OPENING NIGHT (2023)
Hello Dankness
Soda Jerk (70 min)
Comprised entirely of hundreds of film samples, Hello Dankness is a political fable that bears witness to the psychotropic spectacle of American politics from 2016 to 2021, and the mythologies and lore that took root around it. Taking form as a suburban stoner musical, the film follows a neighborhood through these years as consensus reality disintegrates into conspiracies and other contagions. Part political satire, zombie apocalypse, and Greek tragedy, the work is also informed by the encrypted memetics of contemporary internet culture. Begun in 2019 and labored on throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Hello Dankness is a record of the time, written from the time.
WAVE 1:
PROGRAM 1
A to Z (16mm)
Michael Snow (5 min)
It makes an odd sort of sense that Michael Snow’s career would begin with a pornographic animation about the romance of domestic objects. Done in charcoal on paper, its table, chairs, and ceramics exist as mostly negative space, shaped patches of white against hatched messes of gray. Taking on a life of their own, they move jauntily within their flat realm, coming together as couples and groups in search of not so obscure pleasures. The fetish of commodities has rarely been handled with such a light touch. - Phil Coldiron
A Chair
Takahiko Iimura (8 min)
In Memoriam, Takahiko Iimura (1937-2022). Offering no less than its title suggests, this forerunner of conceptual video art filters the object of its attention through wavy black and white signals accompanied by sounds of drumline static. Its original installation format at the inaugural Forum Expanded program in Berlin, which was re-staged in 2023, allowed visitors to view together and share the moment on multiple synced TVs brought in by Arsenal staff. —Inney Prakash
Where do you stand, Tsai Ming-Liang?
Tsai Ming-Liang (23 min)
“I am fond of chairs,” Tsai Ming-Liang announces via title card. Joining the pantheon of auteur quarantine missives alongside Jafar Panahi’s Life, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Night Colonies, Mati Diop’s In My Room, and Alice Rohrwacher’s Four Roads, Where do you stand reveals a peculiar obsession with playful ease, showcasing the director’s favorite places to sit (not stand, presumably, as the official translation suggests), in addition to a few of his recent paintings and a bright orange tabby cat— satisfying any desire for the mundane details of our artistic heroes’ lives. - Inney Prakash
WAVE 1:
PROGRAM 2
Henny Penny the Sky is Falling
Raphael Montañez Ortiz (10 min)
Ortiz destroyed pianos throughout the 1960s (he flayed, stabbed, smashed and otherwise deconstructed many other household objects, too, but he seems most remembered for those pianos). Henny Penny is scored by Ortiz’s most famous concert, at the Destruction in Art Symposium in London in 1966. The piano’s death rattle is synced to grainy, black and white footage shot in a Coney Island chicken slaughterhouse in 1958. Married to a cacophonous symphony of death, suddenly the loss of the piano doesn’t seem all that bad. Henny Penny mirrors shots from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—a hellish flurry of feathers in front of a vertiginous camera— but it’s the nightmare-Deleuzian final freeze-frame that will make you want to puke. —Mackenzie Lukenbill
Tierra de Leche
Milton Guillen, Fiona Hall (12 min)
A group of Central American diary workers in the Northeast of the United States reminisce about their relationship to the land, labor practices, and their home countries. Hours, days, weeks, and years pass by and the repetitiveness of the labor makes way to new families in a non-place. These workers, despite their initial dreams, never come back home, where many of their families forget about them, or are lost to time. The film is an exploration of multispecies exploited by capitalistic forces, humans and cows, and questions the technologies we have created to maximize efficiency over liberation. It is not all lost, however. They have left the farms. —Milton Guillen and Fiona Hall
The Raw & The Cooked
Lisa Marie Malloy, Dennis Zhou (26 min)
The Chens are an Amis family living on Taiwan’s eastern coast. As some family members venture into the brush after a midnight rain, others harvest rice amid the whir of machinery. Blending work and play, food becomes a site for the Chens to pass down their endangered language to a younger generation, trade ghost stories, and express the vibrant hybridity of contemporary indigenous identity. —Lisa Marie Malloy and Dennis Zhou
Next Her Heart (16mm)
(Anna Kipervaser (12 min)
Eternal recurrence and wisdom undone. The end or the beginning. Who are we that we. One and the same are the shadow cast and its cause. A hypnotic meditation through the seven valleys on the way to reach the abode of the Simurgh. —Anna Kipervaser
WAVE 1:
PROGRAM 3
Currency
Crystal Z Campbell (3 min)
An obsolete global currency central to the slave trade, cowrie shells have become an emblem of Black self-fashioning embedded in hair, garments or jewelry. Currency is a striking synaesthetic gesture whose soundtrack emerges from the collisions of the cowry shells and beads woven in performer Angela Davis Johnson’s hair as she moves and rolls her head, hands pressed firmly against an abstract lightboard wall. The pace is erratic, unpredictable, but the pattern a familiar sideways motion of refusal. - Chrystel Oloukoi
默 / To Write From Memory?
