Cinetracts '20
A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency project.
Tony Buba
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Charles Burnett
Su Friedrich
Natalia Almada
Želimir Žilnik
Cauleen Smith
Gabriel Mascaro
Rosine Mftego Mbakam
Akwaeke Emezi
Tamer El Said
Kelly Gallagher
Dani ReStack
Natasha Mendonca
Sky Hopinka
Christopher Harris
Bouchra Khalili
Karrabing Film Collective
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Sheilah ReStack
Cameron Granger
Also Directed by Tony Buba
A film which uses the device of developing Polaroid camera shots to present the highlights of a family celebration during the birthday of filmmaker Tony Buba.
In this film, Buba struggles over whether he should make a film about a food bank, or just use the money to donate food to the bank. In the end, he leaves it up to the viewer.
This short tells the story of a cafe where steel workers come to eat.
A year goes by during the G.W. Bush administration.
A portrait of a now-shuttered barber shop in Braddock PA.
A short documentary about Braddock
A look at the passage of time, filmmaking, and Braddock PA.
A snapshot of a pizzeria in Braddock, PA circa 1990.
A visit with family to learn how to make fresh pasta.
A short film featuring images of his grandfather’s just-demolished shoe-repair shop in 1972
Also Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
A fluorescent tube illuminates an empty playground in the evening. Nearby a flash of light is projected on a makeshift screen. This outdoor movie is a portrait of a village repeatedly struck by lightning. As night falls, the silhouette figures of young men emerge, they are playing with a football raging with fire. They take turns kicking the ball which leaves illuminated trails in the grass. The lightning on the screen flickers amid the fire and the smoke rising from the ground. The game intensifies with each kick that sends the fireball soaring into the air. Finally the teens burn the screen and crowd around it to witness the blazing canvas, behind which is revealed the ghostly white beam of a projector. Phantoms of Nabua is part of the multi-platform Primitive project which focuses on a concept of remembrance and extinction and is set in the northeast of Thailand.
0116643225059 is an early experimental film by Weerasethakul made during his time at SAIC. The work is about a long-distance telephone conversation between the filmmaker and his beloved mother in Khon Kaen, Thailand. Weerasethakul superimposed a photograph of his mother in her youth alongside his own image and his apartment in Chicago. It renders a strong bond between the artist and his family.
Taking the recent tsunami in Asia as its starting point, the filmmakers have used the idea of a ghost seen wandering along the rocky coastline of a Thai island and, in a life-affirming gesture, they have invited some local children to direct the film for them, suggesting and filming the movements of the actor-ghost.
Created in celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this short essay centres on a monologue delivered by a reincarnation of the philosopher in twenty-first century Thailand.
The work is part of the Memoria Project, the first major series of work that is set outside of Weerasethakul’s home country. Given his affinity for the Amazon, of which Thai jungle tales were originally inspired, Weerasethakul has started to explore South America - and since 2017, has been developing a film based in Colombia. He is drawn to its topography, where active volcanoes and landslides ceaselessly transform natural landscapes. The Memoria Project presents both personal and collective memories, while retaining the artist’s fascination with illumination. A vital part of the video and photographic works is the presence of a lone protagonist on the beach. Weerasethakul worked with Canadian actor Connor Jessup who visited him during the filming of a documentary at Nuquí area in Chocó Department, western Colombia. Here, the actor is a spirit that contemplates the artist’s journey, his dream of both real and imaginary films.
Petch, one of the young men of Nabua, composes and plays this song about his village. One evening, he sang a song to Weerasethakul’s film crew regarding an August event when the former members of the Communist Party of Thailand gathered to commemorate the first shoot out in the field more than 45 years ago. Weerasethakul layers Petch’s song with an image of his friend, Kamgiang, whose grandfather was killed by the soldiers in the field not far from his home.
Invisibility displays Weerasethakul’s continued interest in the issue of perception and memory. The installation takes threads from his recent films, Cemetery of Splendor and Fever Room, both of which feature the same actors. Here, he takes them deeper into an imaginary world and ponders the future of shared consciousness. The videos depict a landscape where the protagonists are confined to a room, along with the viewers. With no way out, they infiltrate each other’s dreams. Invisibility mirrors the troubled state of Thailand’s politics. It proposes a decayed vision of the future where one needs to constantly evade reality. The viewing experience shifts between seeing and not seeing, fact and fiction, space and void.
For a Fiery Monkey Year.
In this video diary, Weerasethakul documents the set of Primitive Project in Nabua, Thailand, particularly the scene when teenagers are hypnotized and sleep inside a time machine.
Cactus River is a diary of the time Apichatpong Weerasethakul visited a newlywed couple near the Mekong River.
Also Directed by Charles Burnett
Tells the poignant chapter in the historic struggle to secure equal and adequate access to healthcare for all Americans. Central to the story is the tale of how a new national program, Medicare, was used to mount a dramatic, coordinated effort that desegregated thousands of hospitals across the country in a matter of months.
This video work intermingles fiction with actuality in a poignant confrontation with homelessness.
