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Memento Mori as 3,684 Cyanotype Sunprints
Chris Peters
Los Angeles, CA | 2022 | 3 | DCP
This film is a sequence of 3,684 separate cyanotype sunprints, developed using a photographic process invented in 1847. Frame-by-frame, the images were fixed to coated art paper by strong UV (sun) light, developed in 5 percent vinegar, dried for 24 hours to complete oxidation, then scanned and hand aligned. The ‘grain’ you see is actually wood pulp from the paper! The poem was written by GPT-2, a state of the art AI writing engine. It is presented verbatim, edited only for length.
Parasite Family
Prapat Jiwarangsan
Bangkok, Thailand | 2022 | 5 | DCP
United States Premiere
Parasite Family is constructed from old film negatives discovered in an out-of-business film lab. Using analog and digital editing techniques, Prapat Jiwarangsan breathes new energy into these old films. He accompanies them on their journey from the world of analog to the world of digital, and finally to the world of AI-generated images and NFT artworks. Suggesting that these faces represent a certain kind of family that is parasitic on Thai society—the kind of families and institutions that absorb wealth and power—they gradually evolve into a new species of monster.
Handbook
Pavel Mozhar
Berlin, Germany | 2021 | 26 | DCP
After the presidential election in Belarus in August 2020, numerous protests erupt throughout the country. The special police take brutal action against demonstrators. Almost 7,000 people are arrested. Hundreds of victims recount their experiences in interviews, revealing a system of repression, which is reconstructed in the director’s room in Berlin.
NIOBE
Laura Moreno Bueno
Spain | 2021 | 9 | Blu-Ray
North American Premiere
The vines weep, exploring the emotions that emanate from crying. A sensory journey through the corporeality of two women who are one. Is it possible to reach ecstasy through movement? The filmmaker explores the duality of feelings and lets the bodies speak to each other and express what words cannot.
A Perfect Storm
Karel Doing
Netherlands | 2022 | 3 | 16mm
A Perfect Storm is a landscape film, or more precisely a landscape imprinted on the film’s emulsion. The artist has used seeds, tiny composite flowers, and other small elements of cultivated plants that grow in his garden and wild plant species gathered from a nearby nature reserve. The film consists of sequences that are intricately composed and parts that are completely “self-organized.” As such, plants appear not merely as inanimate objects but rather as characters who are expressive in their own right.
A Comb Without Its Teeth
Mohamed Allam
Cairo, Egypt | 2023 | 15 | DCP
World Premiere
The characters lead us into a debate about the concept of anger through different experiences and aspects. Each chapter is intertwined with parallel images of movement and place to discuss our relationship with states of anger, how anger shapes our feelings towards people and things, and how it shapes our culture in general.
I'll Be Back!
Hope Strickland
Liverpool, Manchester & Brighton, UK | 2022 | 11 | DCP
North American Premiere
Taking a legend surrounding Francois Mackandal, a Haitian Maroon, as a starting point, I’ll Be Back! explores Black metamorphosis alongside institutional collecting practices and colonial violences. The film shifts across digital, 16mm, and archival formats, interrupting conceptions of time in order to question the distances between myth, fabulation, and machinations of power.