Opening of the series “Xcèntric screens Metamorphosis”

Premiere of their most recent film, Unmistaken Hands: Ex Voto F.H., and presentation of materials rarely shown in public, in a talk with the filmmakers. The session also includes one of their foremost titles, In Absentia. The marginal, footnotes and lower case are doors to other worlds for the Brothers Quay. Emma Hauk spent the last eleven years of her life in the German sanatorium of Wiesloch. There, she compulsively wrote letters to her dead husband, repeating the same phrase over and over: “Sweetheart, come.” The Quay twins dedicate In Absentia to Emma Hauk in an extraordinary collaboration with the musician Karlheinz Stockhausen. In Unmistaken Hands: Ex Voto F.H., the departure point, as on so many occasions, is literature, in this case the universe of Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández, recognised as an influence by writers of the calibre of Gabriel García Márquez. Sanatorium is the title of the project of their next full-length film; we present a preview here.

• In Absentia, 2000, 35 mm, 19 min
• Sanatorium (work in progress), video, 8 min
• How Strange My Lover Was, video, 12 min
• Unmistaken Hands: Ex Voto F.H., 2013, video, 26 min.