Emory Chao Johnson (18 min)
Queer time moves differently. Selves are multiplied and then hidden away, secret objects are infused with mimesis, desires are internalized. Vials of synthetic testosterone provide most of the narration in Emory Chao Johnson’s collage. The filmmaker withholds the audience’s view from domestic drama and traumatic squabbles that invade the soundtrack, keeping at bay what Moyra Davey once referred to as “the wet.” Instead, Chao Johnson focuses on methodical practices—injections, cooking, commuting, inspecting one’s own body—collapsing those fraught, wet questions of identity until they undergird their quotidien present. —Mackenzie Lukenbill
Remembering Wei Yi-fang, Remembering Myself
Yvonne Welbon (30 min)
Sovereignty is inextricably linked to questions of both belonging and ownership. During her six-year stay in Taiwan, filmmaker Yvonne Welbon “learned the importance of choosing to name one’s self, the importance of knowing one’s self,” the ability to declare your own sovereignty. Welbon briefly took the name Wei-yi Fang. She interrogates her Black past in fluent Chinese; she was born in the United States to Honduran parents. This building of a multiplicity of selves forms a prism, through which Weibon is able to sharply comment on the differing racisms that her multiple selves have encountered. A cohesive personal history is fittingly assembled from many sources—interviews, recreations, documentary and archive—until a sovereign self comes into focus. —Mackenzie Lukenbill
WAVE 2:
PROGRAM 1
Where is this street? or With No Before and After
João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata
(88 min)
Departing from Paulo Rocha’s The Green Years, the inaugural moment of the Portuguese Cinema Novo, João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata drift through a locked-down Lisbon in search of subtle signs of life. Along the way, bitterly comic examples of the class character of pandemic responses butt up against strange moments of serenity. Their camera moves with a disoriented attention, equally curious and apprehensive of what it might find in this new world. As in life, history returns in strange and unexpected ways, though here that return occurs in mercifully gentle register. - Phil Coldiron
WAVE 2:
PROGRAM 2
Onlookers
Kimi Takesue (72 min)
In the introduction to his famous dialogues with Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut attempts to describe the essence of tension in a cinematic scene through an example of a dinner party’s cross-directional dance of gazes— a matter of who’s looking at whom, and with what hidden motivations. Kimi Takesue’s Onlookers then, despite its placid veneer and languid pace amid the sightseeing landmarks of Laos, is loaded with the tension borne of ocular entanglement between subjects in their daily environments, ogling tourists, Takesue’s own camera and subject position as traveler, and our apparently fixed positionality as witnesses to the scenes she captures. The result is as complex and open-ended as the social co-existence it reveals. Through a series of expertly framed static takes (with meticulous sound design), we’re free to let our senses wander between the sometimes humorous, sometimes off-putting, and always porous borders between seen and seer—and might just take pause to consider who could be observing us as we do. - Inney Prakash
WAVE 2:
PROGRAM 3
Keeping Time
Darol Olu Kae (32 min)
Darol Olu Kae’s homage to the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (Ark), an LA-based avant-garde jazz ensemble, moves the spotlight from the stage to the labor which makes a gig happen. With polyphonic structure, Keeping Time mirrors the fluid and multigenerational composition of the band, as members leave, pass through or die, and follows new bandleader Mekala Session’s earnest attempts to honor past legacies while forging anew. In a skillful kaleidoscopic assemblage, the film weaves together archival footage and audio with the present, restless energy that seeps from every corner of Session’s house. - Chrystel Oloukoi
Sol in the Dark
Mawena Yehouessi (51 min)
Sol sees Afrofuturism as a link between past and present, and as a rebuttal to a world in which “we are all commodities within a same architecture of violence”. Diffracting their observations, dreams, beliefs, and poetry through an ambiguous, collectively imagined figure named “Lascar” — an antiquated term referring to Southeast Asian sailors on European ships, a present pejorative for diasporic, suburban French teens, and any other number of definitions depending— Yehouessi assembles a team of incisive young collaborators whose multiplicitous views yield a fluid and aesthetically bombastic imagining of Blackness along the space-time continuum. These ideas, sounds and images may be individually familiar, but as the film obliquely states, “The difference? Is (precisely) in the plural.” —Inney Prakash
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 1
Anti-Cosmos
Takashi Makino (16 min)
