OPENING NIGHT
The Afterlight (35 mm)
Charlie Shackleton, 2021 (82 min)
WAVE 1
look at that round ass shit
Memory Playthrough
Sim Hahahah (2 min)
Someone demonstrates a formula to recount memories. The process is safe and virtually painless.
Contour
Fabio Andrade (10 min)
“Open the leaves I will see my body turned into flower.” - Gabriel Joaquim dos Santos.
That Was When I Thought I Could Hear You (16mm in person)
Matt Whitman (9 min)
That was when I thought I could hear you: on petals, on fire, and on the edge of the bridge.
Global Fruit
G. Anthony Svatek (5 min)
Tropical fruits and vegetables radiate on a blizzard-struck street corner in Brooklyn, NY. A visual oxymoron, tugging at the edge of an interconnected and collapsing global order.
Wasteland No. 3: Moons, Sons (16mm in person)
Jodie Mack (5 min)
A world tender and unhatched, Future chaos in repose, in slumber. Yggdrasil. Microcosmos. Batter in a bowl. A living wreath. Oleander hyacinth blow away dandelion, particles of an interplanetary lullaby. Dedicated to the one I love. Desiccated attic must momento mori in grace engraved. With the loss of the imaginary and the real, I am unspeakable as one remembers I once was this... before myself, and then nothing, before I could touch the envelope that is right before me, translucent, When I could cry but could not answer. - Darcy Shreve
vs
Lydia Nsiah
(8 min)
Recordings from server farms and data centers, which are the result of various translation processes between World Wide Web, expired 16mm films, and digital video, are sent into a metaphorical and literal maelstrom - becoming a mechanical eye that looks back and looks at us, the viewers.
Constant
Sasha Litvintseva, Beny Wagner
(40 min)
For most of recorded history, the human body was the measure of all things. Constant asks what led measurement to depart from the body and become a science unto itself. The film explores three shifts in the history of measurement standardization, from the land surveying that drove Early Modern European land privatization, to the French Revolution that drove the Metric Revolution, to the conceptual dematerialisation of measurement in the contemporary era of Big Science. Each chapter traces the relationship of measurement standardization to ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power. Cinematic and technical images that begin as products of measurement systems are stretched beyond their functions to describe the resistance of lived experience to symbolic abstractions.
WAVE 2
wings
Goat
Paige Taul (3 min.)
A film about a girl and her js. A meditation on the politics of style, collectivity, and personal taste.
D'Homme A Homme (Super 8mm)
Yashaddai Owens (3 min)
A black trumpeter searches for the truth of this world, but doesn't know which path to take until he's confronted by the image of self.
Alive in Death
Maliyamungu Muhande (6 min)
Burned, scratched, and painted film guides a reflection on healing from colonial trauma; physical scars blend with damaged film.
Autoethnography
Iván Reina Ortiz (15 min)
Artist Iván Reina Ortiz explores their gender identity through examining archival material, personal footage, and how they came into feeling freedom between the gender spectrum.
When Angels Speak of Love
Helen Peña (13 min)
A ritual portrait of a Miami woman as she grieves her sister’s passing and prepares for new life in Clearwater, FL.
WAVE 3
the memory of a memory
Co-presented by Triple Canopy
Vecino Vecino
Camila Galaz (21 min)
Against the backdrop of the 2019 Chilean social uprising, 'Vecino Vecino' deconstructs an archived TV news report about the MAPU Lautaro—a left-wing armed organisation who fought against the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile in the 1980s.
We Knew How Beautiful They Were, These Islands
Younes Ben Slimane (21 min)
At night, a stranger digs graves, buries the dead and watches over them. In the dark, he reveals the personal belongings of the deceased to us.
SHE GATHER ME
Miatta Kawinzi (12 min)
SHE GATHER ME, titled after a line from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, is a poetic meditation on the resonance of different physical and mental landscapes of the African Diaspora. Through analog and digital film, video, and audio, this piece presents alternative ways of considering place and the search for a space of belonging & refuge.
Three Songs without Z.
