Cosmic Rays Film Festival 2024

<p>Amid the ruins of the 14th-century city of Hampi in southwestern India&mdash;fabled site of the ancient Monkey Kingdom&mdash;troops of langurs observe a world in flux. Intercutting observational footage with constructed sequences, filmmaker Shambhavi Kaul juxtaposes human, simian, and geologic timescales, marking a place where history, mythology, and nature conspire and collide.</p>

<p>A series of executions of Iranian political prisoners began in the summer of 1988, following the end of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. For nearly three decades, I have been preoccupied with the coincidence of this massacre and my birth in August 1988. The prisoners had no specific graves and were all buried in mass graves, and the most significant mass grave was called Khavaran. The mothers of these prisoners are a symbol of resistance and freedom, and they are called the mother of Khavaran. This film is an experimental documentary and a personal essay based on these events.</p>

<p>A charged meditation on impermanence and entropy explored through Robert Smithson&rsquo;s Spiral Jetty and early video art. Using hand processed 16mm film and analog video synthesis, DiElectric Drift asks what an artist is capable of creating in time, and what do monumental yet fleeting gestures ultimately mean.</p>

<p>A structuralist diary, in blue and red.</p>

<p>Intriguing portrait of summer fireworks, in which delayed and separated sounds create a unique rhythm.</p>

<p>Couldn&#39;t get things right I remember when the sound of the wind and the sound of you taking a shower could still be confused.</p>

<p>A series of executions of Iranian political prisoners began in the summer of 1988, following the end of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq.</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>Light in its many forms&mdash;solar, aurora borealis, from a projector, peaking through 16mm brackets&mdash;is the subject and material of Solar Storm. The film toggles between the scales of the granular and microscopic to the vast and planetary. United in this collage of found and re-animated footage, one finds: an analog countdown from the start of a film reel, sun spots, magnetic field disturbances, and an overheard conversation. The film is created using an ink-jet direct-on-film technique where the digital frame is printed directly onto recycled 16mm celluloid.</p>

<p>A camera roll and investigation into the landscape of West Chicago, IL&rsquo;s former Rare Earth&rsquo;s Facility, Kress Creek and Reed-Keppler Park. The former Lindsay Light and Chemical Company owned production plant polluted and distributed radioactive mill tailings (thorium byproduct) throughout the community including dumping in a landfill where the Reed-Keppler Park now stands, near the West Chicago Community High School, as well as in the West Chicago Sewage Treatment Plant, which resulted in runoff into the West Branch of the DuPage River and into floodplains such as the yards of homeowners. Mill tailings are effectively radioactive sand that can easily be carried by wind into bodies of water, the air we breathe or onto food grown nearby. Clean up of the Superfund sites occurred from 2005-2012 but prior to this West Chicago reportedly had elevated rates of cancer.</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>A sense memory of the archive presents itself. The sun magically settles between the crevice of two trees; the warp and weft of the forest turns into a macro lens that obsessively documents the ridges that appear on a butterfly wing; a magnifying glass searches in the negative space of loss and absence; fire flickers through glass, water, and finally consumes the frame within the frame.</p>

<p>2022 | 5 min. | Super 8mm | 18fps | Color &nbsp;| Sound</p> <p>Oceanic patterns come in waves of chroma blurs and ultraviolet light, illuminating marine life in states of change.&nbsp;<br /> &nbsp;<br /> Notes:&nbsp;</p> <p>Washed-up pieces of bleached coral, urchins, and abalone enter tide pools offering evidence of acidification in the warming waters of the Pacific Ocean. Imagery and color were manipulated with found sea glass and diachronic glass. The sound was made with hydrophones placed inside tide pools, within layers of sea foam, and the surrounding waters capturing the sounds of whales, sonar, container ships, cruise ships, and mining. An ocean soundscape of increasing noise.&nbsp;</p>

<p>&ldquo;Unity Island&rdquo; looks at 1/4 square mile stretch of land situated between Niagara River and Black Rock Canal at the border of Buffalo, NY and Fort Erie, Ontario. A railroad traverses the island from Canada to the U.S. passing by a park visited by picnickers, bicyclists, and fishermen.</p>

<p>A ghost, a face, lucid minerals, vague landscapes... To experience delayed emotions is like trying to decipher a riddle caught up in time lags.<br /> I wanted to tell that riddle visually.</p>

<p>A mysterious transmission revealing playful geometric possibilities. Help Desk is a hypnotic hand drawn animation, providing a meditative and contemplative space, oscillating between flatness and depth, control and instability. The film was made using an improvisational process of &lsquo;straight ahead&rsquo; animation, and was primarily an attempt to regain some much needed focus after the fragmented years of the pandemic.</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>In the catalog, I learned about a lot of things.</p>

