Mimesis Documentary Festival 2024

<p>How to make a film about an event for which there are no moving images? In my search to make a project about Ecuador&#39;s largest worker&#39;s strike, which ended in the massacre of hundreds or thousands of workers in 1922 (and of which there are no moving images), I turn to other work from that same year. Inspired by Hito Steyerl&#39;s essay &quot;In Defense of the Poor Image&quot;, this found-footage essay-film reclaims the &quot;poor image&quot; in the context of past and present class struggles in Ecuador.</p>

<p>Random anecdotes found on the internet by an anonymous narrator, and the guidance of a cryptic physiotherapist, reveal a world full of gazes, rules and technologies that separate us.</p>

<p>Through the eyes of renowned researchers Camille Parmesan and Michael C. Singer, this project explores the delicate balance of nature and the stark realities of climate change in a captivating study of the Edith&#39;s Checkerspot butterfly.</p>

<p>A road trip through memories of family and mythologies of place.</p>

<p>The Troite are protective totems placed at crossroads, water sprouts, and in places of remembrance. They are the pillars of heaven and the mystical gateways of the Amber Mountains of Romania.</p>

<p>This project features a group of workers at an archaeological site in the Sub-Balkan region of eastern Bulgaria. Their confessions to the camera explore the conditions of contemporary life as the country, shaped by over thirty years of lethargic political transition, transitions from the lev currency to the euro.</p>

<p>A love letter about correspondence, an elegy to gay porn, and a promise to remember.</p>

<p>Drawing its title from a song by Afghan singer Ahmad Zahir, &quot;you have black eyes&quot; is a stream-of-consciousness montage depicting collective bodies in a constant state of disruption, movement, processing, and grieving. It celebrates the body as a historical, domestic site of resistance through dance and movement including found footage of ants carrying flowers, rubab player Ustad Beltoon interrupted, and Hazara throat singing across an imaginary landscape.</p>

<p>A portrait of KB Brookins; a Black, trans and queer writer from Texas manifesting freedom in their present and future.</p>

<p>Deep in the primordial waters of Earth&rsquo;s history, a creature is born with a will to dominate all, but Mother Nature has other plans. ECO: A FEMINIST DISASTER is an ongoing series of films composted from a subgenre of eco-horror films produced between 1970-1981 serving as a critique of environmental media, a speculative film history, and a personal diary.</p>

<p>Patients file in and out of a public health clinic in a former Mayan town in rural Yucat&aacute;n. A young doctor, who has just arrived there on temporary assignment, sends voice messages to his girlfriend.</p>

<p>This project explores heterotopia, portraying the imprisonment experienced through immigration and resistance against unjust laws (whether in the US or Iran) with slogans like &quot;Woman Life Freedom&quot; or &quot;My Body, My Choice.&quot;</p>

<p>A brief essay on the origin of four small towns in rural Kansas and Oklahoma, told through each town&rsquo;s respective water tower. Tall tales, public memorials, and roadside signage present in a region shadowed with settler-colonialism, imperial pursuits, identity fictions, and the threat of severe weather.</p>

<p>A bicycle tourist family consisting of woman, man and children enters Iran on the way of tourism and travel around the world. On the way of cycling tourists in Iran, they entered Fars province and in Firozabad city of Fars, they lost their camera which they had taken during the trip. When someone else in another city of Fars province named Qir-o-Karzin knows about loss of camera, they bought a camera and give It as a gift to tourists. After learning about this, the film crew went to Fars province and took action to find the tourists&#39; camera</p>

<p>Arremonops rufivirgatus is a science fiction project that explores the ambiguous human histories surrounding the discovery of the bird known as the Olive Sparrow (Arremonops rufivirgatus), as part of the westward expansion in the &ldquo;wilderness&rdquo; beyond the Mississippi river. The project investigates the etymology of the name, and the biographical history of eponymic master of the species. The events surrounding the categorization of this plain bird are mere blips in history, yet they remain instrumental footnotes in trying to draw attention to the interconnectedness between a colonizers&rsquo; worldview and scientific history.</p> <p>The film engages the eponymous tendencies of exploration, and colonialism, and the hidden histories that are part of the contemporary echoes for the endangered species, Arremonops rufivirgatus.</p>

