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Alexandre LaroseA triptych portrait of the filmmaker's father done in his ineffable style.
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A triptych portrait of the filmmaker's father done in his ineffable style.
What do the wild waves say? In the wake of Saturn and Beyond (Georges de Beauregard International Prize, FID 2021), Declan Clarke is listening again. The waves, here, are those which, through the writer Francis Stuart, connected the Irish nationalist movement to Nazi Germany in the heart of the 20th century: anti-English chronicles for German radio from 1940 to 1944, a pirate transmitter transported to Ireland, infiltration of agents with his wife who remained in the country... The filmmaker puts himself in the role of the writer but never lets us hear his voice, as if to distance himself from the power of the radio broadcast as a vector of discourse. Rigorous and playful, both lively and melancholic, this film is a meditation on political compromises and the mass media that are their tools.
16mm restoration by BB Optics. Bill Brand's 1984 document of unionized struggle in West Virginia makes clear that, contrary to current understandings, design and decoration are not antithetical to serious political commitment. As voices on the soundtrack recount the struggle against industrial bosses for safety and equity amongst the miners, the image flickers and flutters in optically-printed mosaics of location photography. We might take these as a brutally elegant visualization of the state of ravaged lungs, riven with patches of black. Form does not clarify a political understanding, it renders it indelible. With poetic text by Kimiko Hahn
Living on the margins of one of the most polluted ZIP codes in the U.S., the eponymous Daron Colbert prepares for a role in this hybrid narrative-documentary. The film layers cinéma vérité performances with poetic personal reflections, and through its analog aesthetic, immerses viewers in the lived realities of neighborhood, identity, and aspirations
Imprinting successive layers of time in a ritual of repeated gestures, active attention, walked paths, shifting seasons, and cycling years, Dans les cieux et sur la terre combines the alchemical potential of photochemical film with the ritual of the filmmaker's performance. Filmed over 7 years in the neighbourhood around the filmmaker's Montreal home, a foundational local monument meets fleeting traces of urban flora. Bipacked with travelling mattes, the vibrant reversal filmstrips pass many times through the camera's gate, sedimenting layers of time
An 18‑minute experimental film from 1984 that uses a three‑colour separation process to capture MacKenzie Falls in the Grampians, Victoria. Filmed on 16 mm black‑and‑white negatives and printed in red, green, and blue passes onto Eastmancolor stock, the film superimposes slight temporal shifts to create luminous colour flares around moving water and foliage. The soundtrack blends multiple waterfall recordings to echo the film's visual layering
An ode to the memories of El Aliso, the sycamore tree that once stood at the center of Yaangna, the Indigenous Gabrieleno village that Los Angeles grew out from. All elements sourced in the film are from the original site and the nearby Los Angeles River.
Over the last 2 years in Delhi starting late 2019, I wrote, filmed and recorded, as days and nights turned from collective rage and exuberance to withdrawal and solitude. The search was along the edges of disquiet and premonition, in fragments and intensities, through wandering and not-staying. Perhaps down pathways made from adjacent knots of desire, seeking solace, seeking life. This video / essay has been composed from those notes, recordings, slivers of prayers, non-intended sound, stranger-love, lamentations and extreme longing, in a city that absorbs, mirrors, tears apart, and simultaneously allays both remorse and euphoria.
What happens to the energy of attachment when it has no designated place? To the glances, gestures, encounters, collaborations or fantasies that have no canon? **
These incomplete fictions, these false closures and tenuous associations, compose a timeline of the city at an angle through the time of this work. There is a shadowy sense of a protagonist who un-dreams it all; a stranger, who turns out, is no stranger at all.
Somewhere I wrote:
… so much power, it is difficult to move towards love.
—Priya Sen
*Majrooh Sultanpuri translated by Baidar Bakht and Marie-Anne Erki
** Lauren Berlant, from 'Intimacies: A Special Issue'
The Miracle on George Green tells a collective social history of the UK tradition of the commons—land collectively owned and used to gather, play, and debate. The film centers around the George Green treehouse in East London. In the early 1990s, when the old sweet chestnut tree that housed the treehouse was threatened, a group of schoolchildren wrote letters to the treehouse as part of a campaign to save it.