A teenage boy leaves a moment of boredom while his father works on his old car, and the mother wishes to go out for a stroll around the block. One more relocated family post Hurricane Katrina.
A musician spends New Year's Day trying to help his friend pay the rent.
A woman (Lynn Redgrave) who believes a dead composer is in love with her falls in love with a man (James Earl Jones) who constantly fights an imaginary man named Hank
Director Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, My Brother's Wedding, To Sleep with Anger) presents a tale about a young boy's encounter with his family in Mississippi in the 1950s, and intergenerational tensions between the heavenly strains of gospel and the devilish moans of the blues.
After the death of his father, a former football star reunites with the family that he abandoned years earlier.
The daring theft and escape of Robert Smalls, a slave in 1862 Charleston, SC.
When an 11 year old boy gets cut from his Little League baseball team, he sets out to form his own team.
Looks at the United States as it becomes an increasingly diverse nation. Tracing the history of significant changes in the Immigration and Nationality Act beginning in 1965, this program introduces a dramatic vision of a multi-cultural America where people of color are the new majority. The feelings and stories of ordinary people are featured in everyday context in six cities across the county. Interviews with residents of Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Miami and several other places probe the changing relationships between newcomers and established residents.
Also Directed by Su Friedrich
The film is primarily a portrait of Kam Kelly, who teaches West African drumming to students at various New York schools, including Intermediate School 292 in Brooklyn. One of his students, Jessica Jackson, is featured. The piece was commissioned for the “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2012.
First Comes Love consists of perfectly choreographed scenes of four wedding ceremonies accompanied by a complex medley of popular love songs. All seems to be going as it should until the couples reach the altar, when the celebratory atmosphere is interrupted for a surprising public service announcement. Then song and dance continues until the happy couples depart, leaving behind a dwindling crowd and a few altar boys who carefully sweep up the rice that blankets the pavement like snow. The film doesn't attempt to defend--or discredit--the institution of marriage. Instead, it reveals the many subtle emotions surrounding the event, and raises questions about how the double standard regarding marriage affects gay and straight couples.
The Head of a Pin reveals the awkward ruminations of the filmmaker and her friends as they attempt to learn about nature. Starting out as an examination of the differences between urban and rural life, between the daily grind and summer vacations, the film turns unexpectedly into a portrait of what happens when city dwellers encounter a country spider.
After a twenty year period of multiple illnesses and injuries, the filmmaker turns the camera on herself as a way to analyze her chances for a happier, healthier life. In the process, she captures the frustration, tedium and petty annoyances of a revolving-door relationship with the medical establishment, while portraying the complicated web of emotions that accompany any medical problem. With humor and honesty, The Odds of Recovery uses the filmmaker's medical history as a means to address a perennial human problem: the desire to avoid conflict and deny the need for radical change.
Through a series of twenty six short stories, a girl describes the childhood events that shaped her ideas about fatherhood, family relations, work and play. As the stories unfold, a dual portrait emerges: that of a father who cared more for his career than for his family, and of a daughter who was deeply affected by his behavior. Working in counterpoint to the forceful text are sensual black and white images that depict both the extraordinary and ordinary events of daily life. Together, they create a formally complex and emotionally intense film.
In 1989, together with a group of female friends, Su Friedrich rented and renovated an old loft in Williamsburg, an unassuming working-class district of Brooklyn. In 2005 this former industrial zone was designated a residential area and the factories, manufacturers and artists’lofts were priced out by property speculators lured by tax breaks. Friedrich spent five years documenting with her camera the changes in the area. She shows the demolition of industrial buildings and the construction of trendy new apartments for wealthy clients, watching old tenants leave and new inhabitants arrive. As she keeps meticulous record of developments, the extent and speed of the upheaval becomes clear. Her own tenancy agreement expires too and so her documentary images and trenchant commentary become the tools of her growing anger. A documentary of small changes evolves into an historical record of New York, a case study of the rapid gentrification of our cities.
The Ties That Bind is an experimental documentary about the filmmaker's mother, who was born and lived in southern Germany from 1920-1950. Through a mixture of personal anecdote and social history, she describes the rise of Nazism, the war years, and the Allied occupation, during which she met her future husband, an American soldier. The Ties That Bind breaks with the usual format of war documentaries, thus allowing a different portrait of the individual to emerge, while it reflects on the current political situation in America and the filmmaker's activities in relation to those issues.
Rules of the Road tells the story of a love affair and its demise through one of the primary objects shared by the couple: an old beige station wagon with fake wood paneling along the sides.
Su Friedrich has taken up the camera again in her ongoing quest to film the battleground of family life. Her mother Lore--who played the lead in The Ties That Bind (1984), a film about her experiences growing up in Germany during the Second World War--plays the lead again, this time kicking and protesting against being moved at the age of 94 from her home in Chicago to an “independent living” facility in New York. Friedrich and her two siblings fill out the supporting roles, cajoling, comforting, and freaking out.
With few words and no polemics, From the Ground Up shows how an ordinary cup of coffee occupies center stage in the world economy. Traveling with the filmmaker from Guatemala to South Carolina to New York City and seeing each phase of coffee production unfold—the growing, picking, processing, distribution, brewing and selling—one comes to understand that most products we use have passed through the hands, and lives, of countless people in numerous countries. As the world’s second most traded commodity after oil, it’s all about the coffee, and about everything else we consume, consume, consume….