One of the few artists still earnestly committed to an ideal of grand spectacle, Takashi Makino crafts all-over abstractions that are uniquely overwhelming. Here, color provides the shape, tracing an arc through oscillating fields of mottled not-objective imagery as they modulate steadily from cool blues, purples, and greens into hotter and drier reds, pinks, oranges, and browns, and then back to the initial shades. The score, a deep and unnerving arrangement of processed field recordings by Lasse Marhaug and the great Lawrence English, seems to confirm that the sense of climate catastrophe which emerges isn’t incidental. - Phil Coldiron
Night Walk
Sogn Koo-yong (65 min)
There is an incredible depth to Sohn Koo-young’s images—levels of both contrast and detail that would seem antithetical. They are so close to stills, if it weren’t for the movement. Night Walk’s compositions evoke a point-and-click PC game; the shots are locked off precisely and the details beckon to you. The fragments of text and poetry that provide narration, similarly, feel like an interactive text game—the tender grass aids my (your?) footsteps, the firefly lights my (your?) path. The night is dyed in a shade of indigo that I want to discover for myself, like Rohmer’s Green Ray. A bottling of a simple, yet perhaps impossible, experience. - Mackenzie Lukenbill
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 2
.webp)
Speech for a Melting Statue
Collectif Faire-part (10 min)
In June 2020, thousands of people took to the streets in Brussels to make a fist against police brutality and institutional racism in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. For a moment, it seemed that some demonstrators would take down the statue of colonial king Leopold II in a nearby square. For now the sculpture is still standing, but an optimistic poet already prepares her speech for the day it will be removed. —Collectif Faire-part
Private Footage
Janaína Nagata (91 min)
After purchasing a seemingly innocuous home movie from South Africa online, the filmmaker begins peeling back its layers to uncover a strange and violent history of Apartheid in this riveting desktop thriller. Seeing Nagata’s mind at work as she isolates and expands details frame-by-frame is a masterclass in active viewing. —Inney Prakash
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 3
Lotus-Eyed Girl
Rajee Samarasinghe (6 min)
Loosely based on the erotic poem “Caurapañcasika” by Bilhana, which was written in prison upon discovery of the poet’s clandestine affair with Princess Yaminipurnatilaka. The verses were written while awaiting judgment, not knowing if he was to be executed or exiled—his fate is unknown. “Lotus-Eyed Girl” ruminates on the curious and fractured intersections of death, desire, and class. Fading family photographs (from an uncle’s funeral to my mother on her wedding day), pomegranate arils, pulsating floral mandalas, and horror atmospherics culminate into an ecstatic collision of death and longing—echoing devastations of the past. Through principles of psychogeography, the systems of power that shape identity and desire, in the way that colonialism has altered human perception, are examined in an undulating and capricious form. –Rajee Samarasinghe
Fugue
John Gianvito (15 min)
A man hikes through late-winter woods. Russia invades Ukraine. It’s difficult to reconcile the scales of action described by those sentences, but this difficulty is what John Gianvito dwells on in his new video. It may simply be that this is a diary, movingly plain and provisional in construction, which recounts what its author did for a few months last year: he watched a war on the internet and went outside. Even if that’s true, such a description makes Gianvito’s images seem less strange than they are. - Phil Coldiron
.webp)
L’escale
Collectif Faire-part (14 min)
Filmmakers Paul Shemisi and Nizar Saleh travel from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Germany for the screening of their new film. During a layover in Angola, they're stopped at the airport because the airline doesn't trust their documents to be real. While Paul and Nizar think they are being led to a hotel, where they would stay until their flight back home , they are actually being taken to an illegal detention center. —Collectif Faire-part
A Movement Against the Transparency of the Stars of the Seas
Esy Casey (30 min)
“I split in two,” the narrator of Esy Casey’s two-channel film says, as she crosses the Pacific, “one of flesh, one made of pixels.” The pixels, via texts and video messages, travel back home to the Philippines while the flesh remains confined to a house in California where she works as a cleaner, “erasing traces” of existence rather than being allowed to embody it. Casey frames this portrait of migration with dual histories of imports and exports, the value of silver and a statue of Christ brought by Magellan measured against the present-day lives of women who leave en masse to work as domestic laborers around the globe. Dance, free movement, is put in dialogue with the practiced work happening in the American household’s ascetic interior. - Mackenzie Lukenbill
Promised Lands
Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa (20 min)