In a parallel universe in our own space-time continuum, humanity has been overrun by artificial intelligence. The machines are better, faster and more efficient at everything, outstripping their makers. However, one aspect of humanity escapes them: love. Their guidebook attempts to capture the phenomenon in 64 terms, including jealousy, regret and ardour. Posing in homey and romantic settings, they run through the entire spectrum with digital precision, yet without a hint of passion.
Logline: In the abandoned smart city of SimBeijing, a self-driving police car confronts their existential troubles with their built-in AI therapist.
Synopsis: Theta follows a self-driving police car as they confront their existential crisis while patrolling the streets of the abandoned smart city of SimBeijing. Left with nothing to do, but still under constant surveillance, the car discusses their troubles with their built-in therapist — a self-help AI called Guanyin. Not all is as it seems in the smart city. Originally built as a replica of the Chinese capital to test autonomous vehicles, SimBeijing has mysteriously become a ghost town. As Theta gradually opens up to Guanyin, they reveal the darker reasons behind why the city has been abandoned. Theta continues Lawrence Lek's ongoing Sinofuturist universe, in which he explores questions of identity, surveillance, and empathy in the age of AI.
Whispered voices announce the death of a girl. Around her, kneeling teenage girls watch her, intent. Once again, they whisper and repeat in chorus "light as a feather, stiff as a board," a magic formula drawn from the depths of time that accompanies the carrying of her body, in near levitation. We are in the living room of a house, dimly lit, candles scattered everywhere, popcorn spilled on the sofa. From the outset, Site of Passage evokes, through its motifs and decor, teen movies featuring young witches and horror films from the 80s and 90s, where pajama parties turn into anguish. In Crashing Waves (FID 2021), Lucy Kerr made the reverse side of images, taken from genre cinema, her object of study. It is to reduction that she applies herself in this film, emptying her setting of all horror to retain only the invisible trace and suggest it, in a brief and stripped-down gesture. Here, no morbid stories but a series of mysterious gestures, performed by six adolescent girls with angelic faces. The lightness of the games they indulge in offers a counterpoint to the fantasized horror, despite the persistence of a disturbing strangeness. To the creaking of the parquet floor caused by the young girls' movement, the minimalist sound treatment adds a continuous background noise, that of the cinema machinery, a ghostly presence in the middle of the room. A final image shows them sinking and straightening up, supporting each other, in a game of weight and counterweight. Lucy Kerr offers a choreographic variation suspended in time, and represents adolescent sisterhood in ritualized union. As in this final painting, where the pastel colors blend into the ballet of intertwined bodies, which, in this place of passage, seem to become one.
Crashing Waves follows a testimony from a stunt performer who discusses both the ecstasy and peril involved in their work to defy gravity.
A ghost, a face, lucid minerals, vague landscapes... To experience delayed emotions is like trying to decipher a riddle caught up in time lags.
I wanted to tell that riddle visually.
NYC RGB is part of a series of works in which Viktoria Schmid deals with historical color film processes. Using a special technique of color separation through RGB filters, the real temporal dimension can be concentrated on a cinematic triple exposure. The film strip was sent through the camera three times, exposing the material with a different color filter on each pass. First red, green, then blue. This method borrows from historical color film processes and corresponds to a separation of color by the photoreceptors in the eye. The temporally staggered recording of the color separations generates perceptual patterns in the condensation on a single film strip that go beyond a human experience of time and the perception of the human eye. What becomes visible in the color overlays, respectively in the repetitions and the resulting differences, celebrates the past moment in its uniqueness. Viktoria Schmid succeeds in demonstrating in the filmic reproduction that each moment has never been there before and will never return. With the triple exposure, real time is condensed and a new cinematic time level is generated.
The film was shot over a period of several months from the 20th floor of an atelier apartment in New York City, where the artist lived in 2020 during the initial phase of the pandemic, and finally again in 2022. Schmid's work explores everyday perceptions and how they can be sharpened through her art. Musician Liew Niyomkarn composed a sound design from field recordings made on site and synthesizer triads that are the acoustic counterpart to the RGB colors of the film.
