Cosmic Rays Film Festival 2023

<p>The bleached palette and home-movie aesthetics of Super 8 footage provide the image track for this testimonial about an illegal abortion in Mexico City in the 1960s, delivered in voiceover by the filmmaker&rsquo;s mother. In its account of this intimate and disorienting memory, Lesser Choices summons a time of profound uncertainty&mdash;a moment from an era without rights&mdash;and offers a warning to the present.</p>

<p>The beast plunges into the river and emerges, observing what it&rsquo;s like to perpetuate cycles of destruction and isolation.</p>

<p>&ldquo;The world is an egg, the egg itself is a theatre: a stage theatre in which the roles dominate the actors, the spaces dominate the roles and the Ideas dominate the spaces.&rdquo; -Gilles Deleuze.</p>

<p>Amid desert landscapes and chain-link fences, plutonium lay scattered and buried in the town of Palomares, Spain. A voiceover narration describes an undisclosed medical condition, and land and body converge in the uncomfortable difference between recovery and survival. Telling two divergent stories in parallel, Sine die is based on real events that correspond to physical contamination, whether that be the earth or the body &ndash; the director&rsquo;s &ndash; that together invoke a condition of the chronically present.</p>

<p>Through snowy stargazing, flirting with guys on dating apps, taking ketamine (or not), and watching YouTube lecture videos, outer and inner space collapse &ndash; to draw a warped cartography of desire and distance.</p>

<p>The Voice in Isabel Fleiss&rsquo;s Office,A woman with an unusual malady&ndash;cobweb buildup in the throat&ndash;receives an even more unusual treatment in this adaptation of a surreal poem by North Carolina writer Virgil Renfroe.</p>

<p>Fathom, a unit to measure depth. A medical-science trajectory toward understanding the deep complexity of distorted minds and the perception of the ones who suffer it. &nbsp;</p> <p><span style="color:#e74c3c"><strong>ISFF13 Symbiosis 2020 Winner&nbsp;</strong></span></p>

<p>Described by its director, Juanita Onzaga, as a work of &lsquo;ancestral futurism&rsquo;, this dizzying visual journey takes on the perspective of Sybille, the last woman on Earth, a planet where water no longer exists. She seeks to communicate with the spirit of water, a carrier and transmitter of more memory than humans could ever remember. Shot on Super 8, this sensorial trip finds fluid form to describe the end of the Earth as we as humans know it.</p>

<p>This is the third variation of the on-going 16mm film projector performance piece, &quot;Six Seventy-Two Variations,&quot; for which I produce images and sound as a live performance. I use a wood carving knife to scratch off the photographic emulsion of the looped film as a live performance. Scratched patterns, which would be mostly horizontal lines, will appear as an abstract animation on the screen and produce noises, as the area of the filmstrip reserved for the optical soundtrack will be also scratched. Due to the distance between the gate of the projector and the position of the photocell to read the visual information for sound, the noise from a scratched pattern will be produced about a second later after it appears on the screen. &mdash;Tomonari Nishikawa</p>

<p>Jon Satrom&rsquo;s Prepared Desktop leverages the digital defaults and mundane functions of our technologies. Scripts, presets, and glitches collide as he tickles the edges of his OS.</p>

<p>&Delta;V/&Delta;T is an ongoing single-channel audiovisual composition performed entirely and exclusively in realtime, primarily with tools designed by the artist and built by hand. Pronounced &ldquo;DELTA V, DELTA T&rdquo;, &Delta;V/&Delta;T is the formula for acceleration &mdash; change in velocity divided by change in time. &Delta;V/&Delta;T is concerned with connections between the technological singularity, sensory perception and the physical universe; and phenomenological aspects of intense audiovisual stimulus.</p>

<p>Sanzgiri&#39;s father was 18 when India ousted the last remaining Portuguese colonizers from Goa in 1961. Combining 16mm with drone footage, desktop screenshots, and Skype interviews with his father, Sanzgiri utilizes various modes of seeing at a distance to question identity, the construction of memory and anti-colonial solidarity across continents.</p>

<p>In this film shot on 16mm, Sanzgiri traces lines and lineages of ancestral memory, poetry and his history. A search for solidarity in the sounds and colours of a spontaneous movement in Delhi led by Muslim women, an Iqbal Bano song, images of B.R. Ambedkar &ndash; a radical anti-caste Dalit intellectual &ndash; all revolving around a letter addressed to a distant relative. Seeking to reclaim the past from erasure, and provide a journey towards a potential future.</p>

<p>What is liberation when so much has already been taken? Who has come for more? &quot;Golden Jubilee&quot;, the third film in a series of works about memory, diaspora and decoloniality, takes as its starting point scenes of the filmmaker&rsquo;s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India, created using the same technologies of surveillance that mining companies use to map locations for iron ore in the region. A tool for extraction and exploitation becomes a method for preservation. The father, sparked by a memory of an encounter as a child, inhabits the voice of a spirit known locally as Devchar, whose task is to protect the workers, farmers, and the once communal lands of Goa. Protection from what the filmmaker asks? Sanzgiri&rsquo;s signature blend of 16mm sequences, 3D renders, direct animation, and desktop aesthetics are vividly employed in this lush, and ghostly look at questions of heritage, culture, and the remnants of history.</p>

<p>Incarcerated participants in a mental health experiment watch videos of sunset-soaked beaches, wildflowers, and forests on loop, prompting them to reflect on isolation and wilderness.</p>

