COMMUNITY PARTNER
Neutral Zone
Curated by Brandon Walley
Resistance refers to the ability to withstand a disturbance, while resilience is the capacity to recover after suffering from the disturbance. Systems of oppression such as gender, racial, and class discrimination thrive in countless forms across our planet. Each film in this program reveals a different vantage point in order to consider this dichotomy that allows revelations and revolutions to manifest. These projected images shine a light to reveal complexities in humanity’s intrinsic motivation to resist injustice and the resilience to persevere through time and space.
Make-Out (Newsreel #49)
Newsreel
New York, NY | 1970 | 5 | 16mm to Digital
Make-Out (Newsreel #49) is a vibrant document of the early second wave women’s movement and the concerns and thinking of young women at that time. This film is unique in the Newsreel collection, as it was filmed with actors, with a voice-over script created from a women’s group discussion.
New Left Note
Saul Levine
Boston, MA | 1968–82 | 27 | 8mm to 16mm Print
As editor of New Left Notes, the newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Levine was at the center of multiple radical political movements. For this film, he employs a rapid-fire editing style to create a frenetic, kaleidoscopic portrait of the antiwar movement, women’s liberation, and the Black Panthers.
Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron)
Cauleen Smith
Los Angeles, CA | 1992 | 6 | 16mm
Less a depiction of “reality” than an exploration of the implications of the mediation of Black history by film, television, magazines, and newspapers. Using her alter ego, Kelly Gabron, Smith fabricates a personal history of her emergence as an artist from white-male-dominated American history (and American film history).
An Infinite Loop for Resistance ft. Aldo Tambellini
M. Woods
New York, NY | 2018 | 6 | DigitalFile
An avant-garde is a front line. This is a work for the regeneration of the avant-garde. This is a media-fashioned attack aimed at the disturbing omnipotence of hyperrealism and fascist banality–best symbolized by Donald Trump’s burning latex effigy.
Singing in Oblivion
In Competition
Eve Heller
Vienna, Austria | 2021 | 13 | DCP
Films that uncompromisingly deal in (and with) death necessarily seem to have fallen out of time, like the dead themselves. Singing in Oblivion takes this idea as its point of departure and goes missing in the hereafter, in a shadow realm of forgotten places, forms of existence and world views.
Notes for a Déjà Vu
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos
Tehuacán, Mexico | 2021 | 22 | Digital
It is a paramnesiac experience of the images where Jonas Mekas still lives and we can hear him comment on the memory of an imaginary trip to Mexico. This film is shot with expired 16mm celluloid during a popular protest. This is a movie that remembers. This is a political movie.
Brandon Walley is a filmmaker and curator based in Detroit, Michigan. Walley creates 16mm, Super 8, and digital film art that explores the abstractions between humanity, ecology, and technology. His films have been widely screened internationally. Walley is the Program Director for the Detroit Broadcasting Company and has been Media City Film Festival’s Regional Artists Curator since 2008. He has been honored with Best Michigan Filmmaker Award from the Ann Arbor Film Festival and was an Artist Fellow with Kresge Arts in Detroit in 2020.