MONO XVIIII FESTIVAL OF CINEMA ARTS

Transitional Object

Shayna Strype

Transitional Object is an experimental 16mm animated film that blends 2D and 3D animation techniques to create a tactile journey into the imagination of a young girl. The film explores her deep bond with her cherished stuffed animal and how play serves as a bridge between her inner imaginative realms and the outside world. The passage of time unfolds through the parallel aging of both the girl and the object.

Labor (2024)

Juliana Cerqueira Leite

Labor continues sculptor Juliana Cerqueira Leite's research into the ways repetitive movements construct and deconstruct the built world. Four former assembly line workers perform, from memory, the movements that defined their work. Labor uses long exposure photography and techniques pioneered by Lilian and Frank Gilbreth in the early 1900's to draw parallels between the development of film and photography, and assembly-line based industrial manufacturing. The film and its original score by Nik Colk Void connect the material qualities of their mediums to memory and work, moving from animation to live action.

Welcome Home (2024)

Amina Gingold

"Welcome Home" is a three-channel 16mm installation projecting looping films onto a house-shaped sculpture. Emerging from my obsession with homes, I focus on their physical structures and symbolic meanings. I was on a late phone call with my former stepmother when I received the news. A story unfolded about abandoned, discarded, and broken furniture. It was dirty, and clothing was everywhere. A familiar man emerged from the shadows, who had left it all behind.

You are the season, the day, the minute

Bruno Delgado Ramo

The Weather, the Time that goes by takes place. The sky is traversed by water drops, birds in flight, balls, light beams. And also by a cloud of expectation and augury, which is an agency shared by the observer and the sky. The landscape above has an abstract and elusive condition.

Untitled (2024)

Erin Neitzel

Untitled is a collection of forgotten frames from the heads and tails of films I have run over my years as a projectionist. These are the parts never meant to be seen by an audience, and also where I find the intimacy in a print: notes from old archives or theaters, different layers of reprinted and reused material, many languages and formats, in other words, all the residue of a life and travels. All the things that make these prints living, organic things are normally only seen by the projectionists that run them, except for now, when I get to share them with you.

Seeding (2024)

Jiayi Chen

This channel installation explores the perception of a landscape, It tries to touch—the roughness of the bark, the tingling of dry grass, the teasing of gossamers, the blunt blow of tumbling water, the flow of wind—through the eyes.

Where are the wild things?

Ben Clement

This film combines screenprinted 16mm film with footage of the Oslo Fjord and the Nordmarka wilderness, north of Oslo. Video elements depicting everyday interactions with modern technology and cyberspace are assembled from digital snippets captured on an iPhone, then screenprinted onto film. These screenprinted overlays are placed onto untouched forest and fjord landscapes, free from human presence. The title plays on Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, inspired by a childhood fascination with escaping into pure, unspoiled nature. The film seeks to depict an idyllic, romanticized landscape subtly disrupted by elements of modern life.

Interlaced (2024)

Ray Chang

"Interlaced' is a building card project inspired by the histories of New England's former textile mills. Reflecting on its industrial foundations and their impact on manufacturing, craft, labor, and early American identity, this work delves into these narratives through play and experimentation.

Everytime you recall

Jo Jovel

This film centers around how memory often changes as you recall important moments of time over and over again. Is what you recalled once again true to life, or is it just a fragment of light sifting through your mind? Accompanied by a score created through real-time emotion and feeling on Ableton Live.

When you weren't looking

Patricia Delso Lucas

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Genomic Memory

Shahkeem E Williams

A meditation on the act of remembering, transference and maternity. Captured in the northeastern countryside of Jamaica, a mother returns to her native land seeking ancestral guidance for the arduous journey of pregnancy and delivery.
Fleeing political turmoil, a mother separates from her young daughter in search of asylum in America. Decades later, and many worlds lost, the daughter returns to her ancestral land, pregnant and seeking the wisdom of her mother's mothers to navigate her maternal journey. The final part of a series of films illustrating the broken fragments and unhealed wounds in mother-daughter dynamics, Genomic Memory, highlights the aftermath of African-Caribbean mothers leaving their daughters to immigrate to the United States. The project illuminates the plights of pregnancy and parenting faced by African Caribbean immigrant women and the struggle to bridge the generational divide created by bodies of water.

This Dissonance

Christophe Katrib

This film is an homage to the precious souls lost and the beautiful voices speaking out around the world. It is a poetic, visceral, raw expression of the dissonance I feel in the U.S. as an Arab person - in a majestic Land, itself taken violently some hundreds of years ago - witnessing from afar as U.S-backed Israel commits genocide and ethnic cleansing on Palestine and my homeland of Lebanon.

False Expectations

Erica Sheu

Finding and preserving memories of connections and tenderness in dead flowers, in between blinds, slants of shadows and hand processed film frames.

H(xy)/V(z)=Ø

Jim Hobbs Ojon

H(xy)/V(z)=Ø stems from an interest in grid systems, the "nocturnal", and the use of artificial lighting to create or enhance an augmented form of vision. The recollected experience of being blinded by headlights while driving at night sets loose a series of fragmented moving images, archival photographs and motion graphics which in turn create a type of hallucinatory experience.

ROXY (2024)

Nyasia Pettway Rochelle Christiane Nahu

ROXY features a woman, blonde haired and brown eyed, who doesn't know she's dreaming. Escapism is her reality, her mind is the only place she feels comfortable enough to scream and cry in. This particular night, she sees a dream that isn't her's. Familiar sights of trees and buildings that feel like lost memories; a life she didn't live but can see somehow. In color, at that, but she dreams in black and white. She sees the world for what it is, but she is lost in her mind, far from reality. The film explores the pieces of her she loves and hates; disorganized thoughts and memories, but beautiful nonetheless.

Good Grieve (2024)

Kenzie King

Good Grieve weaves together a portrait of grief, obsession, and nostalgia through imagery and objects that permeate our everyday lives.The film provides a symbolic landscape where the past intrudes upon the present in a looping rhythm of indelible imagery. Grief and memory take shape within the fleeting ephemera, as the familiar objects inexplicably evoke moments of pain. By revisiting these memories as intrusive images on loop, the objects in the film slowly shed the layers of narrative, leaning into the cyclical nature of grief in order to break free from it.

Pretty Girls Always Smiles

Annie Grey

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Catarina (2024)

Gustavo Lopes

A short film that offers an intimate glimpse into the life of a Brazilian transwoman living in Brooklyn, New York in 2024. Through a series of vivid vignettes, the film paints a poignant portrait of Catarina's life as she asserts her right to exist. "CATARINA" invites viewers to reflect on the universal desire to belong and challenges us to empathize with the experiences of those navigating the intersections of identity in an ever-evolving world.

I Am Swimming With Zaza

Coco Villa

I Am Swimming With Zaza is an ongoing intimacy between fact and the fantastical, real and imagined. As they circulate, slow-moving sculptural gestures and rhythmic shapes become more intertwined superseding juxtapositions of you and me, then and now, and here and there. What can I do to honor you, now that it is too late? The You, and you that I come from, and the You that occasionally stands in for me.

Dove Stone (2024)

Raine Roberts

Dove Stone is an experimental documentary/dance film juxtaposing the erosive tendencies of human behavior and the erosive nature of our environment. Color portion shot on location at Fort Tilden beach; Black and White portion shot in studio.