"This story is true. I give it as it is, with embellishments." This sentence, the keystone of A Woman Escapes , is by Audrey Benac and diverts the famous opening line of Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped. Sofia Bohdanowicz's alter ego, lonely and grieving, Audrey wanders through the Parisian apartment of her recently deceased friend Juliane. Over views of Istanbul, Burak's deep voice evokes a package received by mistake, intended for Audrey/Sofia, sent by a certain Blake: a small 3D camera. Images of the young woman on a bus speeding through the landscape then mark the beginning, not only of a correspondence, but of a film that makes circulation – images, sounds, dreams – its driving force. The voices of the three characters mingle with the interlacing of stereoscopic views, 16mm film grain, and 4K images, in an exchange articulated according to the motif of braiding – like the challah cooked by Audrey. As announced in the opening, A Woman Escapes abandons Bressonian austerity and fully embraces the ornaments of its fiction – detours and artifices, profusion of images and colors. Quotation and reuse are the logic of staging this palimpsest film, as seems to be illustrated by the first letter sent by Blake to Audrey, which describes Nam June Paik's Zen for Film , a work in constant reinvention as alterations and dust accumulate on a blank film. Cards that range from blue to red (the colors of 3D glasses) through a whole range of magentas, from the first images showing Juliane's gestures to the last, where these same gestures are repeated by Audrey, A Woman Escapes draws a trajectory that seems to make cinema a manifesto for healing.
Following the shooting of a documentary on the death of her daughter, a mother reflects on her own life and especially on the passing of time.
In overlapping frames, one emerging from a point of view links two worlds, two views. On one side is portrait and myth: the fictionalized story of Yassmine Flowers, a transgender migrant from Morocco who, in Tsang and Flowers's collaborative retelling, becomes a woman scorned by her family, poisoned by a king, revivified by a goat, then finally settling at the bottom of the sea. On the other is landscape and documentary: the farmers, fishermen, and the rugged coast of Lesbos where migrants have sought refuge, often tragically. In an early shot, goats hesitate before jumping over a shallow creek. Many don't quite make it, and splash awkwardly before regaining their footing. One emerging from a point of view exists in the space of such leaps, both in the hope of crossing, and in the ethereal beauty that comes from these momentarily blended realms
Actress Maisa Abd Elhadi was shot while protesting in 2021. This short reimagines the moment the actress danced with the forces and through creativity removed all obstacles, for herself and those before and after her
The latest of Tsai Ming-Liang's "Walker series" locates Lee Kang-Sheng, dressed in the red robes of a Buddhist monk, in Paris. As with the earlier films and installations, Lee's pace is slow to the point of being nearly still. He moves out of time, out of step, with the commotion around him, but his walk aligns with the camera's frame, passing from one side to the other. He always appears amid the ruckus — an unexpected reveal by a passing bus is a classic instance of Tsai's deadpan humor. Throughout, Lee is presented as someone who is seen, by passersby who gawk, snap photos, and in one case, verbally harass him. One of his observers is a young man, possibly an artist, whose solitary wanderings are intercut with the monk's slow trajectory across the city. The two converge at the Centre Georges Pompidou, where on a large canvas stretched over the floor, they literally cross tracks
Darkness, Darkness, Burning Bright is a stunning piece of pastoral surrealism in two parts, "Prelude" and "Oraison", set to an electro-acoustic composition by analog filmmaker Gaëlle Rouard. Combining in-camera visual effects, such as split screens, exposure shifts and superimpositions with handmade photochemical processing, the film strip becomes a record of rigorous and intoxicating experimentation. Rouard performs as both alchemist and painter, investing objects with a sense of stubborn, almost pictorial opacity
The story of Paul the Apostle's life, ideology and influence is told by piecing together 20th Century 16mm and cassette propaganda, board games, animation, reenactments, Roman Empire doom metal and covers of Catholic liturgical music. The gentle Paul themes with flute, acoustic guitar and mellotron contrasts with the Demonic Roman Empire themes of electric guitar, drums and synth. Performance artist Linda Montano and Usama Alshaibi portray Paul on his journey. The film tries to capture the disturbing reaction Paul and his letters had in the early days of Christianity. The use of live action, animation, found footage and original music was a way to recover his biography from the brains of 20th Century humans so that in some perhaps misguided Utopian impulse, we can build something new out of it for the future
Bibi Seshanbe is a film that occurs at the intersection of dream, folklore, and ethnography. In frequent closeups of women's hands at work, it weaves between the life of Bibi Seshanbe Ona, Central Asia's version of Cinderella, and the women who, in hushed tones, appeal to her protection in ritual practices. Against a flat and hazy city backdrop, there is a velvety richness to the spaces where women gather. Every texture, from the glowing orange of a plastic milk pail to a sheet of sesame-crusted bread, beckons. For the followers of Bibi Seshanbe, her story offers solace, and hope for sumptuous if fleeting joy
Building on his Sinofuturist project, which contemplates an Earth society dominated by the ubiquity of AI, Lek guides us through a dense apocalyptic environment with a series of chapter-oriented Socratic dialogues that contemplate the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. In the lead up to the corporate-sponsored 2065 eSports Olympics, in which humans and handicapped "Synths" face off on computers, a pop star named Diva poses profound questions about the nature of originality, ultimately enlisting our AI philosopher-guide Geo's assistance in staging her comeback. In a world where the algorithm dictates power, violating its dictums can entail serious consequences— while machines must face their own qualms about appeasing human nature. Lek's lushly orchestrated score creates a dreamy, liquid atmosphere in which to consider the film's many provocations.