<p>A one take recording of a family&#39;s visit to the bamboo green at the foot of the Helan Mountains.</p>

<p>Butterflies and moths comprise 12% of all species known to man (180,000 species!), and their seemingly endless biodiversity is visually translated on their wings through color and pattern variation. Incredibly, we humans share these specific wing shaping genes with butterflies, and actually these major molecular paintbrushes are found in numerous other creatures as well.&nbsp;</p> <p>Shot at two cutting-edge research labs which specialize in the evolution of butterflies and moths, BIopixels is an animated short film exploring the world of evolutionary biology on the microscopic scale.&nbsp;</p> <p>The images - rendered from collections containing over 50,000 specimens - were take by microscopists over three years to create the animated shorts Nanoscapes and Biopixels. Both the animation and the score play with concepts of pattern, time, density and other means of development common to biological evolution.</p>

<p>A travelog through the familiar and unfamiliar terrain of digital landscapes. Pairing 16mm footage of computer desktop backgrounds with soundscapes of sites of technological extraction - precious metal mining, smelting foundries, microprocessing plants, and data farms - Bliss.jpg excavates and examines the geological and geographical sites that produce our virtual worlds.</p>

<p>Cette maison is a heartbreaking journey into memory and an experimental treatment of an emotional state. Miryam Charles ― whose short film Second Generation screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019 ― has made one of the year&rsquo;s most formally challenging features: a study of the horrible stasis of grief seen through a meditative lens. In a striking, stylized presentation, Charles resurrects her murdered cousin Tessa ― represented in the film by Schelby Jean-Baptiste ― to tell us about the life she was denied and have conversations with her mother, Valeska (Florence Blain Mbaye), about the cruelty of their separation. Emotional and political currents intertwine as Charles explores her own youth for warning signs. She recreates her family watching the Quebec referendum of 1995 in their Laval home while packing to leave for the United States in case the vote went in favour of separation ― and considers the contentious relationship between Haiti, Canada, and the US. Time and space collapse into a single awful moment, a chasm into which Tessa has disappeared. Cette maison is an act of reclamation, recreating Tessa in body and spirit on 16mm film so she can be remembered and heard ― by the film and by the audience ― once more.</p>

<p>In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States ended a woman&rsquo;s right to a safe and legal abortion. &#39;Contractions&#39; takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women&rsquo;s health clinic. We listen to an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive justice activist. We watch 14 women who witness and perform with their backs to the camera. In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they speak with the full force of their collective presence.</p>

<p>All personal archival VHS engaging with a core question of artists in times of chaos: who owns a memory and what is its value? A record of the queer Midwest. Drugs, sex, love, friendship, and a failed Los Angeles movie deal.</p>

<p>An invisible line connects California to parts of the Middle East and North Africa, where similar climates provide ideal growing conditions for date palm trees. Using textural 16mm, filmmaker Long surveys the arid California landscape along the San Andreas Fault&mdash;from microscopic plant cells to macroscopic pans of the golden mountains&mdash;and zooms in on the lives of those whose livelihoods are dependent on the trees&rsquo; sweet fruits and the exoticism they lend the region. Interlacing personal stories with historical images, Feet in Water, Head on Fire explores how a landscape and community have been shaped by shifting trends. As one of the film&rsquo;s subjects says, &ldquo;the dates will likely survive us all.&rdquo;</p>

<p>Replication in &quot;contemporary society is characterized by the loss of data, degradation, and noise.&quot; (Lev Manovich) Reproducing original watercolors for The Birds of America&mdash;which were augmented with friable pastel, chalk, and crayon&mdash;caused the naturalist John James Audubon (born Jean Rabin) much consternation; for the red-throated loon (plate 202), he relied upon engraver Robert Havell, who charged &pound;114 for one ream (500 sheets) of paper, copper plates, tin shipping cases, and the work of etching, printing, and aquatinting.</p>

