Henri Matisse's artwork will never look the same, and it's all Barbara Hammer's fault! In Resisting Paradise, the 2000 Frameline Award recipient takes art out of the galleries and museums and into our conscience.

While Hammer was an artist-in-residence in South­ ern France, she wanted to explore abstraction in the same way that Matisse and Pierre Bonnard had. But when the fighting in Kosovo erupted, she felt called upon to make a very different film, asking whether art can exist during political crisis and war.

The resulting documentary contrasts the lives of Matisse and Bonnard duringWWII with those oftwo French Resistance fighters. Lisa Fittko describes how, during the war, she led philosopher Walter Benjamin over the Pyrenees and into Spain. Marie-Ange Allibert Rodriguez reveals how she doctored the documents of hundreds of Jews, at the risk of her own life. We also discover that, while Matisse was in his studio painting, his wife and daughter joined the Resistance and were captured and tortured by the Nazis. Hammer's manipulation of the film reminds us that, just as art must always find new forms and styles, so history itself needs to be constantly reviewed in order to rediscover new truths.