Dozier uses her own image across three films to playfully but incisively unpeel the layers beneath performed sexuality and love's gaudy desperation. Referencing commercialism and excess— with nods to a Japanese ad featuring Faye Dunaway & Charles Matton's 'Spermula', respectively— and satirizing the darkness of innocence lost, the trilogy enlists the artist's body as an empowered guide to its own complex history amid a sea of cultural signifiers
In I Cannot Now Recall, Kersti Jan Werdal guides the viewer through a selection of Yvonne Rainer's dreams, chosen by the filmmaker from a collection of Rainer's journals archived at The Getty Museum. Constellated first through Werdal's selections, and then refracted through the readings of a street-cast filmed in LA High Memorial Park, Rainer's dreams appear as nodes on an anxious psychic ecosystem. As the material distills from private reflection into script into performance, what emerges is a vital interchange between desire and disquiet. References to the medium of film seem to further entangle the relationship between filmmaker and subject, as well as the relationship between film and viewer. Joined by doubles and guides, in unfinished buildings and the depths of outer space, the dreamer explores her subconscious with a probing appetite for expansion and wholeness – but who the dreamer is exactly remains an open question.
A young Argentine woman comes to Cuba to make a documentary about prostitution. But instead she gets herself a black Cuban lover and the boundaries of prostitution start to fade. A taxi- driver also gives his opinion on the subject of prostitution
A sober sexual reawakening gives rise to a speculative communion with neanderthals
Seizure dreams, horses, and long distance conversations from bed. Loose reenactments from Marguerite Duras Baxter, Vera Baxter. A year of stormy weather and temporal rupture recalled in fragments. Featuring my mother and other star crossed lovers.
Selected by Exeter Phoenix for their 2021 Artists' Moving Image commission, Dan's idea was to make a film about Blackness and belonging in the English countryside, taking a family photo of some of his relatives at the Gloucestershire viewpoint Coaley Peak as a starting point. Whilst making the film, something happened
In Mélodie de brumes à Paris, a West Indian man named Richard (Greg Germain) struggles to repress traumatic memories from his time fighting on behalf of France in Algeria. A run-in encounter with his father turns the film into a mournful lament on life under colonialism, before a cameo by the filmmaker (playwright Julius Amédée Laou) spins it in an entirely different direction. This is the North American premiere of a new restoration made from the original 35mm negative at LTC Patrimoine (Paris) under close supervision from Laou, in partnership with Jesse Pires (Lightbox, Philadelphia) and film programmer Steve Macfarlane.
Many of the musings that appear in rupture are about the disconnection that occurs in socially mediated life. Yet the film's emphasis is ultimately inward, and closer to the texture of thought itself. Typewritten notes appear over a slowly rotating and abstracted image of tree leaves in shadow. These express ideas that sometimes repeat, contradict each other, or trail off. Others mingle with the words of major Black thinkers, expressed in audio and video clips: bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Prince. Aside from these archival sources, the image is almost entirely abstract, though it quivers with an intensity suggestive of an active and questioning mind: a prism of introspection
After seeing him mentioned on a Bishop's Transcript held in Gloucestershire Archives, Dan goes for a walk in the woods in search of Daniel, a man buried in Nympsfield on the 31st of December 1719 and described on the document as 'a black stranger'. Whilst walking, Dan talks directly to Daniel, speculating about the parallels between him and his namesake and wrestling aloud with the problems that come with trying to read the archive at face value and fill in its gaps.