*In Memoriam* Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa (1976-2023) Promised Lands centers a landscape descending into sunset as its main protagonist, accompanied by the often dissenting voices of narrator and subtitles. These voices struggle over possible meanings and derivative stories that stream out like estuaries from the obstinate trees and mountains. Their struggle to 'tell the story' echoes the struggles borne from the ghosts of colonialism, or the project to gain narrative power over a land and its peoples. Amongst swirls of Western art historical references, political polemics, and neo-romanticism, Wolukau-Wanambwa inserts tender moments of resolve that nestle in the sounds of nature, or in a nearly inaudible conversation recorded between Emma and an Elder; what speaks truest is most silent. As Wolukau-Wanambwa suggests towards the end of the film, to be promised is not so much a blessing, but rather the condition of being spoken for. —Andros Zins-Browne
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 4
three sparks
Naomi Uman (95 min)
Esteemed avant-garde filmmaker Naomi Uman takes a residency in rural Albania as the starting point for this poignant, profoundly personal first-person feminist documentary on village life, gender roles, solidarity and creativity. Split into three parts, the film begins by establishing the filmmaker’s place in the community and builds to a collaborative video project that playfully unpacks the acts of seeing and being seen, bridging the experiences of Uman and the women and girls of the village. Each image delights in splendid detail; the whole is a stirring symphony of perception. —Inney Prakash
WAVE 3:
PROGRAM 5
Life on the CAPS
(Meriem Bennani (75 min)
Welcome to the CAPS, a fictional island in the mid-Atlantic created as a result of teleportation gone awry. Our guide to this low-fi, sci-fi world built on Moroccan YouTube and amateur hip hop is a neon green CG crocodile with an implacable accent (she is voiced by Crotchet Fiona, a Spanish rapper originally from Equatorial Guinea) who cheerfully assures us that “CAPS” stands for “capsule,” not “capital.” The latter, however, undoubtedly applies. The CAPS series was shot in Morocco, and it makes no attempt to conceal this setting beyond digital effects that depict teleportation-related side effects like “mega ear” and “plastic face syndrome.” The colonial presence, meanwhile, is everywhere: in ads for a used car company called Atlantic Cars and the mostly offscreen menace of American troopers. Some CAPS residents collaborate with these occupiers, while others plot insurrection with tactics like cutting the fiber optic cables laid deep in the ocean. At one point it’s suggested that this gives rise to CAPS literature — hacked lines of code. The result is a delirious, frayed, and endlessly energetic scramble of digital signals. - Genevieve Yue
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 1
black strangers
Dan Guthrie (8 min)
In staging an impossible dialogue in the British countryside between present-day Dan, and his purported 18th century namesake in the Gloucester Archives, artist Dan Guthrie stretches the contours of what can be done with archival traces. The cinematography of black strangers revels in close visual framings — a hand in the archives, a back in the woods, or a wallpaper — thus gesturing at the trappings and dissimulations embedded in proximity. Dan’s wanderings in the woods offer a rumination on the incommensurability between the speculative, whimsical, feverish weight of his questions, and the silence of the person reduced to the label “black stranger” in the archives. - Chrystel Oloukoi
rupture
Zkonqu (18 min)
Many of the musings that appear in rupture are about the disconnection that occurs in socially mediated life. Yet the film’s emphasis is ultimately inward, and closer to the texture of thought itself. Typewritten notes appear over a slowly rotating and abstracted image of tree leaves in shadow. These express ideas that sometimes repeat, contradict each other, or trail off. Others mingle with the words of major Black thinkers, expressed in audio and video clips: bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Prince. Aside from these archival sources, the image is almost entirely abstract, though it quivers with an intensity suggestive of an active and questioning mind: a prism of introspection. - Genevieve Yue
Mélodie de brumes a Pàris
Julius-Amédée Laou (23 min)
In Mélodie de brumes à Paris, a West Indian man named Richard (Greg Germain) struggles to repress traumatic memories from his time fighting on behalf of France in Algeria. A run-in encounter with his father turns the film into a mournful lament on life under colonialism, before a cameo by the filmmaker (playwright Julius Amédée Laou) spins it in an entirely different direction. This is the North American premiere of a new restoration made from the original 35mm negative at LTC Patrimoine (Paris) under close supervision from Laou, in partnership with Jesse Pires (Lightbox, Philadelphia) and film programmer Steve Macfarlane.
