Stephen Coates wil be discussing the cold war Soviet X-Ray bootleggers at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London on November 12th as part of an event of forbidden culture.
The event is "VHS in Off-World / Film Dubbing as Subversion" with Irina Margareta Nistor
"Between 1984-89 in the apartments of tower blocks in Bucharest, capital of a sequestered communist Romania, thousands of pirated videocassettes of forbidden films from the West were screened illegally. The disorientating foreignness of these technicoloured, ideology-busting films were tempered by the voice of Irina Margareta Nistor, who frequently skirted exposure and arrest by Nicolae Ceausescu's dreaded Securitate whilst defiantly translating and dubbing the films into Romanian. In this unique event, Nistor joins curator/serial digressionist David Ellis for audio-visual essays and a discussion of forbidden culture, incorporating the screening of original VHS material, illustrative slides, plus 'live' dubbing and a Q&A in a homage to this lesser-known heroine of cinema."