Karthik Pandian, Andros Zins-Browne (35 min)
A portrait of Zakaria Almoutlak, a sculptor and media activist from Homs, Syria, who fled the civil war in 2015. A triptych of songs, co-written by Andros Zins-Browne and Karthik Pandian with Almoutlak and performed by singers Aliana de la Guardia and Ganavya Doraiswamy evoke memories of his fractured homeland, from his imprisonment by the Assad regime to dancing at a wedding under bombardment. News footage, YouTube videos, and speculative reenactments staged by Pandian and Zins-Browne supplant a missing visual record of Almoutlak’s experiences. Presented in a vertical format (ubiquitous in everyday life, but unique in the cinema), Three Songs without Z. renders moments of joy and pain that are so often edited out of stories of survival.
What We Shared
Kamila Kuc (69 min)
Seven inhabitants of a de facto state on the Black Sea unfurl a web of stories about loss and displacement through the re-imaginings of dreams and memories of the 1992-93 war in Abkhazia. To question the unstable distinction between fact and fiction, these re-imaginings are interwoven with auto-fictional narration and archival materials that have been processed through an AI technology. The Black Sea permeating the film’s world acts as a metaphor of both an idyllic holiday destination of utopian happiness; as well as a perilous force, a place of conspiracy and death. What We Shared employs emotive soundscape and imagery to produce a sensory reflection on artistic practice as a powerful binding force and an act of resistance to dominant power structures.
WAVE 4
open sky / open sea / open ground
cielo abierto / mar abierto / suelo abierto
Libertad Gills, Martín Baus (4 min)
From a point of view-listening that is both animal and elemental, between the air, the ocean and the sand, relationships emerge between humans, birds and marine life.
Notes From the Periphery
Tulapop Saenjaroen (14 min)
Mainly shot in the peripheral areas of the ever-expanding Laem Chabang port in Chon Buri, Thailand, Notes from the Periphery interrogates the notion of territoriality, globalized networks, and ownership through fragmented relations of the affected sites and communities nearby, shipping containers that become a policing tool against protest in Bangkok, and the life cycle of a barnacle.
Canada Park
Razan AlSalah (8 min)
I walk on snow to fall unto the desert. I find myself on unceded indigenous territory in so called Canada, an exile unable to return to Palestine. I trespass the colonial border as a digital spectre floating through Ayalon-Canada Park, transplanted over three Palestinian villages razed by the Israeli Occupation Forces in 1967.
Golden Jubilee
Suneil Sanzgiri (19 min)
What is liberation when so much has already been taken? Who has come for more? Golden Jubilee takes as its starting point scenes of the filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India, created using the same technologies of surveillance that mining companies use to map locations for iron ore in the region. A tool for extraction and exploitation becomes a method for preservation. The father, sparked by a memory of an encounter as a child, inhabits the voice of a spirit known locally as Devchar, whose task is to protect the workers, farmers, and the once communal lands of Goa.
Lida
Lev Omelchenko (50 min)
Lida takes place on the day of Lida Omelchenko's 70th birthday. This already special day is made more unusual by the recent arrival of her grandson, Lev, who had immigrated to the United States with his family in 2001. Returning to Ukraine for the first time as an adult, Lev documents his grandmother as she tends to the small homestead and prepares for the birthday celebration in the rural village in Ukraine. By capturing moments of arduous labor, as well as through personal conversation, Lev inquires into his grandmothers relationship to her home, land - and their family.
WAVE 5
after months of total darkness
Co-presented by The Future of Film Is Female
Pretend You're There
Katie Colosimo (2 min)
Pretend You’re There is about how the internet, movies, TV, daydreaming and growing up can influence how your reality feels.
Searcher
Divya Sachar (19 min)
The artist examines her schizophrenia, and wonders if trauma is passed down through generations.
True Places
Gloria Chung (7 min)
Places that exist at the border(s) of memory and physical terrain.
Other Tidal Effects
Sofia Theodore-Pierce (7 min)
"And there are other tidal effects, mysterious and intangible." –Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea Catamenial seizures, tidal correspondences, a sonic EEG, and a lullaby in partial translation. Highlighting the seams with the darts. An exploration of epileptic rhythms and sensations through moving image practice.
