‘Premiere: Where Is Rocky II? - Pierre Bismuth’

For his first feature-length film, the artist Pierre Bismuth hired a private detective and three Hollywood scriptwriters to look for ‘Rocky II’, a strange fake rock hidden in the Mojave Desert. Behind this name, borrowed from Sylvester Stallone’s film, lurks a mysterious object created forty years ago by the American artist Ed Ruscha and which, despite the artist’s international fame, has managed to remain completely undiscovered for all those years. A unique film in its genre, Where Is Rocky II? draws on America’s cultural history and Hollywood mythology with humour. Between popcorn movie and documentary reality, the quest for Rocky II is first and foremost a pretext to get audiences thinking about how we project our imagination.
 
The visual artist, scriptwriter and director, Pierre Bismuth (France, 1963) lives and works in Brussels. He is interested in processes and protocols as vital expressions of human activity and his work covers diverse fields of knowledge and has featured in numerous international exhibitions in institutions such as the Vienna Kunsthalle, the New Museum (New York) and the Pompidou Centre (Paris). In 2005, Pierre Bismuth, Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) was awarded the Oscar for best screenplay.