Teleporting migrants and US troopers are segregated on the CAPS, an island of metamorphosing bodies and virtual realities.
The final chapter in a dystopian sci-fi trilogy, Life on the CAPS imagines a world where unauthorised migrants disassemble their bodies and teleport. They have been detained by US immigration troopers on the CAPS, a once-transitory island in the Atlantic Ocean that became a city with its own music, dance and high-tech culture. The migrants develop plastic faces or adaptable physical forms if they do not properly rematerialise—like Kamal, who has bought a new body to fight for liberation. Occupying separate zones, troopers and migrants have bizarre online encounters via deep-sea data cables. This film speculates on the states of possibility and revolution that can emerge from a world of bodily fluidity and virtual realities. A co-commission by Nottingham Contemporary and The Renaissance Society.
"three sparks"
Mexico, Albania (2023)
This film in three parts explores traditions in rural Albania and the role of women in society. The project begins by describing the filmmaker's relationship to the country and an unwanted personal sacrifice which solidifies this connection. The film moves into a poetic portrayal of village life and the roles of women in society and concludes with a video piece, revealing the villagers active participation in their own depiction.
Promised Lands centers a landscape descending into sunset as its main protagonist, accompanied by the often dissenting voices of narrator and subtitles. These voices struggle over possible meanings and derivative stories that stream out like estuaries from the obstinate trees and mountains. Their struggle to 'tell the story' echoes the struggles borne from the ghosts of colonialism, or the project to gain narrative power over a land and its peoples. Amongst swirls of Western art historical references, political polemics, and neo-romanticism, Wolukau-Wanambwa inserts tender moments of resolve that nestle in the sounds of nature, or in a nearly inaudible conversation recorded between Emma and an Elder; what speaks truest is most silent. As Wolukau-Wanambwa suggests towards the end of the film, to be promised is not so much a blessing, but rather the condition of being spoken for.
Every day 12 planes leave the Philippines carrying migrant workers, most of them women, destined to care for other people's families all over the world. Once they arrive, hidden away in other people's homes, they are unprotected by the law.
For her screenplay, Esy Casey spoke to many Filipino women who have been trafficked in this way. She punctuates their stories with devotional dances around the Santo Niño statue, gifted to the islands in 1521 by the explorer Magellan, who went on to launch a worldwide trade in silk and porcelain. These days, the product in demand is the care that the women workers provide.
Inventively, the split-screen video and audio shows two worlds in two languages. The dialogue, spoken simultaneously in Cebuano and English, is split between the right and left speakers. One of the women says she too feels divided in two: between a person made of flesh and one made of pixels—her own children back at home see her only as an image on the phone. This visually ingenious film allows you to make connections between places, times and cultures, between modern slavery and neocolonialism.
Filmmakers Paul Shemisi and Nizar Saleh travel from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Germany for the screening of their new film. During a layover in Angola, they're stopped at the airport because the airline doesn't trust their documents to be real. While Paul and Nizar think they are being led to a hotel, where they would stay until their flight back home , they are actually being taken to an illegal detention center.
The filmmakers' testimony - which offers an eye-opening insight into the impossibility of safe and carefree travel for Congolese artists - stands in stark contrast with the seemingly peaceful images of cloud formations passing by an airplane window.
A man hikes through late-winter woods. Russia invades Ukraine. It's difficult to reconcile the scales of action described by those sentences, but this difficulty is what John Gianvito dwells on in his new video. It may simply be that this is a diary, movingly plain and provisional in construction, which recounts what its author did for a few months last year: he watched a war on the internet and went outside. Even if that's true, such a description makes Gianvito's images seem less strange than they are
Loosely based on the erotic poem "Caurapañcāśikā" by Bilhana, which was written in prison upon discovery of the poet's clandestine affair with Princess Yaminipurnatilaka. The verses were written while awaiting judgment, not knowing if he was to be executed or exiled—his fate is unknown. "Lotus-Eyed Girl" ruminates on the curious and fractured intersections of death, desire, and class. Fading family photographs (from an uncle's funeral to my mother on her wedding day), pomegranate arils, pulsating floral mandalas, and horror atmospherics culminate into an ecstatic collision of death and longing—echoing devastations of the past. Through principles of psychogeography, the systems of power that shape identity and desire, in the way that colonialism has altered human perception, are examined in an undulating and capricious form.