The Hand That Sings
Alex Reynolds, Alma Söderberg (23 min)
A voice says ‘bird’ and a bird appears in the eye, when only a second ago it was a hand, or a tree, or a whistle.
Diary
Gillian Waldo (15 min)
An essay film seeking to make legible the forces acting upon the city of Baltimore through changes in its landscape and personal reflections.
White Hole
Eavan Aiken (13 min)
Human and animal kin are instrumentalised; units of production, their substrate exhausted. Can we conceive a future where technology serves all and look forward with Promethean vigour? White Hole spirals through space and time, seeking the ideal moment for opportunity.
WAVE 6
touch me don't touch me
Tropicollage
Astria Suparak (1 min)
Tropicollage is a short, looping video that collages footage from thirty years of futuristic sci-fi movies and television shows that employ a fetishized tropics trope. White-made media reinforces a racialized, exotic vacation trope, training their cameras on and constructing sets with gangly palm trees, pristine beaches, glistening oceans, and deferential Pacific Islanders, Asians, Caribbean, and/or Indigenous peoples. This is the cherry-picked, colonialist view of tropical lands, which are presented as escapist fantasies and prizes for white Americans and Europeans. People of color are the global majority and within a couple decades the tropics will be home to more than half of the world’s population. Yet white science fiction filmmakers and television creators insist on creating protagonists from a white minority who sojourn to a distant, tropical paradise centuries and millennia into the future.
Madness Remixed
Rhea Storr (10 min)
Contains flashing images. From Beyonce to Miley Cyrus to Diana ross, all have worn Josephine Baker’s now infamous Banana Skirt, performed by Baker in 1926 in a show entitled 'La Folie Du Jour' (The Madness of the Day). The Banana skirt is an exoticisation of the Black body, yet it continues to be worn in homage and appropriation. Madness Remixed examines the fetishisation of Josephine Baker’s body through data moshing analogue film. Seen here in Siren of the Tropics (1927) washing the whiteface from her body in the bath, Josephine Baker is compared with a film fetish, a 16mm abstraction optically printed with latex and glitter. Cultural labour is contrasted with plantation labour, what unfolds is a questioning of which images of Black bodies should be reproduced and on what terms.
Her Violet Kiss
Bill Morrison (5 min)
A woman attends a party where she is first observed by, and later meets, a mysterious guest.
Infinite Distances
Pablo Alvarez-Mesa (25 min)
Found answering machine recordings bring voices longing for a receiver into the realm of the theater, offering hope for connection through a collective experience.
This Is A Pornographic Film—or,goodbyetoArt
cherry brice jr. (11 min)
an eleven-minute celebration of masturbation [explicit].
Acts of Love
Isidore Bethel, Francis Leplay (71 min)
When his older boyfriend loses interest in him, the filmmaker relocates to Chicago and uses dating apps to cast new lovers in an amorphous project that his mother hates.
CENTERPIECE
What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada del Muerto
Hope Tucker (14 min)
Nuclear Family
Creative Agitation (95 min)
WAVE 7
to report an incident
Oliver Sees Indigo
Ryan Clancy, 14 min
An attempt to regain attachment following a period of heroin addiction, near-death experiences, and oxytocin deficiency. The camera shifts between moments of fragile devotion as it searches for a higher power in threads of shared suffering. Oliver, is heaven only for the high?
A Minor Figure
Jamie Weiss, Michael McCanne (17 min)
In 1988, a mysterious man enters the US on a fake passport. Ronald Reagan tours a collapsing Soviet Union. A road trip through rural America ends in a terrorism arrest outside of New York City. What becomes of those lost to the currents of history? Do they leave some trace behind? Or do they simply disappear?
Lake Forest Park
Kersti Jan Werdal (60 min)
Through the showery urban and sleepy suburban landscapes of the American Pacific Northwest, Kersti Jan Werdal’s Lake Forest Park follows a group of adolescent friends in the wake of a mysterious shared loss.
