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Barbara Hammer Program
TRT: 82m
A pioneer of experimental cinema, Barbara Hammer has spent much of her five-decade career deconstructing gender and sexuality through material examinations of the celluloid image and representations of the female body onscreen. This program of 16mm films combines her surreal, sexualized 1970s fantasias with the forays into poetic nonfiction and the trailblazing experiments with optically printed visuals she helped popularize throughout the 1980s. Program includes PsychosynthesisWomen I Love, and Audience, preserved by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation; and Still Point and No No Nooky T.V., preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

Mike Henderson Program
TRT: 75m
A singular cinematic figure, San Francisco’s Mike Henderson became one of the first independent African-American artists to make inroads into experimental filmmaking in the 1960s. Henderson’s work throughout the 1970s and 1980s, from which this program of 16mm films is culled, thrums with a sociopolitical, humorous sensibility that lends his small-scale, often musically kissed portraits (which he later dubbed “blues cinema”) a personal, artisanal quality. Program includes MONEY, Dufus (aka Art), The Shape of Things, The Last Supper, When & Where, Down Hear, Mother’s Day, and Pitchfork and the Devil. All films preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

Program 1: SPECULATIVE SPACES
TRT: 76m

Division Movement to Vungtau
Benjamin Crotty and Bertrand Dezoteux, France, 2016, 4m
U.S. Premiere
In Crotty and Dezoteux’s cheeky and damning political patchwork, a quartet of dancing, computer-animated fruits infiltrate amateur footage shot by soldiers during the Vietnam War.

Wherever You Go, There We Are
Jesse McLean, USA, 2017, 12m
North American Premiere
Assisted by a buoyant electro-acoustic soundtrack, McLean maps an evocative cross-country travelogue through elegantly illustrated postcards and the strangely intoxicating language of junk emails.

IFO
Kevin Jerome Everson, USA, 2017, 10m
North American Premiere
In Everson’s hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, multiple UFO sightings yield both passionate firsthand accounts and detailed reflections; meanwhile, suburban youths raise their arms toward the heavens in becalmed surrender.

Silica
Pia Borg, Australia/U.K., 2017, 23m
North American Premiere
An unseen location scout explores an opal mining town in South Australia in Pia Borg’s sci-fi-laced essay film, which finds in this semi-deserted region both the traces of indigenous culture and remnants of cinema history.

Flores
Jorge Jácome, Portugal, 2017, 26m
U.S. Premiere
Island life, love, and labor are captured in vivid detail in this speculative fiction, in which two soldiers speak in voiceover about the over-proliferation of hydrangea flowers on their isolated Portuguese island in the Azores.

Program 2: PRESENT TENSE
TRT: 76m

Pattern Language
Peter Burr, USA, 2017, 10m
Architect Christopher Alexander’s design theories are applied towards a generative video game labyrinth, resulting in this rhythmic animation made of rippling, skipping, and strobing arrays of light infused with programmatic digital pixelation.

.TV
G. Anthony Svatek, USA/Tuvalu/New Zealand/France, 2017, 22m
World Premiere
The much sought-after, two-letter web domain suffix of the title is examined as both a form of capital and an emblem of a country on the brink of a climate-induced catastrophe in this simultaneously humorous and illuminating essay film centered on the environmentally contentious Pacific Islands of Tuvalu.

disruption
Belit Sağ, Netherlands, 2016, 5m
World Premiere
In the span of a short walk, images and information flow ceaselessly into view as our increasingly digitized lives absorb disparate movie and media moments, from the warmly humorous to the coldly clinical.

Dislocation Blues
Sky Hopinka, USA, 2017, 17m
The Standing Rock protests are the starting point for Ho-Chunk artist Sky Hopinka’s inquiry into identity, community, and mass media. Against twilit images of the Dakota landscape, the film frames present-day traumas through distinct first-person perspectives and reflects on the threatened environment and the complex social realities of the resistance camps.

Rubber Coated Steel
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2016, 21m
North American Premiere
Abu Hamdan, an artist and Forensic Architecture researcher, made an audio analysis to ascertain whether Israeli soldiers used rubber or live bullets in the murder of two Palestinian teens. Through the frame of a speculative court proceeding, the video acts as a tribunal for the case, which includes audio testimony and onscreen forensic animations.

Program 3: THE SHAPES OF THINGS
TRT: 78m

The Crack-Up
Jonathan Schwartz, USA, 2017, 16mm, 18m
World Premiere
Schwartz’s poetic 16mm work meditates on the sights and sounds of slowly crumbling glaciers, charting an interior dance between desperation and hope. The carefully deployed superimpositions, strident soundtrack, and contrasting tones of intensity and tranquility suggest the unpredictable rhythms of metaphysical transformation.

Saint Bathans Repetitions
Alexandre Larose, Canada, 2016, 16mm, 20m
U.S. Premiere
A series of cinematic portraits shot in domestic spaces in a former gold mining town in New Zealand expand into a tapestry of glistening natural light and vaporous movement, created via a painstaking process of in-camera layering effects.

Shape of a Surface
Nazli Dinçel, Turkey, 2017, 16mm, 9m
Shooting on 16mm amidst the Aphrodisias ruins in western Turkey, Dinçel refracts multiple epochs of religious history with mirrors and occluded space, finding figural as well as metaphorical power in the human body’s place within the landscape.