Also Directed by Natalia Almada
The glimpse into the life of Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles. Past and present collide as filmmaker Natalia Almada brings to life audio recordings she inherited about her great-grandfather, General Plutarco Elías Calles, a revolutionary general who became president of Mexico in 1924. Time is blurred in this visually arresting portrait of a family and country living under the shadows of the past.
Told using Mexico's 200 year-old tradition of corrido music, To The Other Side recounts the story of an aspiring corrido composer facing two life-changing choices: to traffic drugs or unlawfully cross the border into the United States.
After 35 years working as a clerk in a government office, Doña Flor has become such a cog, invisible to herself. Cloaked in solitude and routine, she has even suppressed the loss of her daughter who drowned years ago. As her retirement approaches the walls of bureaucracy that have sheltered her from her pain begin to crumble. Doña Flor’s sense of self begins to awaken in parallel with the country beginning to erupt from excessive violence and corruption.
A mother wonders, will my children love their perfect machines more than they love me, their imperfect mother? She switches on a smart-crib lulling her crying baby to sleep. This perfect mother is everywhere. She watches over us, takes care of us. We listen to her. We trust her.
From dusk 'til dawn, El Velador accompanies Martin, the guardian angel whom, night after night, watches over the extravagant mausoleums of some of Mexico's most notorious Drug Lords. In the labyrinth of the cemetery, this film about violence without violence reminds us how, in the turmoil of Mexico's bloodiest conflict since the Revolution, ordinary life persists and quietly defies the dead.
Also Directed by Želimir Žilnik
A film about Roma deportations.
A series of portraits of women from different fields of work who give us their views of the relationship between men and women – a Chinese woman who owns a beauty salon and hairdresser’s studio, workers at the first privately owned shoes factory, women who participate at the Erotic Fair in Budapest, a manager of a restaurant, and successful business women.
The aged rocker Igor works as a journalist and DJ at the "Radio Student" in Ljubljana. He notices that the janitor Miha works for the police, tapping the walls and observing the journalists who are critical of the regime. After a clash with his editor, Igor decides to leave for Greece by his old bike DKW from 1938, via Bosnia and Serbia. Young Rahela joins him on the trip. Traveling through Yugoslavia, Igor becomes involved in unexpected turmoil: Milosevic's "antibureaucratic revolution" starts in Serbia and Vojvodina.
Story follows a weekend in a village where young adults after a hard working week let there steam off in taverns eating, drinking, singing, breaking glasses and occasionally other things every Sunday.
In the center of this docudrama are the events and tensions of the shooting of a feature film about Belgrade in the future. The director sets up unrealistic requirements to the producer, who breaks the law by overstepping the budget. During a court trial where the crew members are at the witness stand, we follow up the drama of how a film is made.
A moulder wants to live a happy life, but the circumstances in his factory are such that everyone is looking for an opportunity to grab the money before the ship sinks down to the bottom.
A construction site with foreign workforce - lunch break. A Greek man tries to write a request letter to the German authorities to allow his parents to stay in Germany.
A multinational company owned by Mrs Judit Angst is facing financial difficulties: she decides to hire a group of young anarchists to fake her "kidnapping". After a couple of weeks spent in confinement she will be able to justify the downfall of her company before the people and at the same time to gain the status of the opponent to the destruction and chaos.
Kenedi is in a huge debt after building a house for his family. He finds himself searching for any kind of work to support himself, for as little as 10 EUR per day, a scarce amount to help him relief his debt. Ultimately, Kenedi decides to look for money in sex business. Initially offering his services to older ladies and widows, he expands his 'business' to offer sex to wealthy men. When he finds out about new liberal European laws on gay marriages, Kenedi sees prospects in looking for a "marriage material", to renew his search for a legal status in EU. The opportunity arises during EXIT Music Festival, when he meets Max, a guy from Munich. But will their promising relationship bring the solution to Kenedi's problems?
Villagers of Kovilj grow cattle on the Danube islands. Marko, an owner of ten horses, around twenty cows and other cattle is a good friend with a Roma named Kamer, who helps him sell the cattle at local fairs. Željko, a young horse breeder leads the villagers when they try to save the cattle in the spring of 2006 from the big flood. An attractive waitress Ana rivets attention of the young men from Kovilj. Life and work close to the Danube connect the Roma people and the locals, and together they show up at the village gatherings (birthdays, patron saint’s days). After unsuccessful emotional relationships, Ana and a couple of her friends decide to leave the village and seek happiness on the other bank of the Danube.
Also Directed by Cauleen Smith
A young woman (Toby Smith) in a photography class begins taking pictures of black men out of fear they will soon be extinct.
Second of three films relating to American conceptual Land Art of the 1970's and American histories and traumas.
“Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) is 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). Smith collages images and bits of text from a scrapbook by 'Kelly Gabron' that had been completed before the film was begun, and provides female narration by 'Kelly Gabron' that, slowly but surely, makes itself felt over the male narration about Kelly Gabron (Chris Brown is the male voice). The film's barrage of image, text and voice is repeated twice, and is followed by a coda. That most viewers see the second presentation of the imagery differently from the original presentation demonstrates one problem with trusting any media representation.”
Mythical forms embodied in puppetry and cinematic spectacle.
Three monologues adapted from the groundbreaking book, Black Women in White America, edited by Gerda Lerner.
Sun Ra’s anthem Space Is the Place performed by The Rich South High School Marching Band in Chinatown Square, Chicago. Cauleen Smith organised and filmed this energetic flash-mob performance, showing the unsuspecting passers-by who gather to listen. The young men and women let nothing, not even rain, bring the performance to a halt.
Personal pilgrimages to three sites of extreme creativity, invention, and generosity: Alice Coltrane's Ashram, Watts Towers, and Watervliet Shaker Community
Sine at the Canyon Sine at the Sea began as a video designed to be background eye-candy at an outdoor performance event and evolved into a protest against the reverberations of the neo-fascist nonsense percolating in American culture.
H-E-L-L-O translates the famous musical sequence from Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind into a greeting for sites around New Orleans loaded with the histories of music and procession.
A found footage assemblage of epic proportions. Produced on residency at Chicago Film Archives, with music by The Eternals.
Also Directed by Gabriel Mascaro
Through dialogues with the owners of penthouses in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Recife, High-Rise explores the social and cultural mindset of the elite, and the phenomenon of the 'verticalisation' of the Brazilian cityscape. This is a film about height, status and power.
The film shows the images made by the police during demonstrations of 2013 (Brazil). In times of anonymous faces, what to do with the feet?
In 2027 Brazil, civil servant Joana mainly deals with divorce cases. As a member of a branch of evangelical Christians known as the Divino Amor group, she uses her position to offer a kind of physical therapy to couples who want to separate. Although Joana and her husband Danilo regularly consummate their marriage, neither her constant prayers nor any other methods of assistance seem to be able to fulfill their desire for a child.
In 1965 a VW Beetle is sold in São Paulo, Brazil. Forty years later, the car ends up in a Recife scrapyard in the northeast, with the license plate KFZ-1348. The documentary “The Beetle KFZ-1348” presents the stories of this car through its eight owners, whose lives show a unique portrait of a country.
Iremar is part of a rodeo troupe that tours the Brazilian northeast. His task is to send bulls into the arena. Intensely exciting physical scenes alternate with contemplative episodes that sketch a painterly portrait of the members of the troupe. Sublime images, which alternate with a less idyllic reality: the hard work amidst the cows. Jointly they form a fabulous choreography, against the background of a rapidly changing society.
Avenida Brasília Formosa provides a sensorial insight into the contemporary reality of a neighbourhood that was tranformed following the removal of families to make way for the construction of a coastal highway. This is about film of encounters, memories and desires.
Entering the virtual world of “Second Life”, Brazilian visual artist Paulo Bruscky meets film director Gabriel Mascaro. Mascaro, an ex-film film director from north-east Brazil currently lives and works making machinima (virtual short films) in the “Second Life”. Paulo hires Gabriel to make a machinima documentary of his adventures as a newcomer to the “Second Life”.
Shirley has left the big city to live in a small seaside town and look after her elderly grandmother. She drives a tractor on a local coconut plantation, loves rock music and wants to be a tattoo artist. She feels trapped in the tiny coastal village. She is involved with Jeison, who also works on the coconut farm and who free dives for lobster and octopus in his spare time.
Rodrigo is a young deaf man from Recife, northeast Brazil who works installing car stereos in a small dealership on the outskirts of town. Despite his deafness, sound penetrates his day to day life and he harnesses its vibrations, allowing it to pulse through his veins.
Seven adolescents take on the mission of filming, for one week, their family's housemaids and hand over the footage to the director to make a film. The images that confront us uncover the complex relationship that exists between housemaids and their employers, a relationship that confuses intimacy and power in the workplace and provides us with an insight into the echoes of a colonial past that linger in contemporary Brazil.
Also Directed by Rosine Mftego Mbakam
Rosine Mbakam is invited to step in Sabine’s small hairdresser’s because it is dangerous in the street. She accepts and pushes in with her camera. Sabine’s stories and the customers’ joys, worries, problems and fears bring depth and life into the premises. At times, it feels like the entire African quarter of Brussels had squeezed in. Laughter abounds, anecdotes and life stories elicit emotions, and a male visitor brings a touch of flirt into the salon.
This film is the portrait of Delphine, a young Cameroonian girl who, after the death of her mother and the abandonment of her father’s parental responsibilities, was raped at the age of 13. She sinks into prostitution to support herself and her daughter. She ends up marrying a Belgian man who is three times her age, hoping to find a better life in Europe for her and her daughter. Seven years later, the European dream has faded and her situation has only gotten worse.Delphine, like others, is part of this generation of young African women crushed by our patriarchal societies and left with this Western sexual colonization as the only means of survival. Through her courage and strength, Delphine exposes these patterns of domination that continue to lock up African women.