.webp)
Coaley Peak (A Fragment)
Dan Guthrie (6 min)
Selected by Exeter Phoenix for their 2021 Artists’ Moving Image commission, Dan’s idea was to make a film about Blackness and belonging in the English countryside, taking a family photo of some of his relatives at the Gloucestershire viewpoint Coaley Peak as a starting point. Whilst making the film, something happened. —Dan Guthrie
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 2
Exterior Turbulence
Sofia Theodore-Pierce (11 min)
Prismatic Ground alumnus Sofia Theodore-Pierce reliably constellates disparate styles of image-making into rich emotional atmospheres, perched just on the far side of legible narrative. Here, the stars are signifiers of last century’s bohemia: reclining nudes, languid novels, overfull apartments, cigarettes. As the camera tilts and pans, surveying them with a loose rhythmic formalism, intertitles inject snatches of daily experience, erotic encounters, standard anxieties. All together, the mood lands near one of the foundational lines of American poetics: “While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem.” - Phil Coldiron
No Tomorow
Ryan Clancy (12 min)
A sober sexual reawakening gives rise to a speculative communion with neanderthals. —Ryan Clancy
Fin de siglo
Maike Höhne (15 min)
A young Argentine woman comes to Cuba to make a documentary about prostitution. But instead she gets herself a black Cuban lover and the boundaries of prostitution start to fade. A taxi- driver also gives his opinion on the subject of prostitution. —Maike Höhne
I Cannot Now Recall
Kersti Jan Werdal (15 min)
In I Cannot Now Recall, Kersti Jan Werdal guides the viewer through a selection of Yvonne Rainer’s dreams, chosen by the filmmaker from a collection of Rainer’s journals archived at The Getty Museum. Constellated first through Werdal’s selections, and then refracted through the readings of a street-cast filmed in LA High Memorial Park, Rainer’s dreams appear as nodes on an anxious psychic ecosystem. As the material distills from private reflection into script into performance, what emerges is a vital interchange between desire and disquiet. References to the medium of film seem to further entangle the relationship between filmmaker and subject, as well as the relationship between film and viewer. Joined by doubles and guides, in unfinished buildings and the depths of outer space, the dreamer explores her subconscious with a probing appetite for expansion and wholeness – but who the dreamer is exactly remains an open question. —LD Deutsch
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 3
.webp)
Close, but no Cigar (16mm trilogy)
lovertits (Ayanna Dozier, 4 min)
A Picture for Parco (Ayanna Dozier, 3 min)
an exercise in parting (Ayanna Dozier, 3 min)
Dozier uses her own image across three films to playfully but incisively unpeel the layers beneath performed sexuality and love’s gaudy desperation. Referencing commercialism and excess— with nods to a Japanese ad featuring Faye Dunaway & Charles Matton’s ‘Spermula’, respectively— and satirizing the darkness of innocence lost, the trilogy enlists the artist’s body as an empowered guide to its own complex history amid a sea of cultural signifiers. - Inney Prakash
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 4
Aidol
Lawrence Lek (83 min)
Building on his Sinofuturist project, which contemplates an Earth society dominated by the ubiquity of AI, Lek guides us through a dense apocalyptic environment with a series of chapter-oriented Socratic dialogues that contemplate the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. In the lead up to the corporate-sponsored 2065 eSports Olympics, in which humans and handicapped “Synths” face off on computers, a pop star named Diva poses profound questions about the nature of originality, ultimately enlisting our AI philosopher-guide Geo’s assistance in staging her comeback. In a world where the algorithm dictates power, violating its dictums can entail serious consequences— while machines must face their own qualms about appeasing human nature. Lek’s lushly orchestrated score creates a dreamy, liquid atmosphere in which to consider the film’s many provocations. —Inney Prakash
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 5
Bibi Seshanbe
