Sponsor
Destination Ann Arbor
Education Partner
U-M Department of Afroamerican and African Studies
Community Partner
U-M Black Film Society
African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County
Donor
Jackie & John Farah
Vision
Çagil Harmandar
Yokohama, Japan | 2023 | 7 | digital file
North American Premiere Premiere
Eyes are magical spheres that make up dreams and retain memories. In our eyes, the visions of the within and of the beyond overlap. New worlds come to be when our gazes meet.
Photosynthesis
Brian Zahm
Chicago, IL | 2023 | 7 | DCP
World Premiere
Seeds. Light. Water. Life. Enter a mysterious void to witness the miracle of life via a 1960s perceptual, art-inspired, three-dimensional experience.
The Looking Game
Ann Upton
London, UK / Dublin, Ireland | 2023 | 7 | DCP
North American Premiere
A two-way mirror with the lights switched off. Eyes are tracked and attentions are plotted as a fictitious audience follows the narrator’s orders. They are divided by the screen and, though they try, neither can see through to the other side. We can’t be sure if the bond they form is reciprocal or if the audience was ever even there to begin with.
Quiet As It’s Kept
Ja’Tovia Gary
Dallas, TX | 2023 | 26 | digital file
A contemporary cinematic response to The Bluest Eye,. Quiet As It’s Kept is an intimate collage of vintage Hollywood, direct animation, original Super 8 and 16mm film footage, and documentary conventions. Meditating on the gaze and Black women’s particular embodied realities, Gary also recontextualizes contemporary social media footage. Instinctual and eviscerating, the film encourages viewers to make meaning that is rooted in the subjective and examine their position within looking relations.
Intervals
Simon Payne
London, UK | 2023 | 10 | digital file
North American Premiere
Stripes of primary and secondary colors in lateral motion and inverse diagonal motion, subsequently layered, divided, and doubled. This has shown as a two-projector piece and it might well work for more than two. Intervals can be thought of as a space between two things, a break in activity, a gap in time, the difference in pitch between two sounds, the difference between two colors.
Long Time No Techno
Eugenia Bakurin
Kiel, Germany | 2022 | 4 | DCP
Bakurin appropriates Soviet film footage from the Odesa Film Studio (the Russian Empire’s first film studio) to reclaim a memory of a lost childhood of two belligerent countries, inviting viewers to look for their own recollections in the same footage, creating an act of collective remembrance in the process. Footage features dancing moments from children’s films, which providing a glimpse into a carefree time of adventure, fantasy trips, and freedom—illusions of a time that has since passed. Today the film studio, like many other cultural monuments in Ukraine, is threatened with destruction by the Russian army.