Sponsor
U-M Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design
Community Partner
Screen Dance International
Donor
Ken Burns
Poem of E.L.
Maya Gurantz
Los Angeles, CA | 2022 | 19 | digital file
In 2013, a woman’s last known movements were captured by elevator surveillance. Released by the LAPD to identify her body, this footage quickly exploded online into thousands of conspiracy theories, becoming fodder for horror and true crime exploitation. Poem of E.L. explores Elisa Lam’s unsolved death by dismantling the tired tropes used to tell her story, translating the elevator footage in three different ways: as physical re-enactment; as a speculative POV journey cutting between memory and hallucination; and as an immersive fugue state in found footage.
Cinema for the Dead
Bruno Moreno & Renato Sircilli
São Paulo, Brazil | 2023 | 14 | DCP
North American Premiere
In the village of Barra Grande, among appearances and disappearances, the animals keep the dead company. An attempt to touch nameless things through cinema, using its technical elements to oscillate between plasticity, the spiritual, and the ethical.
Le Rêve
Peter Conrad Beyer
Stralsund, Germany | 2020 | 8 | digital file
World Premiere
The raven dreams of nature; he dreams of a world of plants and insects. He travels, flies into nature. He is nature itself. Nature itself dreams into trance.
This Line Connects the Void
Tram Quynh Nghiem
Toronto, ON, Canada | 2023 | 16 | digital file
North American Premiere
Filmed in the artist’s family apartment on the edge of Parkdale in the city of Toronto, this work explores the poetics of grief and precarity for the family around the time of death and dying regarding the artist’s sister. With nonlinear storytelling and fragmented images, the work moves between speculative fiction, documentary, and experimental film. Referencing Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Anne Carson’s poem “On Walking Backwards,” it considers the space and metaphor of a void and the desire that moves between the dead and living.
Moth Print
Sarah Bliss
Montague, MA | 2023 | 4 | digital file
"Moth Print" is a collaboration with my deceased father. It traces lines of loss and confronts failure of memory. A cameraless handmade film, it employs a laser printer to image directly onto clear film leader, creating both (optical) sound and image. Each printed sheet contains 231 frames patiently composed and assembled one by one: 9.6 seconds of projected film. It utilizes two texts: digital video I shot of a galium sphinx moth compulsively dive-bombing a light that could destroy it, and a manuscript page from my father’s unpublished memoir in which he describes visiting his own father who was dying of Alzheimer’s. My father found him imprisoned in a state hospital, brutally beaten and bruised, strapped to a gurney, unable to speak.
Déjà Nu
Rolf Hellat
Zurich, Switzerland | 2023 | 14 | digital file
North American Premiere
Voices, rhythm, sculptures of industry and nature, pure existences, and intensely strong fates collide and intertwine in this off-piste and out of the ordinary musical poem of polycultural sentiments.