Saodat Ismailova (50 min)
Bibi Seshanbe is a film that occurs at the intersection of dream, folklore, and ethnography. In frequent closeups of women’s hands at work, it weaves between the life of Bibi Seshanbe Ona, Central Asia’s version of Cinderella, and the women who, in hushed tones, appeal to her protection in ritual practices. Against a flat and hazy city backdrop, there is a velvety richness to the spaces where women gather. Every texture, from the glowing orange of a plastic milk pail to a sheet of sesame-crusted bread, beckons. For the followers of Bibi Seshanbe, her story offers solace, and hope for sumptuous if fleeting joy. - Genevieve Yue
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 6
The Apocalyptic is the Mother of All Christian Theology
Jim Finn (64 min)
The story of Paul the Apostle’s life, ideology and influence is told by piecing together 20th Century 16mm and cassette propaganda, board games, animation, reenactments, Roman Empire doom metal and covers of Catholic liturgical music. The gentle Paul themes with flute, acoustic guitar and mellotron contrasts with the Demonic Roman Empire themes of electric guitar, drums and synth. Performance artist Linda Montano and Usama Alshaibi portray Paul on his journey. The film tries to capture the disturbing reaction Paul and his letters had in the early days of Christianity. The use of live action, animation, found footage and original music was a way to recover his biography from the brains of 20th Century humans so that in some perhaps misguided Utopian impulse, we can build something new out of it for the future. - Jim Finn
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 7
Darkness, Darkness Burning Bright
Gaëlle Rouard, 16mm (70 min)
Darkness, Darkness, Burning Bright is a stunning piece of pastoral surrealism in two parts, “Prelude” and “Oraison”, set to an electro-acoustic composition by analog filmmaker Gaëlle Rouard. Combining in-camera visual effects, such as split screens, exposure shifts and superimpositions with handmade photochemical processing, the film strip becomes a record of rigorous and intoxicating experimentation. Rouard performs as both alchemist and painter, investing objects with a sense of stubborn, almost pictorial opacity. - Chrystel Oloukoi
WAVE 4:
PROGRAM 8
Where
Tsai Ming-Liang (90 min)
The latest of Tsai Ming-Liang’s “Walker series” locates Lee Kang-Sheng, dressed in the red robes of a Buddhist monk, in Paris. As with the earlier films and installations, Lee’s pace is slow to the point of being nearly still. He moves out of time, out of step, with the commotion around him, but his walk aligns with the camera’s frame, passing from one side to the other. He always appears amid the ruckus — an unexpected reveal by a passing bus is a classic instance of Tsai’s deadpan humor. Throughout, Lee is presented as someone who is seen, by passersby who gawk, snap photos, and in one case, verbally harass him. One of his observers is a young man, possibly an artist, whose solitary wanderings are intercut with the monk’s slow trajectory across the city. The two converge at the Centre Georges Pompidou, where on a large canvas stretched over the floor, they literally cross tracks. - Genevieve Yue
WAVE 5:
PROGRAM 1
LANA
Susan Youssef
(4 min)
Actress Maisa Abd Elhadi was shot while protesting in 2021. This short reimagines the moment the actress danced with the forces and through creativity removed all obstacles, for herself and those before and after her. —Video Data Bank
As if No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night
Søren Lind & Larissa Sansour (21 min)
Søren Lind and Larissa Sansour deliver a haunting opera lament which dovetails the personal grief of a Palestinian mother with that of a people. Performed by soprano Nour Darwish, the opera is constituted of a single aria which fuses together the Palestinian folk song Al Ouf Mash’al and Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Lind and Sansour’s post-apocalyptic landscapes of desolation take on a domestic bent in barren interiors which nonetheless honor the labors of grieving mothers— the living-room and bathhouse, with exquisite emphasis on garment, fabric and embroidery. Split across screens, Anna Valdez Hanks’ wrenching cinematography sculpts abstract, geometric blocks of light, resistant opacity and pure darkness, speaking to how ongoing histories of occupation distort foundational spatial and temporal coordinates. - Chrystel Oloukoi