For Prism, Belgian filmmaker An van. Dienderen invited Brussels-based Rosine Mbakam from Cameroon and Paris-based Eléonore Yameogo from Burkina Faso to work together on a film in which the differences in their skin color serves as a departure to explore their experiences with the biased limitations of the medium. Photographic media are technologically and ideologically biased, favoring Caucasian skin. Such white-centricity means that the photographic media assume, privilege and construct whiteness.
The return of a young filmmaker to her home country, Cameroon, and her reunion with her mother.
As of 1990, many African women fleeing their homes because of the war and political instability in their countries settled down in Belgium. 20 years later, They are haunted by their past. How to express these anxieties that gnaw at them? How to say the unspeakable? What if women other than these refugees started to open the doors of the past?
Also Directed by Akwaeke Emezi
‘Hey Celestial’ is a video capstone project based on the texts of Toni Morrison. It examines Morrison's recurring character of the wild/wanton woman, using images of silence and absence to depict her in the isolation created by her freedom. The juxtaposition of sung text, intertext, and subtitled text deliberately recreates the interior discord of secluded madness.
In a city with unbreathable air, a young woman pays a farewell visit to her older lover, a widower who became agoraphobic after his wife’s death. Both immigrants, they argue over her impending return to Nigeria from their place in diaspora, charting an emotional path together through fear, loss, and a thirst for freedom, all marked by an underlying secret. It’s a story of exile, homecoming, what gets left behind, and the truths that change everything.
Incorporating intertext as narration, this piece features a subject whose lover (a spirit/priest) has left them. Rather than accept this loss, the subject makes a square in the grass and summons the priest into their backyard, trapping it. In this work, both the one who has left and the one who has been left serve as self-portrait proxies.
‘Blesi’ is a short about liminal racial/national identity in which my Tamil mother speaks on her experience of having children who don’t resemble or identify with her. It is a self-portrait that features my sister Yagazie as a proxy subject. The sari she wears in the film is our mother’s kurai, one of her wedding saris, and the music is an evening raga our uncle played every evening at his house in Bangsar, Malaysia.
Shot in Lagos, Nigeria, Ududeagu is an experimental short film about impermanence and a spider. Narrated in Igbo with English subtitles, it is a brief and haunting piece of visual mythology.
Also Directed by Tamer El Said
In the fading grandeur of downtown Cairo, Khalid, a 35-year-old filmmaker is struggling to make a film that captures the pulse of his city at a moment when all around him dreams as much as buildings are disintegrating. With the help of his friends who send him footage from their lives in Beirut, Baghdad and Berlin, he finds the strength to keep going through the difficulty and beauty of living IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY.
A public panel about the unfinished film, OF DUST AND RUBIES the last work of the Sudanese filmmaker, painter and poet Hussein Sharrife, who passed away in 2005 before starting the editing process of the film. Through showing some excerpts of the footage, the panel presents different thoughts and questions by five panelists including Hussein Sharrife’s daughter and one of his close associates.
Also Directed by Kelly Gallagher
A colorful experimental animated documentary exploring the powerful and inspiring life of revolutionary Lucy Parsons.
'Pen Up the Pigs' is a handcrafted collage animation that explores connections between slavery and present day institutionalized racism and mass incarceration. Through chromatic animated histories and futures of radical collective power, the strength of left revolutionary thought and action found in every frame embeds in the viewer visual understandings of the imperative resistance required to combat racism.
Abolish ICE.
By painting frames of 16mm clear leader, the filmmaker explores the feelings and sentiments evoked when returning home to Pennsylvania, after being far away for far too long.
A group of powerful, bold, Irish women political prisoners at Armagh Jail shook Ireland to its’ core in 1980 when they began a transgressive “no-wash” protest, refusing to bathe for a year to bring attention to their plight and the abusive mistreatment of Irish political prisoners by the British government.
A short experimental documentary about the site of a former stop on the Underground Railroad, the erasure of history, and what we owe those who came and struggled before us.
Queen Mother Moore speaking at Greenhaven Federal Prison, 1973.
A 16mm collaged and handcrafted personal essay short film that serves as an exploration of land, roots, and the struggle and strength of the persevering women who came before me. This filmic essay exploration is set against the backdrop of Ireland's radical history.
An experimental essay film illustrating the importance of consent and exploring sexual agency, love, pleasure, mutual desire, violence, and vengeance.
An eccentric, animated documentary on the 'herstory' of some of motion picture's greatest (and often overlooked) contributors.
Also Directed by Dani ReStack
A film by Dani Restack
A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted), is a looping meditation on night as space of mysterious energetic transmissions. Animals, human bodies, children, ritual and performance are investigated as zones of conflict, desire and a visceral movement that is more felt than seen.
The third part of a trilogy regarding "feral domesticity," following "Strangely Ordinary This Devotion" (2017) and "Come Coyote" (2019).
16mm to video. Five 16mm black and white silent films transferred to video and projected onto eighteen foot long vellum banners. A fan blows the vellum which makes the projections spill onto the walls and floor. There is one unifying sound track of peeper frogs (Pseudacris crucifer) singing their mating call.
