On Monday, September 27, NCAC and BFA Department of Visual & Critical Studies at the School of Visual Arts will screen a special not-so-late-night double feature picture show of controversial films Destricted and Ken Park. A discussion with the filmmakers about censorship and its effects on art will take place during the intermission. These films have been banned in countries around the world and are almost impossible to find in the US.
The event will start at 6:30PM and will be at The School of Visual Arts, SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street, New York, 10011.
Banned from the U.S. in 2006, Destricted was produced by an international team of curators including Neville Wakefield, Mel Agace and Andrew Hale. They commissioned some of the world’s most visible and provocative artists and filmmakers to make films exploring the issues around representation and sexuality. The NCAC and SVA will screen shorts by Matthew Barney, Marco Brambilla, Cecily Brown, Marylin Minter, Richard Prince, and Sam Taylor-Wood. The films
highlight controversial issues about the representation of sexuality in art, opening up for debate the question of whether art can be disguised as pornography or whether pornography can be disguised as art
according to the film’s producers.
The second film on the bill is Ken Park, by Larry Clark, director of the controversial and acclaimed film, Kids. Banned in Australia, not even available in the U.S., Ken Park is another extension of Clark’s keen focus in the life of young people.
Exploitative, deliberately provocative pornography? Courageous revelation of the secret life of teens? Calculated sensationalism? Telling it like it is? These are the arguments that will inevitably cause fur to fly anywhere in the vicinity of Ken Park, a sexually explicit slab of teenage ennui.
– Todd McCarthy, Variety
Between the two films, there will be a discussion panel with Andrew Hale (a founder of Destricted), Neville Wakefield (another founder of Destricted and one of the film’s producers), filmmaker Marilyn Minter, and Amy Adler (the Emily Kempin Professor of Law at NYU).
UPDATE: Announcing Documentary Film Director Tony Comstock to join Monday night’s panel discussion.