The director comes into possession, through a serendipitous internet purchase, of a roll of 16mm film belonging to an unknown family. This film becomes an investigation, through a post-colonial perspective, using digital tools and the clues that the film offers, to deconstruct and investigate the origin of the material and the socio-political and historical context that surrounds it, namely the Apartheid in South Africa.
In June 2020, thousands of people took to the streets in Brussels to make a fist against police brutality and institutional racism in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. For a moment, it seemed that some demonstrators would take down the statue of colonial king Leopold II in a nearby square. For now the sculpture is still standing, but poet Marie Paule Mugeni already prepares her speech for the day it will be removed.
There is an incredible depth to Sohn Koo-young's images—levels of both contrast and detail that would seem antithetical. They are so close to stills, if it weren't for the movement. Night Walk's compositions evoke a point-and-click PC game; the shots are locked off precisely and the details beckon to you. The fragments of text and poetry that provide narration, similarly, feel like an interactive text game—the tender grass aids my (your?) footsteps, the firefly lights my (your?) path. The night is dyed in a shade of indigo that I want to discover for myself, like Rohmer's Green Ray. A bottling of a simple, yet perhaps impossible, experience
One of the few artists still earnestly committed to an ideal of grand spectacle, Takashi Makino crafts all-over abstractions that are uniquely overwhelming. Here, color provides the shape, tracing an arc through oscillating fields of mottled not-objective imagery as they modulate steadily from cool blues, purples, and greens into hotter and drier reds, pinks, oranges, and browns, and then back to the initial shades. The score, a deep and unnerving arrangement of processed field recordings by Lasse Marhaug and the great Lawrence English, seems to confirm that the sense of climate catastrophe which emerges isn't incidental
Sol sees Afrofuturism as a link between past and present, and as a rebuttal to a world in which "we are all commodities within a same architecture of violence". Diffracting their observations, dreams, beliefs, and poetry through an ambiguous, collectively imagined figure named "Lascar" — an antiquated term referring to Southeast Asian sailors on European ships, a present pejorative for diasporic, suburban French teens, and any other number of definitions depending— Yehouessi assembles a team of incisive young collaborators whose multiplicitous views yield a fluid and aesthetically bombastic imagining of Blackness along the space-time continuum. These ideas, sounds and images may be individually familiar, but as the film obliquely states, "The difference? Is (precisely) in the plural."
Darol Olu Kae's homage to the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (Ark), an LA-based avant-garde jazz ensemble, moves the spotlight from the stage to the labor which makes a gig happen. With polyphonic structure, Keeping Time mirrors the fluid and multigenerational composition of the band, as members leave, pass through or die, and follows new bandleader Mekala Session's earnest attempts to honor past legacies while forging anew. In a skillful kaleidoscopic assemblage, the film weaves together archival footage and audio with the present, restless energy that seeps from every corner of Session's house
An immersive meditation on travel and tourism in Laos, reflecting on how we all live as observers. Traversing the country's dusty roads and tranquil rivers, we watch as painterly tableaus unfold, revealing the interweaving of locals and foreigners in rest and play.
