Playlist
<p>An odyssey through a common land in the south of England told through the hands of the natural history society members who currently occupy it.</p>
<p>Chooka returns to the site of a paper factory in northern Iran 40 years after its foreign workers left the region. Mediated through screens and photography while navigating multiple temporalities, the film explores the entangled relationship between a stranger and a host, a factory and a village, a film crew and a family, foreign trees and a landscape.</p>
<p>Deep in the heart of the Amazon, Tauary inhabitants invite us to listen to the sounds of the jungle, the birds, and animals.However, some weird sounds appear: a creature prowling around the trees. Some of them have heard her, very few have ever seen her, and those who did find her never came back. She charms, she enchants — she leads people to get lost: each of one of them tells a story in their own way and tries to decipher her sounds.</p>
<p>“Der Klang, die Welt... was filmed in the same site as Listening to the Space in My Room, but now we hear Dieter Staehelin speaking about the place of music in his life, and we join him and Cécile Staehelin playing an Arabesque by Bohuslav Martinů. While they play, I turned the lens at certain moments to white, an open aperture”, Robert Beavers.</p>
<p>Defying a highway overpass that split their neighbourhood in two, the local community reclaim their territory using dynamic mural paintings and the subversive traditions of the Mardi Gras Indians to create an alternative version of their history, referring to the various stages of the Civil Rights movement, including the Maroon tradition that united runaway slaves and Native Americans.</p>
<p>By turns raucous and reserved, I Hope I'm Loud When I'm Dead ponders the future of a world in flux as seen through the eyes of motherhood accented by poets CAConrad and Eileen Myles.</p>
<p>The film is a collaborative portrait of the village arts community of Jatiwangi Art Factory in West Java, Indonesia. The film draws on large cast of local collaborators and performers from school children to factory workers. Charting transformations and rebuilding of the community, the film proposes an open form to experience Jatiwangi's model of art practice and their dedication to discourses on local rural life.</p>
<p>A portrait of my Japanese friend Risa (Lisa) Tamaru, filmed in Berlin and Yokohama. It's the sixth film in a series of short portraits of close women friends and my two godchildren. Filming portraits allows me to emphasize private gestures and moments beyond narration and documentation.</p>
<p>My mother is a Sociologist – she came to Glasgow from the south of England in the 60’s to work within the Politics Department of Glasgow University- after a few years the Sociologists broke away and formed their own department, where she taught until she retired. Although the university advocated and furnished her with her own personal computer – she still used index cards to make notes on the books and articles that she read. Now that she no longer has an office her house is filled with shoeboxes and filing cabinets containing these cards. My mother was absent on the day that I shot this film; the interview and sounds were recorded at a later date.</p>
<p>Witnessing my daughters passage though childhood with a 35mm Russian movie camera.</p>
<p>Researched, filmed, and recorded on Visva-Bharati campus at Santiniketan, Sriniketan and surrounding areas of Birbhum, West Bengal, O Horizon stages moments from Rabindranath Tagore’s extensive environmental pedagogy as a series of portraits, moods, studies, and sketches that allude to what might be described as the outlines of a “Tagorean cosmopolitics”.</p>
<p>A group of speleologists go into a cave called Ojo Guareña. The space limits appear diffuse and the human voices reach us as a reverberation from an uncertain source. In the end, we are not quite sure whether we are looking at the cave or whether, on the contrary, it is the cave that is actually looking at us.</p>
<p>Rushing Green with Horses is the editing of brief moments experienced, filmed between 1999 and 2018 while travelling, at home, with friends, and alone. These are private gestures that attracted my attention, beyond narration or documentation, spontaneously recorded.</p>
<p>Shot in 16mm on Rob's Bolex, this is a very private film, one that I decided in 2017 wasn't to be seen by anyone who didn't know my son Lucas Todd Wheeler. Rob honoured my wish, and did not make a work print, leaving it to be shared only via video link amongst friends and family. After Rob's suicide I decided the film was a stunning representation of the grief we feel not only for Lucas, but for the whole world, at the loss of so much light, and so I sent the link out far and wide.</p>
<p>A letter to a loved one from abroad. The reaction to a piece of news and the doubts generated by it in the filmmaker lead him to compile images and sounds, questioning memory and poor communication.</p>
<p>The Haunted is an intimate video letter to the spirit of the extinct Turan tiger, which disappeared from Central Asia in the 20th century. Today, the tiger lives on in people's collective memory.</p>
<p>A brief filmmaker's notebook, in two parts, both silent. The first was filmed in and around a village in Messenia, Greece, and the second in the Cévennes region of the south of France.</p>
<p>This film applies the six principles for composition delineated in Opinions on Painting by the Monk of the Green Pumpkin, written by the eighteenth-century Chinese painter Shih-T’ao as referenced in Raúl Ruíz’s essay ‘For a Shamanic Cinema’ (for example, ‘draw attention to a scene emerging from a static background’ or ‘add scattered dynamism to immobility’). The film is composed of scenes with non-actors, and texts by R.D.Laing and Lucy Lippard.</p>
