OPENING NIGHT (2024)
Pre-film Poetry Reading
Hala Alyan
HALA ALYAN is the author of the novel "Salt Houses", winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel "The Arsonists’ City", and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently "The Moon That Turns You Back". Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.
Fertile Memory
Michel Khleifi (99 min)
Prismatic Ground kicks off its fourth edition with the CINEMATEK (Belgian Film Archive) restoration of Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory (1981), a visceral glimpse of everyday life in the occupied West Bank. A reading by poet Hala Alyan will commence the evening, and researcher, writer, and curator Adam HajYahia will appear to contextualize the film. An afterparty co-hosted by DJs Against Apartheid will follow at h0l0. Fertile Memory (Michel Khleifi, 1981, 99 min.) Restored DCP. In Arabic with English Subtitles. The first feature length film to be shot in the West Bank, Fertile Memory is a portrait of two Palestinian women whose individual struggles both define and transcend the dispossession that heavily determines their lives. Romia Farah—the director’s aunt—is a widowed grandmother working in an Israeli garment factory. Her tenacious personality fuels a decades-long legal battle to reclaim her expropriated land, as well as her strict adherence to patriarchal values. Sahar Khalifa is a feminist writer teaching at Birzeit University. She struggles with the double oppression of Israeli occupation and the gendered ostracization and loneliness she experiences after seeking divorce. Fertile Memory marks a distinct shift in Palestinian filmmaking, from a unified revolutionary cinema, to a capacious reflection of Palestinian society and its many individuals, contradictions, and temporalities. — Tiffany Malakooti, Bidoun “It is Khleifi’s achievement to have embodied certain aspects of Palestinian women’s lives in film. He is careful to let the strengths of Farah and Sahar emerge slowly, even if at a pace that risks losing the film the larger audience it deserves. He deliberately disappoints the expectations engendered in us by the commercial film (plot, suspense, drama), in favor of a representational idiom more innovative and – because of its congruence with its anomalous and eccentric material – more authentic.” — Edward Said
WAVE 1:
PROGRAM 1
Blueprint of a Pleasure Machine
Amit Dutta (25 min)
When a detective is recruited to locate a secret in the bylanes of a lost film-city, little does he know that it is after all a set-up; a conspiracy to send him on a mission with no return. —Matra Publications
Amma Ki Katha
Nehal Vyas (21 min)
India—my nation—is being rebuilt. Her foundation is being laid on the imagined land that claims to be the birthplace of my grandmother’s God. In the mythology that she passed down to me during many summer nights, her God was magical, kind, imaginative and democratic—just like my India was supposed to be. But today, through its many retellings and reimaginings, the tale is being used as a political tool to manifest the violent desire of a Hindutva state. This film attempts to remember—as well as dream—a forgotten nation.
Jikele Maweni Ndiyahamba
Advik Beni (3 min)
An essay film that parallels a replicated mining town of Johannesburg in California to the mines in South Africa. It serves as an indicator of how those who profiteered of mining in South Africa, the white population, where able to leave and start a whole new town based on where they came from, whereas those who work the mines, the black population, are still faced with excruciating conditions. This is seen via the archive footage of the Marikana mines massacre of 2012 contrasted over the beautiful voice of Miriam Makeba. —Advik Beni
No Stranger At All
Priya Sen (40 min)
Over the last 2 years in Delhi starting late 2019, I wrote, filmed and recorded, as days and nights turned from collective rage and exuberance to withdrawal and solitude. The search was along the edges of disquiet and premonition, in fragments and intensities, through wandering and not-staying. Perhaps down pathways made from adjacent knots of desire, seeking solace, seeking life. This video / essay has been composed from those notes, recordings, slivers of prayers, non-intended sound, stranger-love, lamentations and extreme longing, in a city that absorbs, mirrors, tears apart, and simultaneously allays both remorse and euphoria. What happens to the energy of attachment when it has no designated place? To the glances, gestures, encounters, collaborations or fantasies that have no canon? ** These incomplete fictions, these false closures and tenuous associations, compose a timeline of the city at an angle through the time of this work. There is a shadowy sense of a protagonist who un-dreams it all; a stranger, who turns out, is no stranger at all. Somewhere I wrote: … so much power, it is difficult to move towards love. —Priya Sen *Majrooh Sultanpuri translated by Baidar Bakht and Marie-Anne Erki ** Lauren Berlant, from ‘Intimacies: A Special Issue’
WAVE 1:
PROGRAM 2
Film Comment Live: Writing About Avant-Garde Cinema
Devika Girish, Clinton Krute, Ayanna Dozier, Amy Taubin, Genevieve Yue
Avant-garde cinema, particularly in New York City, emerged in symbiosis with the film criticism that contextualized, championed, and critiqued it—and in fact, became a form of its own. Writing about work that is premised on defying formulaic intelligibility, and which invites us to reach beyond language to other modes of interpretation, can be both challenging and thrilling. And reading such criticism can be at once a glorious entryway into better appreciating experimental cinema, and an encounter with the various ways images and text can work together. Moderated by the editors of Film Comment, this panel brings together veterans of avant-garde film criticism to discuss the history of the craft, the nitty-gritty of this niche beat, and what good writing on avant-garde cinema looks like. Panelists include Amy Taubin, Genevieve Yue, and Ayanna Dozier. —Film Comment Free to attend. The conversation will be recorded and published on the Film Comment Podcast on May 14.