Departing from Paulo Rocha's The Green Years, the inaugural moment of the Portuguese Cinema Novo, João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata drift through a locked-down Lisbon in search of subtle signs of life. Along the way, bitterly comic examples of the class character of pandemic responses butt up against strange moments of serenity. Their camera moves with a disoriented attention, equally curious and apprehensive of what it might find in this new world. As in life, history returns in strange and unexpected ways, though here that return occurs in mercifully gentle register
Sovereignty is inextricably linked to questions of both belonging and ownership. During her six-year stay in Taiwan, filmmaker Yvonne Welbon "learned the importance of choosing to name one's self, the importance of knowing one's self," the ability to declare your own sovereignty. Welbon briefly took the name Wei-yi Fang. She interrogates her Black past in fluent Chinese; she was born in the United States to Honduran parents. This building of a multiplicity of selves forms a prism, through which Weibon is able to sharply comment on the differing racisms that her multiple selves have encountered. A cohesive personal history is fittingly assembled from many sources—interviews, recreations, documentary and archive—until a sovereign self comes into focus
Queer time moves differently. Selves are multiplied and then hidden away, secret objects are infused with mimesis, desires are internalized. Vials of synthetic testosterone provide most of the narration in Emory Chao Johnson's collage. The filmmaker withholds the audience's view from domestic drama and traumatic squabbles that invade the soundtrack, keeping at bay what Moyra Davey once referred to as "the wet." Instead, Chao Johnson focuses on methodical practices—injections, cooking, commuting, inspecting one's own body—collapsing those fraught, wet questions of identity until they undergird their quotidien present
Currency as concrete representation of economy; currency as embodiment of presence and acceptance. In Crystal Z Campbell's mesmerising short, a woman rejects the camera's gaze and, with bygone forms of currency attached to the ends of her hair, supports herself against a bare backdrop and expresses through passionate movement. An engrossing articulation of capital's connection to memory and the body, this experimental film bravely uses movement and sound to say so much – without a word spoken.
Eternal recurrence and wisdom undone. The end or the beginning. Who are we that we. One and the same are the shadow cast and its cause.
A hypnotic journey through the seven valleys on the way to reach the abode of the Simurgh.
The Chens are an Amis family on Taiwan's eastern coast. As some family members venture into the brush after a midnight rain, others harvest rice amid the whir of machinery. Blending work and play, food becomes a site for the Chens to pass down their endangered language to a younger generation, trade ghost stories, and express the vibrant hybridity of contemporary indigenous identity.
A group of Central American dairy workers in the Northeast of the United States reminisce about their relationship to the land, labor practices, and their home countries. Hours, days, weeks, and years pass by and the repetitiveness of the labor makes way to new families in a non-place. These workers, despite their initial dreams, never come back home, where many of their families forget about them, or are lost to time. The film is an exploration of multispecies exploited by capitalistic forces, humans and cows, and questions the technologies we have created to maximize efficiency over liberation. It is not all lost, however. They have left the farms.
Ortiz destroyed pianos throughout the 1960s (he flayed, stabbed, smashed and otherwise deconstructed many other household objects, too, but he seems most remembered for those pianos). Henny Penny is scored by Ortiz's most famous concert, at the Destruction in Art Symposium in London in 1966. The piano's death rattle is synced to grainy, black and white footage shot in a Coney Island chicken slaughterhouse in 1958. Married to a cacophonous symphony of death, suddenly the loss of the piano doesn't seem all that bad. Henny Penny mirrors shots from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—a hellish flurry of feathers in front of a vertiginous camera— but it's the nightmare-Deleuzian final freeze-frame that will make you want to puke.
A contemplative short commissioned by Centre Pompidou, the film features Tsai Ming‑Liang in an abandoned mountain home examining old chairs, sunlight, a cat, and paintings of his longtime muse Lee Kang‑Sheng and actor Anong Houngheuangsy. Quietly reflecting on confinement, memory, and the pandemic's emotional landscape
In Memoriam, Takahiko Iimura (1937-2022). Offering no less than its title suggests, this forerunner of conceptual video art filters the object of its attention through wavy black and white signals accompanied by sounds of drumline static. Its original installation format at the inaugural Forum Expanded program in Berlin, which was re-staged in 2023, allowed visitors to view together and share the moment on multiple synced TVs brought in by Arsenal staff.
It makes an odd sort of sense that Michael Snow's career would begin with a pornographic animation about the romance of domestic objects. Done in charcoal on paper, its table, chairs, and ceramics exist as mostly negative space, shaped patches of white against hatched messes of gray. Taking on a life of their own, they move jauntily within their flat realm, coming together as couples and groups in search of not so obscure pleasures. The fetish of commodities has rarely been handled with such a light touch.
Comprised entirely of hundreds of film samples, Hello Dankness is a political fable that bears witness to the psychotropic spectacle of American politics from 2016 to 2021, and the mythologies and lore that took root around it. Taking form as a suburban stoner musical, the film follows a neighborhood through these years as consensus reality disintegrates into conspiracies and other contagions. Part political satire, zombie apocalypse, and Greek tragedy, the work is also informed by the encrypted memetics of contemporary internet culture. Begun in 2019 and labored on throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Hello Dankness is a record of the time, written from the time.