<p>After wildfires force her to leave her home in Oregon, a young filmmaker reconnects with the rituals and the landscapes of her maternal tribe in Himalayan China. In a poetic and contemplative revisiting of her family and her ancestors&rsquo; history, director Shasha Li reflects on their animistic traditions while visiting her childhood hometown, a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site, transformed beyond recognition into a bustling tourist attraction. &ndash;&nbsp;<em>Ruth Somalo</em>&nbsp;</p>

<p>A pseudo-documentary which shows a cult of women dedicated to the veneration of the skull of the Peruvian Independence warrior Tomasa Ttito Condemayta, in the town of Acomayo, Peru, during 2021.</p>

<p>Heterotopia is a film about space that integrates different categories of time, both through the issue of progress contained in the collective, and through the prism of individual and personal experience.</p>

<p>A meditation on technologies of memory, with close attention paid to medium specificity, this installation considers how Zoom and other pandemic technologies composite onto screens, and also into rooms, flattening and deepening connection, attention, and care.</p>

<p>A three-part audio documentary about a small group of people who came together to stop NRG from building an unnecessary fracked gas peaker plant in Astoria, Queens.</p>

<p>A three-part audio documentary about a small group of people who came together to stop NRG from building an unnecessary fracked gas peaker plant in Astoria, Queens.</p>

<p>A three-part audio documentary about a small group of people who came together to stop NRG from building an unnecessary fracked gas peaker plant in Astoria, Queens.</p>

<p>This project is narrated through the director&rsquo;s personal experience of living in the remote Himalayan mountain town of Manali (a popular destination for shooting Bollywood film songs reeking of adventurous love and high romance). The work nterrogates thin layers of narrative practices that construct tableaus of high mountains as static objects and backdrops for second hand urban aspirations of happiness. The precarious reality of living in a highly sensitive ecosystem spins an adventure far removed from most imaginaries.</p>

<p>A suburb in Southern California comes together to create a community and heal from loss.</p>

<p>The destruction caused by the war against Ukraine is shown in lengthy tableaux. Intercepted phone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families set up a shocking parallel world. Sound and image stare each other in the face, stunned.</p>

<p>A poetic portrait of contemporary wildlife conservation, JUST ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH reflects on empathy, agency, and the role of hope in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. This debut nonfiction feature examines scientists and citizen scientists who conduct surveys of frogs, which serve as an indicator species; study sea stars threatened by disease; track bats whose populations have been decimated by white-nose syndrome; and collect data on insects declining at unprecedented rates. Set primarily at night, the film weaves together observational and lyrical sequences, texts written by authors including W.S. Merwin and Adam Nicolson, and an otherworldly soundscape. JUST ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH is a visceral, sensory meditation on what it means to live in a broken world.</p>

<p>A sensory, sound-centric, visceral observation of female strength, stamina, and struggle, depicted through the visual metaphor of a female fighter. Presented as a three-channel immersive audiovisual installation, it envelops audiences within a trifold of screens to invite a comprehensive witness to female power. This conceptual nonfiction project is in conversation with the echoes of gendered violence, and invites viewers into an experience of female strength that transcends biography or justification.</p>

<p>A historic event of sound and light. What is the nature of experiencing global phenomena in today&rsquo;s interconnected world?</p>

<p>Reflecting on the construction of oral history and its relation to the land, The Soldier&rsquo;s Lagoon dives into the misty P&aacute;ramo region and offers an elusive living archive that navigates the dense fog separating Sim&oacute;n Bol&iacute;var&rsquo;s past and Colombia&rsquo;s present.</p>

<p>A live cinema work that looks like a desktop performance, with scenes from unfinished projects and a talk about the sticky interpersonal situations being a filmmaker creates. A funny, tender, and TMI performance accompanied by a live score from Fragrant Blossoms.</p>

<p>An experimental documentary that combines archival footage and poetry. This project follows Lane&rsquo;s relationship with his mother up until her passing in 2017.</p>

