Turn the Garden
Commissioned by the Chicago Film Archives, utilizing solely films from their collection.
Melika Bass
Director
Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Melika Bass
A film portrait of an unstable entity in a haunted vessel, drawn into and floating away from a siren song.
A fractured, makeshift family ekes out a meditative existence, their lives mysteriously intertwined through ritual and habit. Part musical, part melodrama. An enigmatic tale of eternal return, a decayed slice of Midwestern Gothic.
Waking nightmare, dreamless sleep.
A slow-burning prairie grotesque. On the grounds of a rural sanitarium, three young women search for wellness, as a cult leader seeks to control their bodies through labor and daily rituals.
A commissioned documentary chronicling an American dance company's collaboration with a Cuban dance company to create a site-specific performance for the Festival de la Cultura Iberoamericana.
An earthen fairy tale. A feast for the living.
A mysterious, misfit family readies a feast for a group of visiting outlanders. As they shuffle through ritualistic preparations, shadows reveal each creature- one menacing, one wounded, and one worn, stewards of an old tradition.
Ladies in waiting in a house of mirrors.
Bass takes over the upstairs Kanter-McCormick Gallery at the Art Center, expanding the territory of her gothic world in a new work The Latest Sun is Sinking Fast, an immersive, multi-channel installation incorporating 16mm film/video, sound, architecture, and featuring performances by Sarah Stambaugh, Bryan Saner, and Matthew Goulish. The solo exhibition features a spatial narrative installation that delves, through movement, texture, sound, and gesture, into the psychology of a recurring figure in Bass' previous films; while also introducing two new characters, blending the past into the present. Bass has designed the installation by altering the gallery, leading the viewer through a evocative memory of place, embedding us in a timeless society of lost souls in a haunted landscape. -Allison Peters Quinn, Exhibition Director, Hyde Park Art Center
In the American suburbs, two women mysteriously and sensuously entwine in this slow-burning, saucy, abstracted fable on the longing and laboring female body.