WAVE 1:
PROGRAM 3
Homing
Tamer Hassan (34 min)
Centuries prior to the colonization of the Americas, Purple Martins began to nest in gourds that people hung to store food and water and became companion species for many tribes. The birds that European settlers brought with them drove Purple Martins out of their wild habitats so that now they can only nest in birdhouses that people build to prevent their extinction. Without dialogue or narration, Homing follows the migration of Purple Martins from the Amazon to the Great Lakes, between the conservationists who study them and to the houses they are dependent on for survival. —Tamer Hassan
Wolves
Aria Dean, Laszlo Horvath (26 min)
Sheep, a dog, a camera and the filmmaker behind it; somewhere beyond, danger. —Inney Prakash
WAVE 1:
PROGRAM 4
An Evening with arc
arc (42 min)
Through film, performance, and curatorial work with Bay Area film festival Light Field, and involvement with the Black Hole Collective Film Lab, arc has forged a dynamic, multi-disciplinary practice with seriously ethical and spiritual dimensions tied to a militant political commitment. Their appearance on the evening of May 9th will occasion a combination of single channel films and double projector performance pieces yielding spectacular beauty from the fundamental material components of cinema. conical signal (2 x 16mm performance, 6min) ascensions (16mm, single channel, 8min) breathing (16m, single channel, 11min) ailleurs (16mm, single channel, 3 min) infinite column (2 x 16mm performance, 14min)
WAVE 1:
PROGRAM 5
Just a Soul Responding + Reading
Sky Hopinka (60 min)
This is a travelogue of sorts, as two friends whose lives intersect and diverge, look at the road and the vessels we use as means to traverse landscapes both contemporary and historical, and of the spirit and of the body. The title, inspired in part by Smokey Robinson’s Just My Soul Responding, refers to the passive and active ways that movement guides and shapes the routes one follows and creates in roadways and waterways long established, yet sympathetic to paths of desire and paths of refusal. Through each channel are various attempts to reconcile who we are, who we want to be, as well as who and what was lost along the way. —Sky Hopinka
WAVE 2:
PROGRAM 1
Listening In, Resounding Out
Eislow Johnson & Dominic Bonelli (11 min)
Through the ears of an acoustic engineer, the film explores how in the near silence of the anechoic chamber, listening is a straining toward understanding and connection. It engages with cinema as a body — one given presence and depth through sound — and a body as a resounding instrument, which listens to its own vibratory depths and amplifies its feedback. —Dominic Bonelli, Eislow Johnson
Ilanga Alikho (The Sun is Missing)
Advik Beni (8 min)
Ilanga Alikho is an experimental landscape film with an element of poetry. The film follows the son of the professional mourner who has now taken up the mantle of his father. He is confused. He does not want to mourn anymore, but it is all he knows how to do. He goes to the local flea market and purchases some chickens for a sacrificial ceremony in the name of his ancestors. Soon enough he is traversing the vast mountainous landscape of Kwa-Zulu Natal as he struggles to find a place where belongs. —Advik Beni
Bleared eyes of blue glass
PARK Kyujae (9 min)
The "bleared eyes of blue glass" in the title of this experimental short expand on a verbal image from Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves, considered the most experimental among the 20th-century British writer's literary works, from which the young filmmaker took inspiration for his film, borrowing passages and visions to explain his own understanding of what cinema is. A film that plays with water - precisely - and light, and yet in a very dark b&w lit up by rare flashes of colour, making a journey in the night in which the shadow of a man gradually acquires substance. —PARK Kyujae
in the interval
æryka jourdaine hollis o'neil (24 min)
Both an intimate family portrait & cinematic collage of Black and trans collective memory and (be)longing, meditating on themes of safety, bodily autonomy and generations of compounding loss across time and media. Taking the form of a diptych, the first act interrogates the convergence of Black confrontations with police brutality and the annually increasing disparities of homicidal violence experienced by Black trans women and femmes, while the second act non-linearly traces the respective origins and evolutions of a Black non-binary trans femme scholar-artist and her late father who died unexpectedly ten years prior to filming. Organized around family VHS footage, viral media and found footage, present-day video diary using digital as well as Bolex 16mm cameras, performance, and other artifacts of an inherited personal and public archive, the film explores the continuities and cleavages of the filmmaker and her father's corresponding lived experiences, amidst the backdrop of unrelenting anti-Black, queer- and trans-antagonistic acts of violence, both state-sanctioned and otherwise and the aftermath of a deadly global pandemic. The film stands as an open-ended inquiry into what Frantz Fanon once called “the problem of time” for figuring Black life, collectivity and struggle—where past, present, blood kin and queer kin kaleidoscopically collide. —æryka jourdaine hollis o'neil
Behind the Sun
Bentley Brown (18 min)
A filmmaker explores astrophysical metaphors to make sense of a failed relationship to person and place. —Bentley Brown
WAVE 2:
PROGRAM 2
Both, instrument and sound
Sharlene Bamboat (40 min)
In this intimate portrait of queer life and intergenerational friendship, 80-year-old Tony describes his political activism since the 1970s, after moving from Calcutta, India to Toronto, Canada. Translated through sonic and filmic experiments, his stories and observations express the tensions inherent in solidarity and collectivity under neoliberalism. The film’s score, co-written with musicians and the film’s cast and crew, remixes and meditates on the concept of tension, and its manifestations in sex, identity, music, touch and political struggle. In the face of a growing politics and language of individualism, the film interrogates discourses and practices of solidarity and their enmeshment with friendship and love. Fragments of phone calls, conversations over shared meals, and tender moments captured on 16mm film portray the complexity of building community, and the hazards of reducing shared experiences of oppression to individual expressions of identity. —Sharlene Bamboat
barrunto
Emilia Beatriz (70 min)
"barrunto” is a word used in Puerto Rico to refer to a bodily unrest, an omen or a forecast sensed via signals present in the environment (such as when rain is forecast through aches and pains or when ants emerge anticipating an earthquake). “Barrunto” is a way of thinking with surface and subconscious, underfoot and underground. BARRUNTO is a speculative narrative informed by poetry and theories of quantum entanglement across diasporic distance. An intimate exploration of grief and resistance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets to the bed; in sites of displacement, nuclear contamination, and military occupation from Scotland to Puerto Rico; from the bottom of the ocean to the planet Uranus; using digital, archival, and 16mm film hand-processed in “grief tea.” from its deep vibration tracks to the nonlinear narrative, barrunto is a film that attempts to activate sensations and modes of being with the world and in connection beyond western frameworks of knowledge and understanding. Made in collaboration with artists in Scotland and Puerto Rico including Sound Production by Claude Nouk, Music & Voiceover by Shanti LaLita, Archival Footage by Andrés Nieves and Karla Claudio Betancourt, Voices by Alicia Matthews & Harry Josephine Giles, Translation by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, Animation by Sharif Elsabagh, integrated captions consultation by Bea Webster & Ciaran Stewart, featuring poems by Gallego, Ursula Le Guin & June Jordan. —Emilia Beatriz Co-presented by Third Horizon
WAVE 2:
PROGRAM 3
Capital
Basma AlSharif (17 min)
A Ventriloquist walks into a bar and orders a stiff drink. The Bartender asks: will that be all? The Dummy answers: Does it look like I can speak with this hand up my ass? As Egypt syncs further into poverty and is overwhelmed by debt, new cities are being erected across the country and prisons fill with dissenting opinions. But who are these cities for and what desire or ambivalence do they inspire -- and at what cost. Since it is currently not possible to safely speak about this: a ventriloquist, songs, and advertisements describe a seemingly bygone era of fascism. Referencing Telefoni Bianchi films, a precursor to propaganda cinema under Mussolini, the legacy of building new capitals provides the material to express opinions and hope, through satire. —Basma AlSharif A sitting room amidst a white void. An elegant woman dressed in brown satin and lace. Sisi, his voice pitched down and distorted, dismisses the idea that his New Administrative Capital might never come to be. A ventriloquist tells jokes about fascism. A man calls, bringing the woman to orgasmic frenzy with the names of real estate. The relations, already strange and obscurely mediated, between the people and objects populating Basma al-Sharif’s Capital grow only more disorienting from here, as the film descends into a deranged whorl of new development: high rises, glimmering with the inhuman sheen of investment properties, seen from impossible angles; CGI visions of communities planned for perfect consumption; city and desert torqued into patterns of abstraction. Finally, all this collapses into a kind of music video, menacing and banal, for Nino Ferrer’s “Le Sud',' whose French lyrics are loosely and pointedly translated as karaoke-style subtitles. Unflinching in its pile-up of idiocies, al-Sharif’s film, a grim and exuberant satire, sketches the terms of a new anticapitalist realism. —Phil Coldiron