Inside a Lithuanian synagogue, young Domas Darguzs regales the filmmaker with a whispered, wide-eyed account of mythical events, while the film cross-cuts to images of a goat farm. Kid brother of a Isreali soldier, Domas’ stories are part fantasy, part hopeful ruminations of a courageous, young mind interrupted only by an impatient adult.
“A soldier’s trip to Syria is complicated when he accidentally impregnates a friend. Meanwhile, a horse breeder from Ohio is driven away from home by her own desire to become pregnant. In Hard as Opal the lines between truth and fiction, fact and fantasy, are reined in and treated not as fixed, divisive markers but as malleable threads of narrative potential. Buckhiester and Leventhal perform alongside other non-actors who are filmed in their own varying domestic and professional environments. The result is a rich accumulation of narratives held together by questions concerning the nature of objectification, loneliness, and dissociative fantasy.”—Brett Price
In Dani Leventhal’s Platonic, geometric specters twirl in space; pet cats foam at the mouth; a little boy mistakes his junkie dad for a superhero; and a confused adolescent worries he has sired a centaur.
In Dani’s Leventhal’s latest video we are invited along on a house visit with a familial group. There’s trash in the garden, guns on the sofa, and martial arts in the living room. A photo session records a young woman throwing punches at a man, playacting for the camera, but sweating anyway.
In Shayne's Rectangle, Dani Leventhal's moving and mysterious prayer for healing, a horse farm and a casual poolside dissection are the nodes between which a series of patiently taken sharp turns maneuver through moods both intimate and detached. The camera pursues, observes, offers, reflects, and is reflected. Things clear and things indistinct interact rhythmically, resonantly, producing a volatile and haunting visual prosody. -- Jeremy Hoevenaar
Sister City channels moments of paradoxical experience--of being a superhero or being for sale--into reverberant conduits, articulating a nature divided by panes of glass or suspended in watery solitudes. Each shift begets a kind of origin story: one encounter traces the specific azure of a James Turrell installation to a pet shop jellyfish, in another, a modern-day putto purifies a horrific tale by blowing bubbles in a tub. Sister City, like water, seeks its own level; cresting and displacing continuous bursts of life spiritualized, succulent, and ultimately alone. -Deirtra Thompson
Also Directed by Natasha Mendonca
Mixing documentary and personal memories, the work portrays the flood‐stricken Indian city of Mumbai after the monsoon of 2005. The artist revisits the neighborhood from which the work takes its name and uses it to piece together a mosaic that is, at once, a portrait of devastation and its emotional consequences, and an analysis of the crumbling of personal sanctuaries, in a universal sense.
Transgender Khush wants to transform his female body into a muscly Bollywood one. Suman is a musician whose work criticises the conservative socio-political climate in India. Their lives keep intersecting in this modern, hybrid portrait of the metropolis Mumbai. Exceptional, stimulating and original.
Darkness intimately meanders through the passage of time imperceptibly tracing the path from night to light. The every day activities of people done in partial or total absence of light makes it hard to decipher what the viewer sees or yet again makes the viewer see more carefully, a way to glimpse a deeper reality. Sometimes the people seem at ease with darkness its almost as if night is not meant to be lit. Yet we see children playing and struggling to study in darkness and that makes one question the comfort with the dark.
Also Directed by Sky Hopinka
The filmmaker's grandmother orates memories and the history of Red Banks, a pre-contact Hocąk village near present-day Green Bay, WI.
Texts and performances by the late Indigenous poet Diane Burns bind Sky Hopinka’s dazzling and mysterious blend of original and found sources, which continues the filmmaker’s exploration of language, storytelling, and transcendent ways of seeing.
Told through recollections of youth, learning, lore, and departure, this is an imagined myth for the Xąwįska, or the Indian Pipe Plant - used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who have fainted.
An Unangam Tunuu elder describes cliffs and summits, drifting birds, and deserted shores. A group of students and teachers play and invent games revitalizing their language. A visitor wanders in a quixotic chronicling of earthly and supernal terrain. These visions offer glimpses of an island in the center of the Bering Sea.
Filmed during the 2016 Standing Rock protests in South Dakota, Sky Hopinka's Dislocation Blues offers a portrait of the movement and its water protectors, refuting grand narratives and myth-making in favour of individual testimonials.
Images of landscapes are cut and fragmented, as a hand guides their shape and construction. The voice tells a story about a not too distant past, and elements of nostalgia are assembled in terms of lore.
Sky Hopinka traverses the personal memories embedded within the landscape of Red Banks, a precontact Ho-Chunk village site near present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin, that was also where European settler Jean Nicolet made his landing in 1634.
An experimental documentary, Kicking the Clouds is centered on a 50-year-old cassette tape of a Pechanga language lesson between the director’s grandmother and great-grandmother, and contextualized by an interview with his mother in his Pacific Northwest hometown.
For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?
An exploration of Fort Marion, the US fort where Native American prisoners of war were placed.
Also Directed by Christopher Harris
Found footage of Angela Davis, Foxy Brown, and Gus.
