films, writings and readings, Kawase explores these marginal spaces of creation, places of distance and resistance, fragile but stubbornly alive.
and on Friday December 12, he will take part in an afternoon of Ethiopian cine-poetry organized in partnership with Eloi Ficquet (EHESS/Cercles) and the CIPM from 2 to 6 pm at Cinéma le Miroir in La Vieille Charité, Marseille.
Ethiopia, urban margins in creation
Program
- Opening film: Azmari, the Fest of Voices (2023), by Itsushi Kawase
A film about Ethiopian azmari - singers, storytellers and commentators on social life. Somewhere between documentary
Between documentary, poetry and ethnography, a reflection on the future of these marginal societies, where creation merges with survival.
- Mirror film: Sami's Odyssey (2022), by Robin Dimet
Sami, an Ethiopian poet, translates Greek mythology into Amharic, wandering through a rapidly changing Addis Ababa. Between myth and modernity, a poetic drift where Homer meets bulldozers.
- Cross-reading: "Mischief of the Gods
Itsushi Kawase will read extracts from his book, in Japanese, accompanied by a French translation.
Published in Japan under the title ストリートの精霊たち (The Spirits of the Street), and known in Amharic as የፒያሳ ቆሌዎች (Ye Piassa Qolēwoch - The Spirits of Piassa), this work evokes the deities, demons and marginal figures who haunt the old quarters of Addis Ababa and Gondar - spaces now threatened with destruction, but where a dense, supportive and inventive social life survives. Under his pen, these portraits of wandering souls become the vibrant theater of a mischievous and tenacious humanity.
- "Cantique de la nuit" by Bewketu Seyoum
Bilingual reading (Amharic / French) of the collection translated by Alain Sancerni (ed. Dumerchez, 2020). Night, language and the city: when poetry becomes refuge.
- Closing film: Mugut: The Wheels of Democracy (2025), by Tesfahun Haddis and Mitiku G. Tesfaye.
Doctoral students and filmmakers, Tesfahun Haddis and Mitiku G. Tesfaye observe, from Great Britain, the deliberations of the city council of Sheffield (Great Britain) around an old café threatened with destruction. An Ethiopian view of Europe, a mirror turned upside down, replaying the tensions between memory, space and democracy.
Between films and readings, a meeting to cross views, languages and rhythms of the world. An invitation to think about urban creation from its margins. Where poets become passers-by, and mischievous spirits invite themselves into reality.
Both events are free to attend.
