SPONSOR
Office Evolution
COMMUNITY PARTNERS
Digital Arts, Film and Television (DAFT)
DONOR
The Cohen Family Charitable Fund
This program of recent personal, animated, documentary, and experimental films includes the labyrinth of ancient forces; the impact of our actions; distance and proximity or depth and surface; an eagle on a desert island; moments of deep, loving rebellion; defective 16mm footage; a pair of strange birds; and attempts to observe, perceive, and represent the reality.
Insomnia
Emilia Izquierdo
London, UK | 2021 | 5 | HD Video
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
Insomnia explores violent waking life events as experienced in the dream insomniac state through dance and bodily movement. Using hand-drawn animation and archival footage, it takes us into the labyrinth of ancient forces battling oppression through dance and cosmic encounters. Choreographies from Martha Graham, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang-Metropolis and others.
Tormenta
Vado Vergara & Emiliano Cunha
Porto Alegre, Brazil | 2021 | 7 | HD Video
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
Tormenta (Storm) is a contemporary fable that is born from the anguish of seeing Brazil destroyed from the inside out. Through memories and images from the first two years of a child’s life, an atonal poem is born: a document on the chaos of the now, and the impact of our actions over future generations.
vs
Lydia Nsiah
Vienna, Austria | 2021 | 8 | HD Video
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
vs (or “virtual spiral”) deals with the dynamics between time and body in film. On digital video and non-reliable 16mm film, the processual of time and (film) body is visually transformed by spiraling camera movements. The spiral runs like a thread through the film.
They Dance With Their Heads
Thomas Corriveau
Bromont, Canada | 2021 | 8 | HD Video
The severed head of a choreographer is held captive by an eagle on a desert island. With a dazzling mastery of drawing and painting, this animated short unexpectedly takes us into the sensitive world of an artist madly in love with dance.
If I Could Name You Myself (I Would Hold You Forever)
Hope Strickland
Manchester, UK | 2021 | 8 | HD Video
Cotton is a plant with connotations that far surpass its delicate white flowers, bringing to mind issues of enforced labor, of exploitation, and of colonialism. Yet the very crop for which creole women were forced into labor also offered a form of herbal resistance: cotton root bark could be used as birth control. Beneath the inherent violence of the slave economic system, we find quiet resistance.
Nature.Meadow.Sky.Long Shot
Yannick Mosimann
Bern, Switzerland | 2020 | 3 | 16mm
UNITED STATES PREMIERE
Images of defective 16mm footage are evoking mysterious scenes and the photographer reads his notes.
An Odd Pair
Melissa Friedling
Brooklyn, NY | 2021 | 29 | HD Video
WORLD PREMIERE
Exploring human/non-human entanglements and (odd) kinships spawned in assisted reproductive technologies, the film tracks a search for the origin of a fugitive pair of birds while investigating the circumstances of the filmmaker’s own twin pregnancy.
Birdsaver Report Volume 2
Heehyun Choi
Los Angeles, CA | 2021 | 11 | HD Video
Wild birds continue to collide into glass walls, and humans collect, measure, and analyze to prevent it. Various attempts to observe, perceive, and represent the reality are prevalent in the history of art, film, and media. Do human vision and bird vision lie in the same world? Are we able to see the same image as the other?