"Florida, 2007. In a quiet outer suburb of the Milky Way galaxy, we live our lives in the pleasant warmth of our middle-of-the-road star, the Sun. Slowly, but surely...there will be one last perfect sunny day" -- International Film Festival, Rotterdam.
A night light.
In this austere and sorrowful portrait of his hometown, St. Louis, Harris sets his black-and-white camera loose to wander through the city’s decaying north side neighborhoods, an area populated almost exclusively by working class and working poor African Americans. Gliding down empty streets, across the facades of once-elegant homes, entering condemned buildings, the camera makes a detached but ultimately damning portrait of civic neglect and apathy. Poignantly, human beings are rarely encountered; their presence haunts the soundtrack of eerie footsteps, an unanswered telephone, and sparse voiceover commentary from found sources. 16mm. (Jim Trainor)
A performer lip-synchs to archival audio featuring the voice of author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston as she describes her method of documenting African American folk songs in Florida. By design, nothing in this film is authentic except the source audio. The flickering images were produced with a hand-cranked Bolex so that the lip-synch is deliberately erratic and the rear projected, grainy, looped images of Masai tribesmen and women recycled from an educational film become increasingly abstract as the audio transforms into an incantation.
A three-channel video installation and a split-screen video installation in response to an 1850 daguerrotype of a young American-born enslaved woman named Delia, who was photographed stripped bare as visual evidence in support of an ethnographic study by the Swiss-born naturalist professor Louis Agassiz, who held that racial characteristics are a result of differing human origins.
A sunny afternoon on an architecture tour boat in Chicago is haunted by the specter of the European refugee crises as a disembodied narrator recounts a much more dangerous voyage across altogether different waters. The hazardous journey is the unseen other of the carefree trip down the Chicago River and across Lake Michigan.
2011, 3 minutes, 16mm double projection, color, silent
Frenzied voices on the Chicago Police Department’s scanner call for squad cars and reprisals during the 2020 uprising in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, as Google Earth tracks the action through simulated aerial views of urban spaces and the vast Cook County Department of Corrections, the country’s third-largest jail system. In Christopher Harris’s Dreams Under Confinement, the prison and the street merge into a shared carceral landscape.
Also Directed by Bouchra Khalili
Presented at Documenta 14 in Athens.
On one hand an exploration of the Bosphorus as a “continuous drift” between Europe and Asia; on the other, the tale (recounted via voiceover) of Anya, an undocumented Iraqi who has lived in the region for 12 years awaiting a visa to Australia.
Bouchra Khalili is interested in the Mediterranean as a space of nomadism and itinerancy. Her work renders it in its subjective aspect by documenting the realities and narratives of migration, offering an alternative mapping based on the personal testimony of clandestine migrations. Mapping Journeys is a series of documentary works telling eight stories. Each presents a static shot of a map of the territory concerned, on which the traveller's hand sketches his or her journey. The accompanying voice has no face, as clandestinity requires: testimony to the invisibility of those at home nowhere and to the loss of identity this brings.
Somewhere between documentary and fiction, this is an essay on questions of territory and human displacements made during an excursion from southern Spain to northern Morocco. Travelling on the Mediterranean rim, we hear immigrants tell their stories.
Bouchra Khalili’s meditation on revolutionary histories considers the poet Jean Genet’s secret 1970 visit to the United States at the invitation of the Black Panther Party.
Also Directed by Karrabing Film Collective
In the Karrabing Film Collective’s They Been Jealous, riots in indigenous Australia correlate with the accumulative possession of traditional lands by the settler state. Karrabing members consider the character of contemporary jealousy, while also remapping indigenous terrains through both social and mythic modes that structure forms of difference and obligation.
One of the Karrabing's most stirring and direct films, Day in the Life (also screening as part of the Frameworks programme) depicts obstacles encountered across four points of their day. A multilayered hip-hop soundscape sees helpless statements by white media make way for the Karrabing's ultimately empowering words of resistance.
As miners steal and pollute the ground underneath them, a group of young Indigenous men are chased by police for allegedly stealing two cartons of beer.
The Jealous One unfolds along two plot lines that meet in a dramatic final encounter: the first, a story of an Indigenous man weaving through bureaucratic red tape to get to a mortuary service on his ancestral land; and the second, a fight between a husband consumed by jealousy and his wife’s brother, who excludes him from community ceremonies.
The Family (A Zombie Movie) opens with future ancestors digging yams and their children playing...but then turn to their elders and ask, "where did we come from?" One kid howls in the background, pretending to be a dingo. A zombie emerges slowly from behind a log, its skin crusted with an oozing white substance, extending a clawed arm toward the children; when they notice, the figure quickly recoils. The children laugh and continue to play, before following the creature to its lair of rusted cars, plastic debris and tarnished woodland. By the end of the film, they’ve killed the monster. What opened as a fairly innocent scene has turned into a commentary on the toxic dangers of unbridled Western consumption.
At the end of the world, only Indigenous people can survive the toxic landscape so the white fellas steal ‘mud children’ to experiment on in the hopes of finding a cure. One such mud child, Aiden now returns to his ancestral lands, where the mermaids were meant to protect him. But the mermaids are being targeted too.
