Breda Beban

Title: Walk of the Three Chairs
Directed and produced by Breda Beban
Filmed on location in Belgrade, Serbia
Performers: ‘Jova’ Band, Breda Beban
Music: traditional Balkan song ‘Who Does Not Know How To Suffer Does Not Know How to Love’
Camera: Robby Muller
Editing: Steve Sprung
Sound: Dejan Pejovic
Duration: 10:00 loop
Format: original format Super 16
Language: Serbian
Production date: 2003
Commissioned by: Film & Video Umbrella / John Hansard Gallery. Supported by the National Touring Programme of Arts Council England.

Walk of the Three chairs

Walk of the Three Chairs revels in the joyous, uplifting sense of self-affirmation that love can instill. This atmospheric 10-minute film (shot by the renowned cinematographer Robby Muller) follows Beban as she drifts down the Danube on the outskirts of Belgrade on a boat which she shares with a small gypsy band. Walk of the Three Chairs records Beban performing the ritual action of its title ­ a traditional Slavic rite of celebration whereby the person honoured walks an exuberant if precarious passage, in which the chair behind them is continually carried to the front of them so that their feet never touch the ground. As she does so, Beban and the band break out into an equally well-known folk song. Accentuating the highs and lows of love¹s emotional odyssey, while linking the airborne exhilaration of Walk of the Three Chairs to the underlying traumas of its partner work I Can’t Make You Love Me. The name of the song is particularly trenchant: ‘Who Does Not Know How to Suffer Does Not Know How to Love’.

www.fvu.co.uk/projects/detail/commissions/i-cant-make-you-love-me
www.apengine.org/2010/10/breda-beban-talks-to-apengines-gary-thomas/

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