WAVE 8
love as a cry of anguish
The day lives briefly unscented
Brandon Wilson (5 min)
A film about ancestry, transformation and loss. Each shot was created by covering and uncovering the lens with the hand. The footage was then arranged in a layered sequence so that images interact as they appear and disappear.
Declarations of Love
Tiff Rekem (29 min)
The culmination of a three-year collaborative shoot between the filmmaker and her father in their home in Redlands, California, 'Declarations of Love' is a fragmentary rumination on the aging father figure and his nearness to the gender-reveal party fire that scorched the San Bernardino foothills in 2020. Oscillating between fiction and nonfiction, micro and macro, subject and object of the gaze, 'Declarations' contextualizes his rage within the existential anxieties of our times.
Heron 1954-2002
Alexis McCrimmon (4 min)
Heron 1954 - 2002 is a visual eulogy that taps into the phenomena of makeshift memorials and small gestures of mourning. Honoring the life of a loved one who died due to an accidental opioid overdose, the film materializes the process of overdue bereavement by invoking a fragmented presence at the periphery of the mind. The use of a scanner and 16mm film produces soft-focused images of broken glass and debris, the warped image of a man's face shifting in place, the balance between the beautiful and the grotesque. Still-life serves as an offering in the form of his favorite brand of cigarettes, flowers, and a bronze figurine of the film's namesake, Heron.
Home When You Return
Carl Elsaesser (30 min)
“Stretching and blurring the boundaries of video essay, experimental film and home movie, traces of a 1950s homemade melodrama by amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin intermingle with a mournful homage to the author’s grandmother and her vacated home. A powerful mélange of cinematic and domestic spaces, past and present.” – Kevin B Lee
Agantukayan (Strangers)
Rajee Samarasinghe (11 min)
As a child, my mother was sent away to live with other relatives for a number of years, away from her own parents and siblings. This footage was shot shortly after the civil war in Sri Lanka on the occasion of my mother’s long-delayed reunion with Kamala, the aunt she lived with during that time. Kamala was living a life of solitude at this point and has now since passed away—this film is dedicated to her.
Untitled
Joie Lee (3 min)
Untitled is an epistolary exploration of my mother’s untimely passing.
In the billowing night
Erika Etangsalé (51 min)
Jean-René is a retired workman who has lived in Mâcon, France, since emigrating from Reunion Island at the age of 17. Today, for the first time ever, the quiet man recounts his story to his daughter. His journey is interspersed with enigmatic dreams and pains that are rooted in the wounds of the French colonial past.
WAVE 9
in the prison of his days / teach the free man how to praise
Hei'er
Yehui Zhao (21 min)
The filmmaker and a mannequin explore the world through its solar terms. The mannequin embodies the soul of Lin Hei'er, the leader of the Red Lanterns who resisted and fought colonial invasions during the late Qing Dynasty, China. Through poetry and performance, the filmmaker resurrects and unravels the many layers of Hei’er’s spirit. They relive a life of love and revolution.
Configurations (16mm)
James Edmonds (9 min)
The little personal myths and structures we set up to aid the survival of the psyche in times of low harvest.
Looking Backward
Ben Balcom (10 min)
Filmed on the former grounds of Black Mountain College, Looking Backward is a brief elegy to the legacy of a utopian college and other impossible projects.
Maman Brigitte (16mm)
Ayanna Dozier (3 min)
Maman Brigitte stitches together the intimacy of a private manifestation Hoodoo vevue of Maman Brigitte (the barrier between the living and the dead) with the aurality of the body (spitting, running, vomiting, etc.). These “interior” corporeal practices are juxtaposed against sweeping landscapes to draw out film/ritual’s capacity to manifest.
Attic Windows of the Infinite
Sapphire Rachael Goss (31 min)
"A little later a thousand hungry eyes are bending over the peepholes of the stereoscope as though they were the attic windows of the infinite..." Baudelaire, On Photography, 1859 Attic Windows of the Infinite is a completely unique film shot on analogue 35mm using different stereoscopic, lenticular and toy action capture cameras animated together to make a world that layers and freezes time, dancing back and forth in space. The viewer is invited to slip through the screen between the flickering pixels into a realm of shifting dimensions, tracing the triangulated narratives of surface, depth and time.