Night Time Go is an exploration of the Australian settler state’s attempt to remove Indigenous people from their lands during the Second World War, and the refusal of the Karrabing ancestors to be detained. The film begins by hewing closely to the actual historical details of a group that escaped from an internment camp in 1943, but slowly turns to an alternative history in which the group inspires a general Indigenous insurrection that drives out settlers from the Top End of Australia.
Across a series of increasingly surreal flashbacks, an extended Indigenous family argues about what caused their boat’s motor to breakdown and leave them stranded. As they consider the causal roles played by ancestral spirits, the regulatory state and the Christian faith, the film makes manifest the multiple demands and inescapable vortexes of contemporary Indigenous life.
Also Directed by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Set in a former US Navy base in Puerto Rico, Ojos para mis enemigos (Eyes for my enemies) observes how multiple introduced and indigenous species—plants and crops, but also animals, humans and not—share this terrain and together constitute a new space, offering poetic as well as very concrete scenarios of the anthropocene, its devastation but also modes of recuperation.
Oneiromancer is the first of a series of works on the sensorial unconscious of the Puerto Rican anti-colonial movement. It centers on the figures, places, materials, and leftover materials of the members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional, a clandestine group, who were arrested and sentenced to near-lifetime prison terms for seditious conspiracy, a political crime.
Shot from the old fuel dock, a mile-and-a-half-long structure once used to service battleships and now used by fishermen as a new short at the decommissioned US Naval Base of Roosevelt Roads in Ceiba, Puerto Rico. The view from the dock is, on one side, the Island of Vieques, and on the other; Vieques Sound--a passage that connects the Caribbean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean. The film is shot through a mirrored object, a formal experiment in order to transform and collapse the monumentality of the view, taking cues from shore fisherman who transform the base's use and meaning.
Farmacopeas are catalogs of plants and their uses. Farmacopea is a film on the relationship between historical processes and the natural landscape of Puerto Rico. Hippomane mancinella, the little apple of death, is one of the most toxic plants in the world. Just sitting beneath it for an afternoon can make you sick for days. If the tree is burned, its smoke can be dangerous and cause permanent blindness. Though it was an important part of the native farmacopea, most Manchineel trees were erradicated. The landscape of the Caribbean has been thoroughly transformed: physically, through introduced species, agriculture and development but also through its visual representation as an undifferentiated tropical place for tourism, service and folklore.
Two young workers at a busy Port-au-Prince open air market have a conversation about the mystical properties of common objects and whether the divine can inhabit any kind of object—mass produced bottles, toxic rivers, beheaded goats.
Instructions to destroy the military-industrial apparatus with a spell. The form of this spell is precise. With Michelle Nonó.
A beekeeper manages the bees that are part of the soundtrack. The afternoon light streams into the theater for 45 minutes to an hour every day and projects images of the forest that has grown in the 10 years since the closing of the base.
Nocturne was shot over 10 days (mostly at night), while thinking about material and poetic transformation—in dreams, in darkness, through objects or ideas—in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. During this time I was hosted by the Quatre Chemins Festival, whose collaborators became an important part of the project. Daphne Menard, appears in Nocturne singing a traditional Haitian song about a young man who goes off to buy coffee and is arrested by police. Guy Regis Junior's mother, an assiduous lottery player, describes her lottery dreams and the common system for deciphering their codes. Two young theater students, from ENARTS, Port-au-Prince's art school, rehearse a speech, written for the occasion.
La Cueva Negra is a moving image project and photo series which explores the Paso del Indio site as a layered repository of symbolic and material histories. The site is well known in the archaeological community. Twenty years ago, during the construction of a multi-lane highway, a complex (possibly Archaic, definitely Pre-Taíno and Taíno) indigenous burial site was discovered and many objects and remains recovered. But the site was paved over for the construction of the expressway.
Also Directed by Sheilah ReStack
A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted), is a looping meditation on night as space of mysterious energetic transmissions. Animals, human bodies, children, ritual and performance are investigated as zones of conflict, desire and a visceral movement that is more felt than seen.
The third part of a trilogy regarding "feral domesticity," following "Strangely Ordinary This Devotion" (2017) and "Come Coyote" (2019).
Come Coyote is the second chapter in the trilogy, Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (SOTD) by Dani and Sheilah ReStack. Come Coyote continues their investigation of climate change, queer desire, motherhood, reproduction and collaboration.
This latest work from the ReStack’s pulls the experience of becoming mother (both through fostering and bio) through the lens of personal lives that are always, also, steeped in a world where systemic racism, classism and heteronormativity influence and shape. Using documentary footage, a journey into a cave, a dream recounted and formal strategies of color, sound and movement the ReStack’s push experiences and ideas together to see what can yield or reveal. The Sky’s In There proposes a fragmented meditation on the capacity of relation to bring about transformation.
SOTD was birthed out of a desire to privilege and amplify the strange and banal quality of daily life, to see what it can yield as an entrance to larger concerns, such as the environment, representation of motherhood, queer desire, the domestic as site of radicality.