A Stone's Throw على مرمى حجر
Razan AlSalah (40 min)
Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice from land and labour. He is displaced from his birthplace Haifa seeking refuge in Beirut, and again to Zirku Island, for work on an offshore oil platform and work camp in the Arab Gulf. "A Stone’s Throw" trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labour in the region and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The film rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline. —Razan AlSalah
WAVE 2:
PROGRAM 4
COP26FILM
Luke Fowler (7 min)
COP26FILM was shot in Fowler’s home city of Glasgow during the period that the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) took place there in from October 31 – November 12, 2021. Denied entry to the main “blue zone“ the artist instead made daily walks around the periphery of the site recording the temporary infrastructure of the conference, security systems, police cordons and the omnipresence of Police helicopters. These combine to form a subjective image of state-power at a highly monitored and politically expedient event. Fowler offsets these displays of power with a "patchwork" of alternative interventions that took place; mass protests, temporary squats, and the significance the Minga Indígena, a collective of over 100 indigenous leaders who travelled to Glasgow to claim representation and space in the decision making process around issues of the climate crisis and potential solutions. COP26FILM features a soundtrack composed from recordings made on location and also synthesized sound by Richard McMaster and Luke Fowler. —Luke Fowler Fowler’s supple lyricism braids together a wide array of activity around the conference—protestors from across Africa, Europe, and the Americas; a woman advancing an anarchist line on housing these far-flung individuals; various men and women in suits and lanyards, local professionals and career politicians equal in aloofness—to create a collective portrait, a history film, of the current state of climate justice. As one activist speaks about the interconnectedness of the world, what sound like gunshots appear on the soundtrack. Art, here, is not allowed to stray from life. —Phil Coldiron
He Who Dances Passes
Carlos Araya Diaz (70 min)
A being from the beyond returns to Chile in 2019, embodied in a worker who dreams of social upheaval. Viral videos intertwine with fiction to narrate the experiences of a polarized country that wanders between drama and absurdity, illusion and failure. —Carlos Araya Diaz
WAVE 2:
PROGRAM 5
Six Seventy-Two Variations, Variation 3 (For Charles) (PERFORMANCE)
Tomonari Nishikawa (23 min)
This is the third variation of the on-going 16mm film projector performance piece, "Six Seventy-Two Variations," for which I produce images and sound as a live performance. I use a wood carving knife to scratch off the photographic emulsion of the looped film as a live performance. Scratched patterns, which would be mostly horizontal lines, will appear as an abstract animation on the screen and produce noises, as the area of the filmstrip reserved for the optical soundtrack will be also scratched. Due to the distance between the gate of the projector and the position of the photocell to read the visual information for sound, the noise from a scratched pattern will be produced about a second later after it appears on the screen. —Tomonari Nishikawa
Bolero Study
Cherrie Yu
(3 min)
Bolero Study is a reprise of Torvill and Dean's ice dancing routine from the 1984 Olympic Sarajevo Olympics. Artist Cherrie Yu and collaborator Jade Manns rechoreographed the duet on their hands. —Cherrie Yu
Us and the Night
Audrey Lam
(67 min)
Night after night, two travellers cross paths at a university library. The library's symmetry, rhythms and recurrences form a fantastic geography for their stories and adventures. —Audrey Lam "As a love story between bashful student workers at a university library, Lam’s virtuosic script creates levity where unwieldy notions of the sublime have long burdened academic language. In moments as quick as the soft lilt in the narrator’s voice when she puns on the school as a “universe-city,” or a captivating sequence where the spritely protagonist, Umi, climbs through part of a shelf that happens to have empty space between books, the two students are shown moving across the dusty, carpeted library as if it were a thrilling metropolis or a bewildering planet. Risk in reaching toward another person amongst heaps of books and words joins an excitement for the unknowns of a relationship." —Lauren Lee
WAVE 2:
PROGRAM 6
El Realismo Socialista (restoration)
Raúl Ruiz, Valeria Sarmiento (78 min)
In September 1973, Raúl Ruiz had completed the filming of 'El Realismo Socialista, when the civilian-military coup occurred in Chile. In 2019, footage from the film was found at Duke University and at the Royal Film Archives of Belgium (CINEMATEK). With the help of these two institutions, under the direction of Valeria Sarmiento and the crew of the film production company POETASTROS, it was possible to rescue, repatriate, reconstruct, restore and finish this piece of filmic heritage. —El Realismo Socialista
WAVE 2:
PROGRAM 7
Deep 1 (35mm)
Philip Hoffman (15 min)
Filmed over 2 years (2020-2022), at home and away, Deep 1 is a diaristic meditation, flower/plant processed and decayed with hyacinth and lichen extract. Winged and four legged animals, both wild and domestic, traverse the frame marked by a hand-made practice. Filmed in Mount Forest, Ontario and Dawson City, Yukon. —Philip Hoffman
Black Rectangle (16mm)
Rhayne Vermette (2 min)
“Time has not been kind to Kasimir Malevich’s painting, Black Square. In 1915 when the work was first displayed the surface of the square was pristine and pure; now the black paint has cracked revealing the white ground like mortar in crazy paving.” This film documents a tedious process of dismantling and reassembling 16 mm found footage. The film collage imitates functions of a curtain, while the recorded optical track describes the flm’s subsequent destruction during its first projection. —Rhayne Vermette *Print courtesy of the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection at the Walker Art Center w/ special thanks to Patricia Ledesma Villon.
Domus (16mm)
Rhayne Vermette (16 min)
"The block of marble is the most beautiful of all statues" - Carlo Mollino This is the story of the godlike architect, Carlo Mollino, animated within the desk space of failed architect, Rhayne Vermette. Made, with love on 16mm, 35 and Super 8, this classic tale of Pygmalion investigates intersections between cinema and architecture. For E. Ackerman, A. Jarnow, and T. Ito. —Rhayne Vermette *Print courtesy of the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection at the Walker Art Center w/ special thanks to Patricia Ledesma Villon.
A Shifting Pattern (16mm)
Isaac Sherman (6 min)
Across the first minute of Isaac Sherman’s A Shifting Pattern, brief filmic phrases—close views of flowers and buds, each between 1 and 5 frames—appear at irregular intervals, generally in the range of every two seconds, as the soundtrack hums with outdoor ambience. A single, quick synth tone signals a turn: the montage accelerates, drawing the Markopoulos-style opening into outright flicker (Sherman continues to make precise use of black frames, creating a dense composition of afterimages, layered and fugal), as saxophone and flute join the synthesizer and field recordings in a similarly accumulative arc that moves from sparse 3-note phrases into a full arrangement which sounds like the record Laurie Spiegel never released on Mego. The botanical world is among the more common subjects for the flicker film, but when matched with the witty sense of fleeting pleasure imbued by the soundtrack, Sherman’s sumptuous and extravagant floral still lives—with their deft handling of light and shadow, of contrasts in color and scale—feel appropriately fresh. —Phil Coldiron *Please note* - This film contains some strobing images.
Measuring 500 Feet (16mm)
Abigail He (14 min)
Dimensions: 500 ft. x 5/8 in. x 1/128 in. (15240 x 1.6 x .02 cm) overall: 547 ft. x 5/8 in. x 1/128 in. (16672.6 x 1.6 x .02 cm) —Abigail He
Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke (16mm)
Tomonari Nishikawa (6 min)
Fireworks were shot at a summer festival in Japan with a Super 16 format camera in order to obtain images on the optical soundtrack area on the filmstrip. The position of the photocell to read the visual information on the optical soundtrack area in a 16mm film projector is 26 frames in advance of the position of the gate to project the image. Each footage from 2 rolls of 16mm film were cut into shots of 26 frames each, and the shots were alternated from one roll to another, which would further separate the sound and visual, while producing a distinct rhythm throughout the film. —Tomonari Nishikawa After moving away, with 2019’s 'Amusement Ride', from the processed and layered frames that marked the first decade and a half of his career, Tomonari Nishikawa continues his elaboration of a new cinema of attractions in 'Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke.' In typically reflexive fashion, he adapts the editing of A and B rolls into a sort of two-chord jam, alternating between a pair of fireworks displays, allowing images of embers and aftermath to spill onto the optical soundtrack, which becomes an out-of-sync field of pops and crackles. The title, it turns out, is quite literal: the search for a novel way to document a familiar experience modulates into a subtle essay on repetition and recognition. —Phil Coldiron
Tricks Are For Kiddo (16mm)
Rhayne Vermette (3 min)
In 2010, Winnipeg director, Guy Maddin exclaims “it’s impossible to collage a film!” —Rhayne Vermette *Print courtesy of the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection at the Walker Art Center w/ special thanks to Patricia Ledesma Villon.