<p>Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Northern Chile and Northwest Argentina, ALTIPLANO takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes. Fusing earth with sky, day with night, heartbeat with mountain, and mineral with iridescent cloud, ALTIPLANO reveals a vibrating landscape in which a bright blue sun forever threatens to eclipse a blood-red moon.</p> <p>Coupled with a soundscape generated from infrasound recordings of volcanoes, geysers, Chilean blue whales, and more, ALTIPLANO makes use of in-camera editing to create evocative visual rhythms through the clash of color and form. Landscapes pulse and stutter, transformed through complex 16mm pixelation and superimposition techniques into spaces that exist in a multitude of times simultaneously. Located at the heart of a natural ecosystem threatened by a century of saltpeter and nitrate mining practices, and recent geothermic exploitation, ALTIPLANO reveals an ancient land standing witness to all that is, was, and will be.</p>
<p>The film deconstructs and reconstructs a photograph taken in 1998 of a Syrian cactus field, a plant known for its resilience. War and its havoc have been there. 20 years later there only remains this photograph projected on a wall in a flat in a Berlin backyard.</p>
<p>In the mountains of Córdoba hides a historical scar. In 1575, hundreds of Hênia-Kâmîare women, children and elders jumped off in order to avoid slavery. A free, poetic view at the very place where the largest mass suicide in the history of the territory known today as Argentina took place. The film is a phantasmagoric trip within this geographical extension, taking it as a vast, green cemetery.</p>
<p>Shot at the Film Farm in Mt.Forest, this comedy is a quest about performance, educational voiceover, analogue filmmaking, ASCII, language, ethics of ethnography and narrative storytelling under a metaphor of instructions to farm land. Text by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Wikihow/shoot-film.</p>
<p>The personal stories experienced by the Uncle, the Father, and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience drawn along a line in time. This cleft line resembles a wrinkle in the family album, but also a crack in the walls of the paternal home. It resembles the wound opened by piercing a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imagination of a people, where the idea of salvation finds a tragic destiny in political struggle. What lies at the end of this line? Will the old war songs be enough to overcome this fate?</p>
<p>"Is Not" is a cumulative poem, with a continuous writing process that could last a lifetime. With this list of "what appears to be but isn't," Parsi observes spaces and people in perpetual motion, creating another poem that caresses, collides, and swirls alongside "Is Not."</p>
<p>Many cities or countries have a distinctive malaise. They are places that could be Portugal, so sunk in a painful longing for the past, and where each tension of the present is only the tip of an iceberg explained in successive retreats that can go directly to the origin of the species, at least. This common feeling in many latitudes is often presented as a diagnosis, a denial of a painful present as opposed to the desire to return to a glorious past.</p>
<p>In a small side room that is freely visible from the main gallery, visitors can look at <em>Polly One</em>. As in <em>Condor</em>(2019), the sky and the sun are the focus here. Although both works depict an eclipse of the sun, the aesthetic that defines this small projection <em>Polly One</em> is different. The sun is reduced to a thin crescent by the moon, but is nonetheless resplendent in bright matte colors, and the rapidly changing cloud formations continuously alter the picture. Over-exposure and light reflection occasionally give the film a red-orange color. The film was made in the small town of Saluda in North Carolina. On August 21, 2017, a total eclipse of the sun was observed in fourteen states from the northern west coast to the southern east coast. It became known as the “great American eclipse.” Everson titled his film for his grandmother, Bertha Everson, who died the day before the eclipse. </p> <p>16mm film transferred to HD video, color, silent, 6:12 min.</p> <p>Courtesy the artist, trilobite-arts DAC, Charlottesville, Picture Palace Pictures, New York</p>
<p>In The Glass Note, a collage of sound, image, and text explore cinema’s inherent ventriloquism. Across surface and form, the video reflects on voice, embodiment, and fetish through the commingling of sound and image.</p>
<p>The Sun Quartet is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four bodily mutations: a sun stone where youth blooms in protest, a river overflowing the streets, the burning plain rising in the city. And, finally, the clamor of the people that shook Mexico after the night of September 26, 2014. The disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa opened a breach in the Mexican political body.</p>
<p>I realized the sun was out and it was cloudy. But the sun had already come out. Something seemed strange so we got off the motorbike and had a look around. I went around a well that was there, and I noticed that there was a dead Chinese inside. I thought so and that is also what my dad said in the newspaper.</p>
<p>A cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to power structures they’re inherently part of. The film grew out of abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Shot at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip Hammer took to Guatemala in 1975, and laced through with Deren’s reflections of failure, encounter and initiation in 1950s Haiti. A vever is a symbolic drawing used in Haitian Voodoo to invoke a Loa, or god.</p>