<p>Among the living and the dead, there is a shared memory</p>

<p>An Islands&#39; diary, told through the sombre but loving portrait of its oldest inhabitants. The Galapagos Islands and their majestic tortoises suffer the same fate of exploitation and disfigurement as the influence of humans on this once pristine and untouched corner of the world develops and devours. This film is the first &#39;chapter&#39; of an ongoing adaptation of Herman Melville&#39;s 1849 novel about the islands, The Encantadas.</p>

<p>Earth is experiencing its final winter. A streaming company hires all available camera operators to film the final weeks of this soon-to-be-lost season. After seeing their footage as a form of ecological exploitation, the camera operators refuse to commodify further climate collapse with their labor.</p>

<p>An amateur archaeologist obsessed with electronic waste records images and sounds for ten years, as part of an intuitive investigation. As he shapes a personal, playful and musical diary, he travels the world tirelessly, trying to decipher what his findings hide and how he might interpret them.</p>

<p>&quot;no more room in hell&quot; began with initial research conducted at the archive of horror director George A. Romero (Dir. Night of the Living Dead) housed at the University of Pittsburgh. Extending research beyond the archive, the film examines the implications of zombiehood in relation to industry, late techno-capitalism, and apocalyptic realities. The experimental cinematic work models itself after Romero&rsquo;s cult classics which birthed the American cinematic zombie against the industrial backdrop of Western Pennsylvania.</p>

<p>A Hungarian music teacher seeks small moments relief while grieving a personal loss.</p>

<p>Still lives of real fruit meet botanical illustrations of plant galls to expose the paradox of dissection: each time we cut something in two, we merely create a new exterior.</p>

<p>Using the photo archives of the Lynden Sculpture Garden near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this project follows a wandering groundskeeper and an unseen companion as they travel across the site in a not-so-distant future. They search for signals that can answer the question: &quot;Who thought of putting a garden outside the forest?&quot; Disoriented by an unstable landscape, the question is addressed cryptically through an encounter with a pine tree that sheds light on the history of the land.</p>

<p>An essay on the everyday choreography stipulated by privately owned public space.</p>

<p>In 1964, Baltimore became the second city in the country to pass a 1% for Art law, allocating one percent of the construction budget for any public building to commissioning a new piece of art. Most of the buildings were public schools, and by 2016, it was revealed that many of the pieces had gone missing. Through landscapes of the city and depictions of the sculptures, the film explores the history of the program, the failures of modernism, the neglect of the school system, and asks who public art can really serve.</p>

<p>One of the late Fred Dewey&rsquo;s most penetrating texts is reimagined as a film. In the process the text of &ldquo;What Is Power?&rdquo; becomes a chorus of very different voices rising to affirm what we find hardest to believe: that power does not reside among the powerful but is always there for the people to reclaim.</p>

<p dir="ltr"><a title="Relict: A Phantasmagoria" href="https://www.melissaferrari.com/relict" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://www.melissaferrari.com/relict</a></p> <p dir="ltr">Relict: A Phantasmagoria is an experimental documentary performed with antique magic lanterns and hand-drawn animation. Invoking the history of magic lantern phantasmagoria as an exercise in belief and perception, Relict considers the zeitgeist of pseudoscience, fake news, religion, and documentary ethics collapsed within contemporary cryptozoology. Adapting modern cryptozoological lore such as the Loch Ness Monster to hand-drawn magic lantern slides based on antique designs, Relict employs the visual language of magic lantern phantasmagoria, including geared slides and dissolving views. These pre-cinematic images are infused with the aesthetics of veracity in current nonfiction filmmaking, including CGI speculative animated documentary, thermal imaging, and interventions of rotoscoped documentary re-enactment. The performer&rsquo;s comments on skeptical cryptozoology are nested in a collage of audio, including interviews with Dr Brian Regal (Kean University), a leading historian of science on the politics of skepticism in cryptozoology; recent creationist sermons; and excerpts of pseudoscientific wildlife documentaries ranging from Disney&rsquo;s infamous White Wilderness (1958) to the Discovery Channel&rsquo;s Mermaids (2012).</p>