Glitter For Girls
Federica Foglia (4 min)
Glitter for Girls is a handmade tattoo film that utilizes a camera-less direct-on-film animation approach to collage multiple layers of water tattoos (commonly used by children.) —Federica Foglia
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 1
Entrance Wounds
Calum Walter (18 min)
A meditation on the image and the bullet. Entrance Wounds considers the modern challenge of trying to unsee an image. The film sifts through moments of the everyday, imagining a world where afterimages of disaster drift in near-transparency over the present. —Calum Walter "Entrance Wounds conveys a global freeze, a narrative trapped in ice, as we waver between horror and numbness. It generates a feeling of logic suspended, as tragedy ceases to register as an event. Grief is amoebic. It fills the space around us like a deadly gas." —Michael Sicinski
He Thought He Died
Isiah Medina (70 min)
A painter stages a heist to steal his paintings back from the vault of a museum. A filmmaker happens to be at the museum on the same day. —Isiah Medina Having been invited by Ontario’s Agnes Etherington Arts Centre to produce a film in their archives while the museum was closed for renovations, Isiah Medina emerged from the vaults with 'He Thought He Died'. As with 'Inventing the Future' (sci-fi) and 'Night is Limpid' (the comedy of manners), a loose generic structure (the heist film) supports an intricate intellectual composition, as a painter (Medina) steals back his work from the museum’s collection. The anti-drama of this scenario—it largely provides an opportunity for extended visual exploration of the multifaceted idea of the frame—runs in parallel to a talkier strand involving a filmmaker (Kelley Dong) visiting the archives to conduct their own research. These conversational passages play out in fast and dense language and montage, each line delivered with a precision that might be confused for blankness, each cut opening new angles both within and beyond a given scene. It’s not quite a spoiler to say that artist and filmmaker do finally converge on a counterpoint of value-forms. —Phil Coldiron
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 2
Camera Test (King Cadbury)
Charlie Shackleton (7 min)
A documentary readymade about family lore and chocolate biscuits. —Charlie Shackleton
Midwood Movie
Melissa Friedling (70 min)
“Midwood Movie,” is a is an exploration of the site of the first purpose-built modern film studio in the US (American Vitagraph Company) which operated from 1907 through the silent era, was repurposed into a yeshiva school for girls in the early 1980s, and rebuilt in 2000s for residential use with the original 70-foot smokestack still intact. The film includes interviews with film historians and descendants of the studio founders; re-photographed nitrate fragments of films that were produced at the Brooklyn studios over 100 years ago; and original footage shot inside the yeshiva school and of the building during and after demolition. The film explores both profound resistances and persistent echoes of national and local cultural histories, the archeology of the American film industry, local neighborhood demographics, gentrification, and politics. —Melissa Friedling
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 3
Social Circles
Eri Saito (16 min)
This piece explores the unique dynamics and communication that arise from the inability to fully connect and understand each other. In our daily lives, we form various social circles through interactions with friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and family. With the prevalence of social media and online platforms, people can create even more diverse social circles and connect with individuals from all over the world. Through this artwork, the faint boundaries that emerge from individual communications and relationships are contemplated, with the hope of sparking thoughts about our future existence and how we interact with others. —Eri Saito
Abiding Nowhere
Tsai Ming-Liang (79 min)
Commissioned by the National Museum of Asian Art in honor of its centennial, 'Abiding Nowhere' was filmed in the museum and at other locations in the DMV. Inspired by the Tang-dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who famously walked from China to India in search of scriptures, the Walker series stars Lee Kang-sheng, who very slowly traverses landscapes and cities around the world. The first Walker video to be filmed in the United States, Abiding Nowhere also stars Anong Houngheuangsy in a film that Tsai describes as “two lonely souls on separate journeys, sometimes crossing paths but never once meeting.” —National Museum of Asian Art
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 4
As close as your voice can call (16mm)
Derek B. Jenkins (14 min)
A film about language, about the way trauma inflects grief, and about learning to speak with the dead. —Derek B. Jenkins
The Treasury of Human Inheritance
Alexis Kyle Mitchell (59 min)
'The Treasury of Human Inheritance' is a film about the experience of living with and alongside disease and disability. Tracing loops, echoes and repetitions across the physical and spiritual realms, ‘The Treasury’ combines documentation of family home movie footage; somatic and religious rituals for death and life after death; abandoned urban architectures teeming with natural growth; celluloid film hand-processed in genetic material; and an analogue synthesizer soundtrack that mimics inheritance patterns of genetic disease. In essence, this is a film about a family – but, more than that, it is a film made from the everyday patterns we embody in order to live through and with one another. —Alexis Kyle Mitchell
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 5
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Revolution Until Victory a.k.a. We Are the Palestinian People (Newrseel #65)
San Francisco Newsreel (45 min)
“Made by a breakaway faction of the U.S. Newsreel collective Pacific Newsreel, 'Revolution Until Victory' edits exclusively archival footage into a detailed, historical reconstruction of the conflict. Great attention is paid to the political genesis of Zionism, the role of colonial Britain in assigning [sic] Palestine to zionists and the strategic role Israel has played ever since in the control and monopoly of the world’s most sought-after commodity, oil.” –Celluloid Liberation Front, SIGHT & SOUND *Program guest curated and introduced by Nadine Fattaleh and Kaleem Hawa
Introduction to the End of an Argument
Jayce Salloum, Elia Suleiman
(41 min)
"With a combination of Hollywood, European, and Israeli film; documentary; news coverage; and excerpts of ‘live’ footage shot in the West Bank and Gaza strip, 'Introduction to the End of an Argument' critiques representations of the Middle East, Arab culture, and the Palestinian people produced by the West. The video mimics the dominant media’s forms of representation, subverting its methodology and construction. A process of displacement and deconstruction is enacted attempting to arrest the imagery and ideology, decolonizing and recontextualizing it to provide a space for a marginalized voice consistently denied expression in the media.” –Video Data Bank
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 6
Let the Red Moon Burn
Ralitsa Doncheva (7 min)
Let The Red Moon Burn is an impressionistic portrait of the ancient ritual of fire dancing in Bulgaria. Weaving 16mm hand-processed images, the film blurs past and present to evoke ghosts in the landscape, the spirits of ancestors unearthed by the throbbing pulsations of live music. All images and sounds are recorded during Zheravna Festival of Costume in Bulgaria, where thousands of people gather each summer to perform traditional dances under a full moon. —Ralitsa Doncheva
at the bamboo green
Xiaolu Wang (11 min)
A one take recording of a family's visit to the bamboo green at the foot of the Helan Mountains. —Xiaolu Wang The site is pretty easy to find. So says the young woman who has been filming an outing to her grandmother’s grave. Along the way, she and her extended family happen upon an imam on the road. Smiling, he offers them his services, and in a long, unbroken shot, they drive him to the gravesite to chant. The route is orderly, the car new and softly beeping, the family plot well-tended, if a little dusty. But the journey is twistier than it first seems. The woman, the filmmaker, explains to the imam that she is from the United States. Later, she reveals that her grandmother once appeared to her in a dream. Each turn is another opportunity to lose one’s bearings, for time to slip past, for languages and customs to become strange. What might seem mundane becomes remarkable in its unlikeliness: a distant family reuniting at a leaf-strewn grave. —Genevieve Yue
In the Wake of Loss
Aminata Ndow (22 min)
A documentary portrait of twenty-year-old Amie Lowe, whose father disappeared during Yahya Jammeh’s violent dictatorship in The Gambia when she was only 3 years old. The personal portrait that emerged illuminates the intimate and small in the interminable wake of unresolved loss. —Aminata Ndow