If From Every Tongue it Drips
Sharlene Bamboat (68 min)
If from Every Tongue It Drips explores questions of distance and proximity, identity and otherness, through scenes from the daily interactions between two women—a poet and a cameraperson.
WAVE 10
destroying the earth, over and over again
Instant Life (16mm)
OJOBOCA (30 min)
The three films you will see are shot-for-shot reproductions of the compilation film Instant Life (1981). Each film in Instant Life (1981) was a remake of an earlier film also called Instant Life (1941). The earlier Instant Life (1941) was a single film, not a compilation.
A Thousand Years Ago
Edgar Jorge Baralt (20 min)
In an imaginary look back at the present from the year 2049, an exile returns to Los Angeles decades after being displaced by large scale social and environmental collapse.
A Vessel, the Ideas Pass Through
Linnea Nugent (6 min)
Secrets of experiencing and the wandering of mind from an initial landing place through the haptic view of a lens.
KŌ (Sugar Cane)
Nathan Howe (30 min)
KŌ is a non-narrated, experimental documentary and the final act of the Hawaiian sugar epoch.
Datura's Aubade
Jean-Jacques Martinod, Bretta C. Walker (18 min)
A farmer discovers a fallen meteorite in the high deserts of New Mexico. The Alien Earth and the Earth Alien commingle under the spell of a deadly nightshade.
Deep Impact
Christopher Thompson (9 min)
Deep Impact explores our deep fatalistic tendencies to design our own catastrophic scenarios in order to enrich our monotonous lives through our simulations of collapse.
Earth II
Anti-Banality Union (97 min)
Earth, present day. With human civilization facing ever-worsening climate calamities, the captains of industry set their sights on a new planet. Starring Keanu Reeves, Will Smith, and Matt Damon, EARTH II reminds us that no matter how far into its final death spiral our species might be, life finds a way.
WAVE 11
the blessings of liberty
Enthusiasm (16mm)
OJOBOCA (8 min)
In-person only. Sunday, May 8, 2022 at Maysles.
Condition/Decondition
Jason Osder (8 min)
Mysterious wartime naval films reveal early military phycological operations.
One Survives by Hiding
Esy Casey (6 min)
Reveberations of US military occupation through three generations of women in the Philippines and US, contemplated through wartime archives and the silent atrocities behind smiles in family pictures.
We Cannot Love What We Do Not Know
Alex Johnston, Kelly Sears (3 min)
We Cannot Love What We Do Not Know takes viewers on a chilling phantasmagoric journey into the paranoid soulless soul of right wing historical propaganda, through an unflinching interrogation of the Trump Administration's cynical, divisive, and factually incorrect 1776 Project.
All the Things You Leave Behind
Chanasorn Chaikitiporn (18 min)
All the Things You Leave Behind interrogates the effects of America's influence on Thai people and society.
Dreams Under Confinement
Christopher Harris (3 min)
Surveillance mapping and police scanner audio combine to form a frenetic urban portrait of the carceral state.
Signal and Noise
Katie Mathews, Jess Shane (13 min)
What are the sounds of Guantánamo Bay Detention Center? In 2015, poet Jordan Scott set out to record the ambient sounds of the prison as a means of bypassing its strict media censorship rules. Today, former detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, recalls how sound shaped his experiences there— both of torture and of hope. Approaching the 20th anniversary of the prison, Scott’s field recordings and Adayfi’s memories come together to create a visceral new landscape of this notoriously secret place.
WAVE 12
industrial capitalism and the world
The North Sea
Chris Kennedy (8 min)
“As Benjamin had predicted, nothing brings the promise of happiness encoded at the birth of a technological form to light as effectively as the fall into obsolescence of its final stages of development.” – Rosalind Krauss
Under the paving stones, the beach
Amanda Katz (16 min)
On Brooklyn's East River waterfront, a new park built on tenuous ground, a new residence converted from a formerly industrial shell, a promise of lives of convenience. A film that circles around rhythms of labor and leisure.