one emerging from a point of view
Wu Tsang
(43 min)
In overlapping frames, one emerging from a point of view links two worlds, two views. On one side is portrait and myth: the fictionalized story of Yassmine Flowers, a transgender migrant from Morocco who, in Tsang and Flowers’s collaborative retelling, becomes a woman scorned by her family, poisoned by a king, revivified by a goat, then finally settling at the bottom of the sea. On the other is landscape and documentary: the farmers, fishermen, and the rugged coast of Lesbos where migrants have sought refuge, often tragically. In an early shot, goats hesitate before jumping over a shallow creek. Many don’t quite make it, and splash awkwardly before regaining their footing. One emerging from a point of view exists in the space of such leaps, both in the hope of crossing, and in the ethereal beauty that comes from these momentarily blended realms. - Genevieve Yue
WAVE 5:
PROGRAM 2
Tous les jours de mai
Miryam Charles (7 min)
Actress Maisa Abd Elhadi was shot while protesting in 2021. This short reimagines the moment the actress danced with the forces and through creativity removed all obstacles, for herself and those before and after her. —Video Data Bank
A Woman Escapes (Real3D)
Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, Blake Williams
(81min)
In Real3D. Three filmmakers of wildly different sensibilities come together for this epistolary narrative of one woman’s attempt to shape her isolation into something from which she might make sense, or even meaning. The woman is Deragh Campbell, continuing the role of Audrey Benac that she’s played across four prior films with Sofia Bohdanowicz, whose soft 16mm interiors comprise the film’s ground note. Alone in a Parisian flat, Benac receives footage from Blake Williams (3D explorations of spaces IRL and online) and Burak Çevik (crisp HD master-shot compositions), and begins editing this material to her own ends. Intimations of romance creep into the edges, but what lingers is the joy and pain of seeing through absent eyes. - Phil Coldiron
WAVE 5:
PROGRAM 3
NYC RGB
Viktoria Schmid (5 min)
This gentle trip from Viktoria Schmid surveys the architecture of Manhattan in a series of fixed-frame compositions, each exposed three times, through red, green, and blue filters. The city’s range of beiges, browns, and grays remain steady, while highlights and shadows splinter into geometric arrays of color. This tension between consistency and change draws the mind toward one of the traits of modern New York which Schmid avoids: its glass-facade new construction. The matter of what goes into making a city durable as both idea and place is a heavy one, though the film’s opalescent skies do help to lighten it. - Phil Coldiron
Only If You Could See a View Above the Clouds (16mm)
Zhuoyun Chen (4 min)
A ghost, a face, lucid minerals, vague landscapes... What do you see when my words fall? —Zhuoyun (Yun) Chen
M*U*S*H (16mm)
Jodie Mack (8 min)
In a dizzying swirl of stop-motion animation, the petals in M*U*S*H* are made to dance in a Dionysian frenzy. Half-shriveled, they are already on their way to becoming a potpourri mulch. Then new petals are thrown on top, a riot of red, yellow, and violet, the occasional fragment of a leaf. The earlier flowers might be buried, or they might have disappeared into the alternating black and white backgrounds that peek through this density of organic matter. The image moves too quickly to allow for careful study, but then, the progression slows and stills. The camera trembles slightly. Movement — life — is discernible from within this wilted flower offering. - Genevieve Yue
Crashing Waves
Lucy Kerr (19 min)
Lucy Kerr uses former stuntperson Jess Harbeck’s account of on-set recklessness as the foundation for this essay on the ethics of certain attempts to capture reality. As Kerr reads Harbeck’s first-person narrative in measured deadpan, she tests it against a pair of images: a black screen and then, after several minutes, a long downward shot of dark waves on a rocky shore. The third and final passage resolves this lightly stated contrast between testimonial and symbolic impulses—between documentary and fiction, if you’d rather—into a grim found-footage horror of practical effects. - Phil Coldiron