Avant Seriana (Before Seriana)
Samy Benammar (19 min)
Mom, you brought me back to our homeland. All I know about these harsh landscapes I learned from books written by the hand that burned these mountains. I try to undo the colonial myths engraved into my memory, but the hills escape my gaze. Do you think I, too, have become the white djinn spoken of by the legends surrounding our martyrs?'Avant Seriana' is an essay film shot in Super 8 in the Aurès region of Algeria. Observing the landscapes of my native land, I realize that they are divided into several images and times. Two different countries are formed : the Algeria of the mountains and an imaginary one born of the tales I've read in colonial archives. My gaze no longer belongs to the places where I was hoping to return to my roots. —Samy Benammar
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 7
121280 Ritual
Antoinetta Angelidi, Rea Walldén (16 min)
The naked body of the pregnant mother. The voice of the daughter. Inside-outside. A song to life. THE MOTHER (fragment of a text by Angelidi, which accompanied the film at its first screenings): The twelfth day of the twelfth month of the year nineteen-eighty was the day before I gave birth to my second child, my son. I. Naked. To come to terms with my fear, I felt the desire to immerse myself into black water, to re-emerge and cuddle my belly. A remembering forgetfulness that to die giving birth is like being born dying. THE DAUGHTER (fragment from the text by Walldén, which is spoken in the film): I return to my second self. Her smell. Mine. The centre I immerse in. Safety is a smell. And I rest. Calmness. The touch. In my head the buzz stops. In her smell, I rest. —Antoinetta Angelidi, Rea Walldén
Idees Fixes / Dies Irae
Antoinetta Angelidi (60 min)
I have been interested in three questions since the beginning: the importance of cinematic writing as juxtaposing dialogue of the elements of heterogeneity, the research of borderlines of cinematic representation, and the incorporation of the creator’s subjectivity in the film. This film addresses the issue of representation of women’s bodies in modern and contemporary art history: gender as construction and not as destiny. It is structured on two axes: on the one hand, the body representations and the body of representation; on the other, writing in situation and not on situations. It is composed as a synchronic and diachronic synthesis and subversion of images and sounds. The inversion of codes, as well as their juxtaposition, constitute the film’s central creative strategies and, therefore, the key for its interpretation. A succession of indirect references and games, subversively comment on aesthetic theories and specific artworks. Music is produced by the repetitive transformations of the sound of speech. The inversions of image and sound function narratively, reinscribing women’s bodies. —Antoinetta Angelidi
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 8
In the Fishtank
Linnea Nugent (3 min)
A triptych contemplation of nature's mystery through earthly scenes. —Linnea Nugent
Extinction Story Origin Story
Terrie Samundra (18 min)
On their way home from school one day, two young girls find themselves in a haunted desert. —Terrie Samundra
Hinkelten
Svetlana Romanova (18 min)
Constructed out of personal poems and notes, xиӈкэлтэн poses questions about image production's intersection with creation of narratives, that are embedded now in our perception of contemporaneity and manifest themselves in our performances of ideas and feelings like love. Positioned in the Yakutian Arctic, this visual essay invites the viewer to ask vital questions in relation to peripheral discourse that seems to be inseparable in relation to the etymology of the word itself - Arctic, and how does the western ontologies in relation to intimacy are fitting in immediate Yakutian realities. —Svetlana Romanova
Unspeakable Heap
Kara Ditte Hansen (14 min)
A short-film about my uncle, a retired greco-roman wrestling olympian living atop a decommissioned landfill. In “The World Of Wrestling” Roland Barthes uses the phrase "unspeakable heap" to describe the wrestler's flesh at the moment of defeat spread out on the floor. A heap also recalls the shape of waste and a structure that rises to a climax only to slope down again towards the ground. For the ground is the surface that marks the difference between victory and defeat, the living and the dead, and the present and the past. —Kara Ditte Hansen
Landscape Suspended
Naghmeh Abbasi (26 min)
'Landscape Suspended' tracks the story of an “interrogation” through the footages from Shahoo mountain, a mountain in Kurdistan of Iran which hosts nomadic Kurdish tribe called Havar Neshins and Kurdish guerrillas. This film’s images are a kind of revelation through visual interrogation, revealing the perception of the socio-political history and violence that surround the people in the mountainous area.Through landscape as its approach, this film tries to uncover spatial justice by observing the living space of the Havar Neshins, identified based on the complexity of the landscape in which they reside. —Naghmeh Abbasi
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 9
Thief Or Reality (35mm)
Antoinetta Angelidi (80 min)
Reality robs you of your dreams and you have to rob it in order to dream. A darkly optimistic film. Three versions of just one day. Three characters trapped in parallel universes. The invasion of the Thief will unite them. Each point of view produces a different story: fate-randomness-free will. What do they have in common? Mortality. "What I spent, I had. What I saved, I lost. What I gave, I have." —Rea Walldén/Antoinetta Angelidi
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 10
UNDR
Kamal AlJafari (15 min)
The camera’s eye returns obsessively to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests. This landscape is transformed into a scenography of appropriation. —Kamal AlJafari
Familiar Phantoms
Larissa Sansour, Søren Lind (42 min)
Blending live action, special effects, private family photos and archival footage, the 'Familiar Phantom' explores the impact on fiction on the creation and reinterpretation of memory. The film is inspired by anecdotes from my family history and my old childhood in Bethlehem, making it my most personal film to date. Shot in a derelict mansion and a black studio, the film oscillates between slow, fluid exploratory sequences and fast-paced collages of objects, mementos, family photos and Super 8 footage, its visuals and editing mimicking the actual workings of memory, constantly revisiting the same imagery alongside new fragments in search of meaning – while alternating between storytelling and ruminations on memory. —Larissa Sansour
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 11
A Visit With Robert (16mm)
Luke Fowler (3 min)
In Spring 2013 I was artist in residence at Dartmouth College in New England. This was a vital time for me developing films and projects with artists Toshiya Tsunoda, Christian Wolff and Larry Polanski. I recently discovered a roll I shot during this time - whilst on a visit to the Cape with Robert. The occasion stuck in my memory because of a particularly infection I had caught which made me reticent to travel or do anything. I recall Robert encouraging me to come anyway and to use my Bolex as a way of counter-acting the virus and my general state of malaise. —Luke Fowler
Eros
Rachel Daisy Ellis
'Eros' explores the architectures of sex, love and intimacy through one of Brazil’s most adored and infamous institutions: The Motel. Regular motel guests are invited to share stories whist filming themselves during a night at their favorite motel, providing a unique insight into the sexual and emotional psyche of a nation. —Rachel Daisy Ellis
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 12
The Hours — A Square Film
Antoinetta Angelidi (80 min)
Memory as construction and as internal pulse. Spendo, on the edge of suicide, re-lives her life, re-constructs it and, finally, liberates herself. Sadness flows and fills the space. The hours co-exist and intertwine. The world: a flesh-eating mechanism. A descend begins, a rhythmic immersion into the depths of memory, where the evil appears in the form of good. Until memory no longer repeats itself. The hours are noiselessly formed anew. —Antoinetta Angelidi
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 1
Trolley Times
Gurvinder Singh (143 min)
"The sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetstone of ideas" —Bhagat Singh
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 2
Abefele
Amir George (6 min)
Abefele is a meditation on artistic and spiritual duality interpreted through the sport of fencing. —Amir George
On the Battlefield
Little Egypt Collective (16 min)
The first release by Little Egypt Collective stages a sound recordist reconnecting with the flat fields where once stood Pyramid Courts – the housing projects that formed the heart of the Black community of the Little Egypt region of southern Illinois. —Little Egypt Collective The Little Egypt Collective is Theresa Delsoin, Lisa Marie Malloy, J.P. Sniadecki, Ray Whitaker.