<p>This project takes an unflinching, personal look into growing up with a flawed foundation. Using a remix of archival and personal footage, it explores concepts of childhood, trauma, and the complexities of familial love.</p>

<p>For geology, seismic silence determines the time between two earthquakes: the longer the silence, the more powerful the next tremor is expected to be.</p>

<p>Seaside fireworks, a march to the US-Iran game, and Souk Waqif festivities all make up a series of vignettes from the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Meanwhile, an attendee ponders the event&#39;s significance amid a shifting of the world&#39;s centers of power.</p>

<p>A house of women adjusts to life in the aftermath of an event unnamed.</p>

<p>To reduce ambient noise when approaching a whale, a vessel should not exceed six knots. A long-standing symbol of the distance between human and animal and the mystery of the natural world, the whale is a site of disconnection, fascination and exploitation. Six Knots follows specialists in cetacean death and conservation on the west coast of Canada. The film tracks the grey space between language, sound and image, and the entanglement of colonization, industrialization, and science.</p>

<p>A collaged found-footage manifesto against political cynicism and environmental alienation, based on George Orwell&#39;s 1946 essay and read by Tilda Swinton.</p>

<p>This sound documentary follows Eva, a Spanish tour guide living in Paris for the past 7 years. Eva conducts the Mysteries and Legends Tour every week in the heart of the city in &Icirc;le Saint-Louis. The tour traces the dark history of Paris, where she introduces her audience to the violence that consumed the city in the Middle Ages.<br /> <br /> Through Eva&rsquo;s undying passion for discovery, the piece invites the listener to see beyond what is mostly known of Paris today; asking them to patiently observe the city, and listen deeply to the sound of its ghosts.</p>

<p>A found footage meditation on eating your feelings.</p>

<p>A live-edited documentary performance that traverses a vast terrain without leaving a tiny patch of land. Each iteration is a unique call and response between a virtual landscape and documentary footage. Set in a small 3D scanned region of the Badlands of South Dakota, voices carry you from paleontology to foraging, indigenous herbalism to nuclear arms, wildlife management to cattle ranching. Strata laters histories, economics, natural sciences, deep time, and personal anecdotes within an immersive landscape that invites you into a meditation on the complex histories embedded in all lands and how profoundly human perspectives shape and define their futures.</p>

<p>Terminal Island is a portrait of Paradise Lost. Los Angeles, California is a place of immense beauty and a perfect climate, but it is also a nexus for ecological dread. Smoggy skylines, overdevelopment and the dying off of the iconic (and invasive) LA palm tree are some of the clues that Tinseltown is in trouble.</p>

<p>A dissection of the phases of holding (or not) onto composure while challenging gender norms</p>

<p>1560: the beginning of the so-called &lsquo;Little Ice Age&rsquo;. Uncanny celestial events ignite the skies over Germany and Switzerland, leading people to believe the world is ending. &lsquo;Tomorrow, the Burning Heavens&rsquo; reconsiders these apocalyptic visions, once captured in hand-colored woodblock prints, and returns to the Alps to observe the industrial production of winter landscapes in a modern-day skiing resort. Here, past and present dreams and nightmares are melted together in a film about the interplay of image-making, technology and faith during times of environmental collapse.</p>

<p>Using footage from my grandpa&#39;s retirement party, I explore memory, death, and masculinity.</p>

<p>As a tree muses on their role in the Order of Things, this being (which humans normally think of as immobile) reveals the speed, agility, and finesse integral to their experience of the world. Adapted from a short story written by Ursula LeGuin, this decidedly inhuman filmic narrative uses the overlapping cyan and scarlet of anaglyph stereoscopic 3D imaging to speculate how a tree (which responds more acutely to light waves in the red and blue portions of the spectrum) might perceive the world visually. Though 3D stereoscopy is used in this film, it is intended to be viewed without 3D glasses.</p>