<p>One October evening in Paris, 1961. A man leaves his room to join a peaceful march for Algerian independence. A photograph reconstitutes the offscreen dimension of the event using fragments of a daily life in suspended time.</p>

<p>When spending a lot of time at home in isolation, the walls begin to move. The sense of time fades, the days pass quietly, everything seems to repeat itself endlessly. Spaces, conversations, visual impressions and sounds merge and make everything seem like a long dream.</p>

<p>Max is Felix Carlson&rsquo;s memory of the family dog. They met as pups and shared a long life together. When Max suffered a serious seizure, Felix began assembling this film as an act of mourning. Max lived two more years, happily and medicated, before he finally returned to the heavenly lap of Felix&rsquo;s grandparents &ndash; Felisa and Felix Aroy &ndash; on Feb 10th, 2022.</p>

<p>A short tribute to my hometown Wuhan, China. All source footage is from my childhood friends&rsquo; social media 15-second video feed. Muybridge captured the galloping horse one hundred forty years ago in a brief 12 frames. The duration of contemporary social media video clips is similar to Muybridge&rsquo;s brevity.</p>

<p>I refused to cook for a long time. Growing up, watching my mom struggle as a housewife made me label cooking as a domestic activity that seemed lonely, frustrating, tedious. As I grew older, I started cooking more. The same pot, the same recipe, the same smell, connected my mother and I.</p>

<p>A hermit lives in solitude within the dense, misty forests of Southern Appalachia and the infernal fires of a glass foundry. Here the phenomenological lines between real and imaginal realms blur as a cosmic flame continues to swell.</p>

<p>The living word produced by Lavoro Macchinine is propelled and propagated by a hunger for, and the digestion of, Il Gatopardo&lsquo;s diegetic space. It longs to hide within it; to become part of it.</p>

<p>Running like water, an eclipse streams glimpses of irreversible consequence.</p>

<p>Dream of Splendor synthesizes footage from the 1962 Hong Kong film The Magnificent Concubine with footage of a souvenir store located in Chicago Chinatown to create a mysterious and at times melancholy exploration of the Chinatown chronotope.</p>

<p>In the dream of a stranger.</p>

<p>In the near future, real estate developers deploy sonic weapons used at protests to clear neighborhoods for high-end high rises. On the front lines are sound medics that tend to those injured by the assaults. As they respond, one member of the team documents the incidents to create a future archive for other sonic activists.</p> <p>For Phase II, the filmmaker walked around areas of rapid development in her city and took thousands of photographs. This animated, speculative fiction/non-fiction archive maps out more aggressive eviction and deployment tactics to come.</p>

<p>Along the tide-swept shores and marshlands of a once-major city, people have gone but the artifacts of their era linger: rusted vehicles, heaped tires, crushed cement and glass. Old structures fall. Mechanical observation systems glitch. Wildlife roam these derelict lands anew. In the absence of human perception linear progressions falter and time moves in loops and skips, unpredictable. And over geologic time, even our most impervious creations will degrade and cease to exist.</p> <p>ywnhx hovers in temporal uncertainty: told from beyond us yet amidst our physical memory, shot on New York City shores marked by human&nbsp;activity but abandoned even in advance of their inevitable inundation due to climate change. We are here yet not here, already come and gone, outlived by junked cars and microplastics,&nbsp;among the alarm cries of foxes and fragmented birdcalls. Composed of documentary footage and sound painstakingly processed to pry apart&nbsp;the assurances of recorded time, ywnhx considers the legacy of our species from vantage of an ambiguous post-Anthropocene.</p>

<p>Filmed on the former grounds of Black Mountain College, Looking Backward (2022) is a short elegy (ten minutes) exploring utopian legacies and &ldquo;other impossible projects&rdquo; through poetic and archival visual language</p>

<p>Frequencies of Deep Time explores changes of geological time in Western New York, change that form strata in the rock formations of gorges like Watkins Glen State Park. I am interested in the stories the formations can tell of the co-evolution of life and minerals, of humans and non-humans, and their entanglement with one another and the land. I developed custom software that uses sound waves to augment three-dimensional forms animating the geological landscapes. Oscillations work as an audio-visual metaphor for change across deep time and provide a way to perform across an incomprehensible length of time.</p>

<p>I know, you&#39;re a seasonal beast. Like the starfish that drift in with the tide. With the tide. So until your blood runs. To meet the next full moon. Your madness fits in nicely with my own. With my own. Your lunacy fits neatly with my own. My very own - from Sea Song by Robert Wyatt</p>

<p>A study of an unnatural American environment: an artificial reservoir. The cinematic image and the landscape it captures: damaged things adrift in an ecology of discord. Two forms of picturing or envisioning nature interact: that of the pastoral, the romantic, the picturesque, and that of the industrial, the topographic, the arbitrary.</p>

<p>An underwater walker advances heavily towards the unknown. What he sees, what he finds, makes up this inventory made of melancholy, obsessions and fears.</p>

<p>Over three years, Joshua Gen Solondz&#39;s film is a crowded collage of gurgling paint, jagged splices, errant sprocket holes, and puzzling images that conjure the densely material frames of the late queer avant-garde filmmaker Luther Price.</p>

<p>Suspended in moments, re-connecting with one&rsquo;s immediate material surroundings (aka nature) through the unbridled flow of emotions. Swimming into the moments of being, merging the heart with mind and senses.</p>