Map to the Sirens
Demetrius Antonio Lewis (14 min)
By way of Atlanta, Georgia’s railway, oral histories from local rideshare drivers with urban landscapes uncover the post-industrial American South and its fraught history with labor and space. —Demetrius Antonio Lewis
ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong
Daphne Xu (9 min)
The ping pong table at Seward Park in New York City and the in-between space of a Cold War. An immigration lawyer advises on how to tell the truth. —Daphne Xu
Khabur
Nafis Fathollahzadeh (30 min)
Khabur, the longest tributary of the Euphrates in Northeastern Syria, has gone through drastic changes in the last decades resulting in its dry-out since 2019. 'Khabur' departs from Tell Halaf (an archaeological site in the valley of the Khabur River) and follows the journey of the archeological collection towards Berlin where it has resided since 1930. It traces the circulation of violence in different times and contexts along the Khabur River and engages with the economic and political power relations that have been transforming the landscape of the region, displacing beings, their belongings, and herstories. The film addresses photography and archeology as two disciplines emerging from the colonial-imperial enterprise, critically engaging with the imperial grammar of photographic archives, and examining the ways it could be recycled, reimagined, and rehearsed. —Nafis Fathollahzadeh
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 3
BLACK INFINITUDE
(Aldo Tambellini tribute)
In November 2020, we lost one of the most influential multi-disciplinary artists of the last century - Aldo Tambellini. Tambellini’s avant-garde work and insistence on new medias led him to be considered a pioneer in the field of experimental film and video. The retrospective screening, BLACK INFINITUDE, and the accompanying installation offers a compendium of some of Tambellini’s most important works while orienting his practice around the poetry, sculpture, performance, and multidisciplinary, time-based experiences he proposed as means for discovering both the universal and sociopolitical contexts of Blackness in his work. Tambellini did not enter filmmaking through the camera. He approached the medium as a sculptural object and an extension of the poetic with which he could experiment in time. One cannot remove Tambellini from the context of his war-torn childhood in Italy or the radical political activities in which he was involved through his work at the Gate Theater, with the Umbra Collective, Ben Morea, and others. His sculptural work is like the negative cast of a cratered world - often concaved half-spheres of brutal remnants. While the sculptural works hold a sort of psychogeography transferred by Tambellini through his experiences of WWII, his cinematic works simulate the “hot”, hyper-speed of chaotic time-space. These works belong in relation to Tambellini’s concept of “The Centrifuge”, an art experience in which all various elements act as subatomic particles. This exploration of negative and positive cosmic space must be seen as a response to the hyper stimulation brought about by witnessing and experiencing incendiary, bombastic, and violently abject sociopolitical traumas. Tambellini’s first explorations in cinematic space involved the slide film as a canvas, and through performative interventions, he began altering the speed of the slide projector, eventually using analog motion picture and projectors. Tambellini, through film and video, quickly began creating “expanded cinema" before it was ever named. Through this screening, we will present Tambellini’s body of essential cinematic work within the context of his multidisciplinary approach and the persistent search for new medias. Program curated/text by M. Woods.
The Screw (1963)
Aldo Tambellini (5 min)
In a perfect example of Aldo Tambellini’s wit and contempt for systems of power and Capital, we begin with Tambellini’s The Screw - a biting satire aimed at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum who agreed to accept a new sculpture created by Tambellini in 1963. In true Aldo fashion, he assembled a group of local teenagers who wanted to learn how to perform as a barber shop quartet. He wrote a song for them to perform, split the commission, and created a public spectacle presenting both museums with “The Screw” - a literal “screw you” to the nihilistic institutions Tambellini called out for violating the ethics of artistic citizenship through their co-opting of commercialized, mainstream, docile, and apolitical art work. Tambellini’s performance incorporates the poetic, the spectacle, the musical, the satirical, and the scuptural.
Black Is (1965, 16mm)
Aldo Tambellini (4 min)
Tambellini at first used 35mm slides as a means of projecting handprinted abstract images onto larger spaces, using a carousel projector to control timing. However, due to the limitations of this technique, Aldo sought an alternative method for exploring time. The result: Black Is uses a camera-less technique on 16mm film. The hand-painted surface of the analog film allowed Tambellini to expand his painterly practice of representing the unfolding cosmic geometries of the Circle and Spiral through the extremes of Black and White, using ink. The quick mechanization of the projector, and the resistance to/breaking of the frame, creates a percolating rhythm and an esoteric landscape, an expanse that both simulates the speed of memorialized, collective trauma and the extremes of cosmic (and Glorious) chaos.
Black Trip #1 (1965, 16mm)
Aldo Tambellini (5 min)
Provided by the Harvard Film Archive and the Aldo Tambellini Art Foundation. Black Trip #1 expands upon the painted language of Black Is, now positing the film experience as similar to the sensorial destination of a hallucinatory zone. We see here the beginnings of Tambellini’s theories on multi-disciplinary media environments.
Black Out (1965, 16mm)
Aldo Tambellini (9 min)
Provided by the Harvard Film Archive and the Aldo Tambellini Art Foundation. In the movie Black Out, Tambellini’s symbolic exploration directly on film reaches its chaotic heights as the painted circle and his iconic spiral intermingle with lattices, light leaks, and concentric circle patterns. Black Out is notable for its soundtrack, calling upon the violence of the political now inside of a cosmic hereafter.
M. Woods Lecture
M. Woods (10 min)
Discussing Aldo Tambellini’s early works, films, and tying his artistic practice to his notes on installation design and innovations in proto-virtual reality, while discussing Tambellini’s history of radical political art practices. M. Woods was provided with full access to Tambellini’s notes and archives, where Tambellini’s ideas about “media centrifuge” as an art installation was discovered.
Black Trip #2 (1967, 16mm)
Aldo Tambellini (3 min)
One of Tambellini’s first forays into representational imagery in cinema. Black Trip #2 is a nail- bomb of a movie. A fitting companion to Black Plus X and Black TV.