Ruisdael Clouds
James Thacher (1 min)
The clouds in Jacob van Ruisdael’s landscape paintings appear both massively imposing and ephemerally vaporous. Clouds loom over us today as a metaphor for a vast apparatus of power thirsty servers that can never be turned off. A man-made climate system with its own tidal movements. Data ‘packages’ break apart and reassemble briefly as images and text on our screens but they “live'' within the vast northern data center archipelago where the climate cuts down on the cost of cooling the machines. Echoes of original images serve as the raw materials of this film, emerging from the cloud, processed by hand and returned to the cloud.
Last Will and Testament
Frank Heath (16 min)
Pondering recent trips through the Suez Canal and to Onkalo, Finland (soon to be the world’s most secure nuclear waste site) a man consults an estate lawyer to discuss an eccentric plan for his mortal remains.
Blue Room
Merete Mueller (12 min)
In two US prisons, participants in a mental health experiment watch nature videos on loop, prompting them to reflect on isolation and wilderness.
Self-portrait
Joële Walinga (68 min)
A tapestry of footage collected from surveillance cameras over the last four years, Self-Portrait moves from moment to moment around the world, beginning with the frozen storminess of winter, to the melt of spring, the lush heat of summer, and finally the decay and cooling of autumn: the dawn of winter.
goodbye, ghost
Evan Schwartz (6 min)
A personal essay on bipolar disorder, created before I knew I had it.
WAVE 13
i am feeling unwell
Reptilian Freeze Reflex
Anna Hogg, Lindsey Arturo, Rachel Lane (2 min)
A reflection upon the way we relate to one another as individuals, scratched into 16mm black leader.
Autoritratto all'Inferno / Self-portrait in Hell
Federica Foglia (4 min)
Several layers of 8mm films merge to create a camera-less portrait of the filmmaker. The first layer is an 8mm orphan film from the 1970s of a woman dancing, the original box titled "woman dancing with a dog." The second layer is an 8mm found footage film that has been buried for some weeks. While covered in soil, the film emulsion has been eaten by bacteria in the ground, plus some bacteria from yeast and sugar. The third layer is an 8mm home movie that has been first decayed in soil, using the technique mentioned above, then hand-painted with ink.
Squish!
Tulapop Saenjaroen (18 min)
Squish! is a meditation on the self through lurid and liquid forms; filtered through both old and foreseeable technology informed by Thai animation history and contemporary culture, and a constant process of constructing and deforming new selves to simulate ‘movements’. By extrapolating and redefining the terms of ‘movement’, be it through psychological, physical or political understandings, the work interweaves the medium of animation with a state of depression.
Wear and Tear
Jason Robinson (8 min)
Wear and Tear is an autobiographical poem and an honest reflection on a very weird year. Filmed with a thrift store Super 8 camera mid-pandemic on a family vacation during a moment of massive uncertainty, the beach serves as a refuge and a temporary escape from reality. Journal entries, email fragments, voicemails and other digital ephemera are stitched together into a somnambulistic narrative about losing touch, self doubt, and the toll of prolonged stress on our brains and bodies.
Elephant
Maria Judice (96 min)
A woman struggles with day-to-day life in her apartment after witnessing the murder of a young boy by a police officer. The fear keeps her captive for a year. Regular visits from her community and virtual sessions with her therapist helps rebuilds her mental strength to be in the world again. She uses the 'green energy' of plants as her protection, guarding her door and the surrounding space. She finds comfort and a place to mimic resilience by caring for the plants. Community check-ins support her healing, adding to her investigation of grief. As the year passes she moves through the grief eventually leaving her apartment. Her return to the community comes as a witness in the trial of the young boy’s murderer. Elephant is a visual meditation on the physiology of grief. The film explores the body, space, and mental health of those witnessing/undergoing oppression, assault, trauma, and loss.
CLOSING NIGHT
Color without Color
Phyllis Baldino (19 min)
Answering the Sun
Rainer Kohlberger (60 min)