Site of Passage
Lucy Kerr (7 min)
Sitting, with appropriately adolescent uncertainty, somewhere between the conventions of the dance film, the performance document, and the coming-of-age story, Kerr’s film is acutely tuned into the social choreography of its tween-girl subjects. In a slumber-party setting, the girls run through a trio of “pieces” with exuberance and commitment: the classic “light as a feather, stiff as a board”; a kind of fast-paced charades; a gymnastic exercise in stacked bodies. There are, notably, no phones in sight. Kerr is respectful of the emotional privacy this age demands, leaving the messiness of experience to hum at the edges of precisely acted rituals. - Phil Coldiron
WAVE 5:
PROGRAM 4
Theta
Lawrence Lek (12 min)
Glossary of Non-Human Love
Ashish Avikunthak (96 min)
WAVE 5:
PROGRAM 5
The Miracle on George Green
Onyeka Igwe (12 min)
The Miracle on George Green centers around a public, natural space—specifically a single Chestnut tree within that space—and branches outward into a history of outdoor collectivity; its successes, its failures, its songs. Soft sunlight blurs the edges of Igwe’s frames. The organic pastels of the social and political movements that she documents are inviting. The fact that these documents are memories, imaginations and archival scraps points toward an uneasy sense of loss: in a world ever-teeming with privatized infrastructure, such harmony feels scarce. - Mackenzie Lukenbill
No Stranger At All
Priya Sen (40 min)
Sunday, May 7, 2024 @ Anthology Film Archives
WAVE 5:
PROGRAM 6
Yaangna Plays Itself
Adam Piron (8 min)
Sunday, May 7, 2024 @ Anthology Film Archives
.webp)
Waterfall (16mm)
Arthur & Corinne Cantrill (17 min)
Sunday, May 7, 2024 @ Anthology Film Archives
Dans les cieux et sur la terre (35mm)
Erin Weisgerber (12 min)
Imprinting successive layers of time in a ritual of repeated gestures, active attention, walked paths, shifting seasons, and cycling years, Dans les cieux et sur la terre combines the alchemical potential of photochemical film with the ritual of the filmmaker's performance. Filmed over 7 years in the neighbourhood around the filmmaker's Montreal home, a foundational local monument meets fleeting traces of urban flora. Bipacked with travelling mattes, the vibrant reversal filmstrips pass many times through the camera's gate, sedimenting layers of time. —Erin Weisgerber
.webp)
Daron, Daron Colbert (35mm)
Kevin Steen (14 min)
Sunday, May 7, 2024 @ Anthology Film Archives
Coalfields (16mm)
Bill Brand (38 min)
16mm restoration by BB Optics. Bill Brand’s 1984 document of unionized struggle in West Virginia makes clear that, contrary to current understandings, design and decoration are not antithetical to serious political commitment. As voices on the soundtrack recount the struggle against industrial bosses for safety and equity amongst the miners, the image flickers and flutters in optically-printed mosaics of location photography. We might take these as a brutally elegant visualization of the state of ravaged lungs, riven with patches of black. Form does not clarify a political understanding, it renders it indelible. With poetic text by Kimiko Hahn. - Phil Coldiron
WAVE 5:
PROGRAM 7
What Are the Wild Waves Saying?
Declan Clarke (72 min)
CLOSING PRESENTATION
.webp)
scènes de ménage (35mm trilogy)
I (Alexandre Larose, 13 min)
II (Alexandre Larose, 15 min)
III (Alexandre Larose, 12 min)
Alexandre Larose’s scènes de ménage presents film as a palimpsest, a surface that retains faint traces of previous impressions. Unlike a sheet of paper, film is highly sensitive, capable of registering subtle movements of light and air: the shadow of a person crossing a room, leaves gently swaying in the wind. In this alchemical transformation, matter multiplies, disperses, and recondenses. What initially appears to be a hazy accumulation of cigarette smoke becomes a man sitting down in a chair. Once opaque surfaces become translucent, and it is perhaps no surprise that Larose lingers at windows, watching as the dusty glass transform the attitude of the trees beyond. - Genevieve Yue