Black Plus X (1969)
Aldo Tambellini (9 min)
The duality of negative/positive, of Black and White, is what led Aldo quite naturally to the film stock of Plus X, a B&W film stock issued by Kodak until the 2000’s. Aldo used the camera and the film to celebrate a day in Brooklyn, documenting Black children enjoying the amusements of Coney Island. While the rumbling of the cosmic noises permeates the sound design, underpins the sense of terror that all Black children will come to understand in the centrifuge of white supremacy, the piece seeks to affirm “Black Power.” Tambellini flips the positive and negative and brings his subjects into the cosmic, spinning in multiple exposures, and eventually crashing to the waves of Ocean as they proclaim “Black Power! Black Power!” Tambellini creates a record of all layers of his theory in one film, combining his sociopolitical militance, with one of his first forays into the represented figure, both documentary of a real time and place and the “centrifuge” that controls the orbiting invisible elements as if the amusement park rides are part of the scaffolding of a multi-tiered reality. The work is sculptural in its analog presentation on 16mm film, its titular self-reference to its own film stock, and its narrative arch. It captures real events without a clear referent in static space, creating one of the most beguiling cinematographic experiments of in-camera multiple exposure. The work is situated in the body and emanates from the central concern of personhood, love, collective unity in the infinite, and an attack at the nihilism inherent in Capitalist institutions and their malignant forgery, represented by the ominous clowns and figures built into the careening rides and strobing footlights. Black Plus X speaks from a place of deep-felt sincerity, inner-reflection and exploration, and reflects what it is to be a loving accomplice in the struggle for Civil Rights and universal human decency.
Listen (2007)
Aldo Tambellini (15 min)
Provided by the Aldo Tambellini Art Foundation. After spending years working at MIT and having left the NYC art scene of the 1960s, Tambellini, like many artists, experienced a time of less prolific output. However, his association with his second wife, Anna Salamone, led to their collaboration on Listen, a politically militant anti-Bush attack on the illegal wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Tambellini used the low-fidelity of digital media, interspersed with long frames of Black, to poetically respond to the atrocities once again committed by the US military industrial complex. Winner of the Syracuse International Film Festival.
Black Video 3 (1981)
Aldo Tambellini (24 min)
*NEWLY DISCOVERED!* Provided by the Aldo Tambellini Art Foundation. This work was recently discovered. A free-wheeling, long-form trance as Tambellini distorts the imagery from a Cathode ray television, recording the results.
Black TV (1969)
Aldo Tambellini (10 min)
Black TV is Aldo Tambellini’s most famous work. A dual-projection sensorial hell that projected the waves of terror over the repetitive death proclamation of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. Despite the contemporary political context, Black TV is a mirror into the depths of the void that is universally familiar. This program ends with Black TV to commemorate the 50 years since Tambellini won an honorable mention at the 1969 Ann Arbor International Film Festival. Winner of the 1969 Oberhausen Film Festival.
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 4
Aida Returns
Carol Mansour (77 min)
'Aida Returns' is a poignant, sometimes sad, sometimes painful, sometimes humorous, often absurd story of a multiple journey: the journey of loss as the director’s mother Aida struggled with losing herself to Alzheimer’s disease, but finding solace in her repeated “returning” to the Yafa and Palestine of her youth; the journey of the loss of a parent; and the ultimate return journey back to Yafa where Aida would finally find rest and be herself once more. Close to four years after Aida’s passing away, the director’s friend and colleague Tanya who lives in Ramallah came to visit Beirut. When she heard about Aida’s wishes and yearning for Yafa, Tanya suggested that she herself carries the ashes back. The film accompanies director Carol Mansour as she engineers a way to return her mother to Yafa in search of eternal rest and peace for her. A return that is aided by an unlikely set of friends and strangers all coming together to facilitate what should have been a simple journey. This journey is at the same time very private and personal, while resonating with hundreds of thousands of Alzheimer’s sufferers and their families as well as hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees awaiting their return home. 'Aida Returns' is a tribute to the lost past of the director’s family, an attempt to restore part of both an individual and a collective memory, and a poetic nod and affirmation to all those exiled Palestinians forbidden from returning to their hometowns, even after death. —Film Forward Production
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 5
Few Can See
Frank Sweeney (42 min)
"In the late 1980s, as violence continues in the north of Ireland, censorship is increasingly being enforced on British and Irish television. In response, broadcasters have entered into a blackout strike. The workers have occupied several stations and are transmitting a programme bringing censored voices back onto the airwaves." 'Few Can See' examines the legacy of broadcast censorship of the conflict in the north of Ireland and political movements during this era. The project attempts to recreate material absent from state archives due to censorship, based on contemporary oral history interviews with people censored during this time period. Within a late 80s current affairs television format, actors verbatim re-enact edited transcripts from 18 oral history interviews, later dubbing their own performances. This technique is inspired by the use of actors to dub the voices of censored people during the conflict. The story is inspired by several blackout strikes which took place at broadcasters across Ireland and Britain in response to censorship. Most of the film is shot on old live broadcast tube cameras, resurrected for the production.
A Radical Duet
Onyeka Igwe (28 min)
What happened in 1940s London when two women of different generations, but both fighting against colonialism, came together to put their fervour and imagination into writing a revolutionary play? —Onyeka Igwe
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 6
Obsessive Hours at the Topos of Reality
Rea Walldén (88 min)
A filmed confession of Antoinetta Angelidi, who has been a pioneer of feminist avant-garde cinema in Greece since the 1970s; who is also my life-long creative collaborator, and my mother. This film is for her a self-revelation, but also performance and direction of the self, as confessions always are. A dialogue with the camera, with me holding the camera, but also with herself and the world. Her testament. An intimate speech about art and life, rape and blindness, but also about human solidarity and the liberating experience of seeing the world anew. It is also a film essay on her gaze. It nodes to her filmmaking techniques. It uses variations and uncanny connections, long shots and jump-cuts, revealing its construction and discreetly incorporating its own metalanguage. For much of the film, Angelidi’s body is immersed in darkness, her face and hands coming out of it as if entering unmediated inside our unconscious and dreams. The film was shot without a crew in the confinement of our flat in Athens, in a single room, during the lock-down. It is about our inner space, at the most secret place of which one finds the Other. —Rea Walldén
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 7
La Laguna del Soldado (The Soldier's Lagoon)
Pablo Alvarez Mesa (75 min)
'La Laguna del Soldado' delves deep into the misty Páramo region, into an ecosystem rich in water, but also saturated with oral narratives that populate the territory like foggy patches. Reflecting on the construction of oral history and its relation to the land, the film traverses the Páramo; a living and elusive archive, navigating through the dense fog suspended between Simon Bolivar’s past and Colombia’s present. —Pablo Alvarez Mesa Co-presented by Union Docs.