<p>Fiction, reality, the private, and the performed overlap on a routine but emotional day at a medical center.</p>

<p>Compassion, sadness and love can be expressed quite effectively online&mdash;even when acted, they can seem quite authentic. The same cannot be said of anger. Onscreen, an expression of escalated displeasure and negative agitation almost always looks like a poorly acted play. This has to do with the frequent use of outbursts of anger online as a strategic means to build an image or intimidate others, especially by male social media users. Anger thus degenerates into a blunt platitude, captured in memes and GIFs.</p> <p>In their latest video essay, Chlo&eacute; Galibert-La&icirc;n&eacute;, a master of the genre they aptly call &ldquo;desktop documentary,&rdquo; explores how they can reclaim anger as a bona fide emotion in the online environment. They study gestures and words, who uses them and how, as well as how people respond to them. With a comic perspective, Galibert-La&icirc;n&eacute; concludes that authenticity is often an imitation of the accepted standard.</p>

<p>Intertwining associated experiments in image and sound generation using AI, Nearest Neighbor focuses on language acquisition and mimicry between humans, birds and machines, asking fundamental questions about consciousness, learning and understanding.</p>

<p>Beauty is pain &ndash; at least in the world of Dance. WHAT WENT DOWN takes a humorous and irreverent approach to unpacking ideas of suffering in pursuit of physical virtuosity. A collaboration between choreographer Peter Carpenter and filmmaker Dani&egrave;le Wilmouth, WHAT WENT DOWN features a group of mid-career dancers who navigate the tense relationship between their chronically injured bodies and the barked orders of an uncompromising film director. Exposing the strenuous labor of the cinematic process both in front of and behind the camera, WHAT WENT DOWN devolves from constant action to profound inaction&hellip; all for you!</p>

<p>(16mm &gt; 35mm, 16 minutes, sound, color, Brazil, USA, UK)<br /> The great voyages to the &quot;New World&quot; were seen as expanding the frontiers of the visible and displacing those of the invisible, therefore, maps from that time render the real and imaginary. The film follows a voyage of the Brazilian Military in search of an imaginary island with the same name as their country. The myth from 1483 Brazil, or Hy-Brazil, is known to exist to the west of Ireland and above the Fortunate Islands. Vision of Paradise is an examination of the capacity of the human imagination and computer simulations to construct environments. Amidst the fine threshold of the real, simulated, and imagined, the film analyzes the contemporary ideas of virtual reality and their ambition to expand the frontiers of the physical world into a &quot;New World&quot;.</p> <p>Screening Formats: 35mm, DCP, ProRes</p>

<p><span style="font-size:18px">Football parties, older men, adolescent desire, and the outrageous yet mundane humiliations of being a teenage girl in the 1980s.</span></p>

<p>Through the thresholds and portals of memory, spaces and time blur and shatter.</p>

<p>Parental ageing and an existential wave collide in fun and surprising ways in the suburbs of LA. Dislocated B-roll, meandering voicemails, and readings from the 1984 children&rsquo;s sci-fi movie The Neverending Story combine to situate our collective grief in the hazy mundanities of everyday life.</p>

<p>Three mystics, poetess Rabia Al Basra, writer Marguerite Porete and poetess Akka Mahadevi are each making a ritual. Those women refused the life they were forced to live and devoted themselves to their Gods. Their devotional spirit is an indication of a somekind erotic union with the Divine giving extended dimensions to the spirituality of the Female, which is usually related to the archetype of the Mother.</p>

<p>An animal, which appears to be a fox, was seen outside the containment of the Fukushima nuclear power plant&rsquo;s No. 2 reactor, where radiation levels can reach more than 10 sieverts per hour. It appeared in front of surveillance cameras on the morning of December 21, 2015, and spent 7 to 8 minutes there before disappearing.</p>

<p>A ritual evocation set on Dartmoor, through stone and water, the senses unfolding, drawing inward, and creating. The inner life embodied and manifesting as divine play, the Lila of Hindu philosophy, the Lila who was my teacher, now reaching down through the ancestral line in father and daughter. Shot on 16mm film.</p>

<p>Otherhood brings together a mother and her daughter, the three American poets Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Lucille Clifton, but also a peacock and two camels.</p>

<p>The film weaves &ldquo;Poem for Three Voices&rdquo; by Bhanu Kapil and dropped frames of a VHS tape of &ldquo;New York: A Documentary Film&rdquo; by Ric Burns to comment on the tape&rsquo;s decaying state and somatic experience of living in New York.</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>