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 8
SYZYGY (35mm)
Akbar Padamsee (12 min)
'SYZYGY', a rare experimental film by the eminent Indian painter Akbar Padamsee, was created in 1969 through algorithmic processes. Funded by a government grant and produced under the auspices of Padamsee's Vision Exchange Workshop, this generative work features a visual motif of unwavering straight lines that autonomously generate abstract patterns, evocative of celestial configurations. Drawing inspiration from the astronomical term for the alignment of celestial bodies, Syzygy manifests constellation-like patterns derived from over a thousand drawings of abstract lines and forms. Conceived as a "theory towards programming forms," the film presents a matrix of horizontal and vertical lines that merge into abstract combinations via a self-generating process. Although the original negative was lost, Syzygy has been meticulously restored from the last surviving, heavily damaged 35mm positive print by filmmaker Ashim Ahluwalia, in collaboration with Future East Film (Mumbai) and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. This revival not only breathes new life into Padamsee's vision but also resurrects what may be the only trace of an Indian experimental film movement that was prematurely extinguished with the disappearance of this film. —Vanij Choksi
Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomenon #59
Joost Rekveld (79 min)
Joost Rekveld’s Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59 departs from a key moment in the history of feedback—the more or less concurrent discovery of deterministic chaos by men on opposite sides of the globe—and moves obliquely toward another decisive step in our understanding of the interconnected systems of our planet: human space travel. The film begins with a long prologue comprising a series of tight close-ups on a mechanical plotter whose seemingly arbitrary movements eventually produce graceful, coherent forms, soundtracked by one of those men, the Japanese engineer Yoshisuke Ueda, reflecting on his discovery. Having set his conceptual terms, Rekveld moves into an hour-long passage of analog synthesis set to the sounds of classic sci-fi, as the relatively simple lines of the plotter explode into outrageous complication, seductive graphic tangles that float in and out of sync with shifting fields of color. Figure and ground constantly feed back into another within the frame, while the whole of the film induces its viewer into their own mental feedback, torquing our sense of time and scale at once toward the massive and the minimal. —Phil Coldiron An abstract animated science-fiction film that takes the experiences shared by humans and electronic circuits as its starting point. Our computing technology emerged during the Cold War as a byproduct of the development of atomic weapons and their associated planetary surveillance systems. In 1961, at what was perhaps the coldest point of this period, Edward Lorenz and Yoshisuke Ueda independently discovered deterministic chaos in their computers. In film #59, humans, aliens and electronic devices vacillate between these poles of a human fever dream of planetary control on the one hand, and lively machinic chaos on the other. All images in the film were produced as analog electronic signals, in a re-enactment of antiquated ways of computing. These signals were generated using period equipment, including an analog computer from 1963, early sonar and radar oscillators, and bits from military flight simulators. This film is an attempt to liberate these technologies from their problematic origins. Narrative elements derived from Cold War era science fiction films set the tone, while references to radar and television scanning result in images that evoke very early computer graphics. These progressively unfold into organic calligraphies, in which the negative space between the patterns becomes one of the protagonists. Resemblances with manmade phenomena are gradually left behind, and the film evolves into a nonverbal meditation on material processes, human perception and the arrow of time.” —Joost Rekveld
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 9
Contractions
Lynne Sachs (12 mins)
In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion. 'Contractions' takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We listen to an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive justice activist. We watch 14 women who witness and perform with their backs to the camera. In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they speak with the full force of their collective presence. —Kino Rebelde/Lynne Sachs
Malqueridas
Tana Gilbert (75 min)
They are women. They are mothers. They are prisoners serving long sentences in a correctional facility in Chile. Their children grow up far from them, but remain in their hearts. In prison, they find affection in other partners who share their situation. Mutual support among these women becomes a form of resistance and empowerment. 'Malqueridas' builds their stories through images captured by them with cell phones inside the prison, recovering the collective memory of a forgotten community. —Square Eyes/Tana Gilbert
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 10
Topos (35mm)
Antoinetta Angelidi (80 min)
A parable on place and time. A game of metamorphoses. A passage after death, a second death. A woman gives birth and dies. At the moment of death, her face disintegrates and assumes the aspects of those who stand by her bed. Her body is torn by the conflicts of those who inhabit it and her voice dissolves into many voices and many roles. —Antoinetta Angelidi The film presents an expanded, in-between moment, where memories flow simultaneously, and their consistency has the arbitrariness and exactness of the sequence of a dream. The entire film is a filmed dream. Bodies drift in different rhythms, each has its own individual temporality, while the film records two 24-hour cycles, presenting successively events that may be 20 years or 40 days apart from each other. —Antoinetta Angelidi, August 1984 In unknown places one finds recognizable elements… Some paintings become references. Recognition of a world or its scattered elements that one already carries inside oneself but had not identified till then. So, one starts constructing a world in one’s image. Fragments or layers of the past – light, colours, placements, faces’ movements, stories – reassembled. Time negates itself and yet the film provides many elements of temporality. Many layers of past, many layers of civilisation. The past is there in many ways and yet it doesn’t exist. Space is naked, alive, creating sensations. The perspective of the film is not a person’s viewpoint; it is the space itself who sees. The film’s space is the body, it breathes, sees, listens, grieves, responds. A series of parallel narrations by different elements of image and sound are weaved and conversing with each other. Associations are induced. The film writes itself, it changes, advancing its own writing. The film is the transparency of a journey, both as the narration of an experience and as the narration of its own construction. Around the moment of the difficult passage, are gathered the desires of the people who constitute the different faces of the woman in trial. One is obliged to create the world anew / one tries repeatedly to enter the paintings, entire pieces come out of them / faces are devoured following the geometry of sensations. One becomes a turbulent field. The voice dissolves into many voices and roles. From the fragments, from the image pieces, a new universe is formed. When the mechanism of memory is amended, the universe remains empty. —Antoinetta Angelidi, September 1985
WAVE ∞
the future is still bigger than the past
WAVE ∞
VIRTUAL EXCLUSIVES
Ma’loul Celebrates Its Destruction
Michel Khleifi (30 min)
**Prismatic Ground 2024 virtual exclusive** CINEMATEK restoration co-presented by Bidoun Ma'loul is a Palestinian village in Galilee which was destroyed by the Israeli armed forces in 1948. Its inhabitants were driven out and expropriated. All that remains of the village are two churches and a mosque, the last visible traces for travellers between Haifa and Nazareth. Over the years, they too disappeared, under a forest planted in memory of the victims of Nazism. The Israeli authorities thus wiped off the map hundreds of Arab villages. But the former inhabitants of Ma'loul have created a new tradition: that of going for a picnic one day a year on the site of their destroyed village, paradoxically on the day of the independence of the State of Israel. It is the day of the picnic that we filmed; the encounter with a stone, a window, a wall, an olive or a pomegranate tree... hidden under the woods. A peasant notes among the young pines certain uncertain landmarks of his lost universe. A family comments with a naive purity on the mural fresco of their village, painted according to traces from their memory. As required by the official Israeli curriculum, a teacher explains to his Arab students the history of the creation of the State of Israel… These are elements of reality that confront each other and make up the film; they allow us to pose a new dimension to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: that of time. —Michel Khleifi
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Dau:añcut (Moving Along Image)
Adam Piron (15 min)
**Prismatic Ground 2024 virtual exclusive** In 2014, an unknown man in Ukraine tattooed a portrait of a relative of a filmmaker in his traditional Native American regalia. Stitched together from footage of the search for this man, the film interrogates what happens when the control of an image is lost and the time’s circular ironies. —Adam Piron
Even God
Liz Roberts (12 min)
**Prismatic Ground 2024 virtual exclusive** All personal archival VHS engaging with a core question of artists in times of chaos: who owns a memory and what is its value? A record of the queer Midwest. Drugs, sex, love, friendship, and a failed Los Angeles movie deal. —Liz Roberts