Wasteland No. 1: Ardent, Verdant
Jodie Mack, USA, 2017, 16mm, 5m
U.S. Premiere
Jodie Mack’s bracing 16mm montage film juxtaposes gleaming close-ups of electrical circuit boards with hyper-saturated images of a flower-littered landscape. In its rapid-fire presentation, the film offers a swift metaphorical representation of technology’s inexorable march.

On Generation and Corruption
Takashi Makino, Japan, 2017, 26m
In this Aristotle-inspired audiovisual panorama, a fathomless void slowly accumulates rippling digital textures, and waves of watercolor pastels wash atop barely perceptible images of natural phenomena. When the darkness returns, only the droning soundscape is left to point the way forward.

Program 4: FIRST PERSON
TRT: 76m

Art and Theft
Sara Magenheimer, USA, 2017, 7m
World Premiere
Magenheimer’s video explores the bounds of narrative and the illusion of received wisdom in the seven minutes and twenty-two seconds it takes to rob a house. Here, images of medieval art, popular cinema, and “live” news reportage speak candidly to the constructedness of all storytelling traditions.

Filter
Jaakko Pallasvuo, Finland/USA/Germany, 2017, 25m
World Premiere
Mixing crude animation, 3D modeling, and faux filmic textures in a self-reflexive essay on digitally abetted nostalgia, this playful work of fair use pastiche refracts all manner of postmodern touchstones (David Foster Wallace, Talking Heads, Reality Bites) into an aesthetic interrogation of its own methodology, resulting in, to paraphrase one onscreen subject, a critique of a critique of a critique.

Semen Is the Piss of Dreams
Steve Reinke, USA/Canada, 2016, 7m
In Reinke’s latest provocation, the words of author Hervé Guibert are made flesh through a montage of “human events” that work to collapse the boundaries between the private and public, the perverse and the prosaic.

Year
Wojciech Bąkowski, Poland, 2017, 6m
World Premiere
Bąkowski’s strangely personal, nostalgia-laced video combines the Polish animator’s love of everyday domestic objects and geometric aesthetics with a flickering synth score out of an eighties urban crime film.

BRIDGIT
Charlotte Prodger, U.K., 2016, 32m
Prodger examines issues of gender, sexuality, and creativity in this first-person essay film, shot in and around the Scottish Highlands and named for the Neolithic goddess of springtime.

Program 5: URBAN RHAPSODIES
TRT: 75m

Tower XYZ
Ayo Akingbade, U.K., 2016, 3m
U.S. Premiere
A visual guide to the under-acknowledged multiethnicity of the London borough Hackney, Tower XYZ skips to the beat of the city’s vibrant youth culture and communal spirit, offering up a rebel cry for a new generation: “Let’s get rid of the ghetto!”

Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder
Fern Silva, USA, 2017, 16mm, 9m
North American Premiere
Through softly textured 16mm photography and regional iconography, Silva offers a modernist reflection on two of upstate New York’s most storied 19th century touchstones—the landscape painters of the Hudson River School and the legend of Rip Van Winkle—nodding to a few musical heroes along the way.

Fluid Frontiers
Ephraim Asili, USA, 2017, 23m
U.S. Premiere
Visually tracing the 19th-century Windsor-Detroit slave pass, with on-site readings of notable texts by many of Motor City’s most storied African-American poets, Asili deftly captures the city not simply as a repository of memory but as a landscape of living history.

Onward Lossless Follows
Michael Robinson, USA, 2017, 17m
U.S. Premiere
Robinson’s latest work of cinematic excavation uncovers the darkness inherent even in life’s most banal images and encounters. It’s an unsettling study in duality—between the earthbound and the cosmic, the found and forgotten, the rural and domestic, the verbal and written.

Aliens
Luis López Carrasco, Spain, 2017, 23m
U.S. Premiere
In this short nonfiction portrait, Tesa Arranz, one-time leader of pioneering Spanish new wave band Zombies, reminisces about her sexual and political conquests, while dozens of her recent paintings are examined by Carrasco’s inquisitive camera.

Program 6: THE FORGOTTEN
TRT: 77m

Barbs, Wastelands
Marta Mateus, Portugal, 2017, 25m
North American Premiere
In this accomplished debut, peasants of the Alentejo region of Portugal stand in stylized tableaux and speak to local youths of the Carnation Revolution, the postwar agrarian reform movement, and the ghosts of a postcolonial struggle that haunt the landscape to this day.

Fantasy Sentences
Dane Komljen, Germany/Denmark, 2017, 17m
U.S. Premiere
In a serene meditation on image-making and the slippery nature of storytelling, Komljen ominously mingles anonymous home video footage with images of contemporary Ukraine’s desolate landscapes.

Missing In-Between the Physical Proper
Olivia Ciummo, USA, 2017, 6m
World Premiere
A prismatic collection of re-photographed images––of deserts and oceans, plants and animals––are disrupted and transformed by an array of color filters, soft synth accompaniment, and familiarly boorish messages lifted from the online world.

The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy
Duncan Campbell, U.K./Ireland, 2016, 31m
U.S. Premiere
Campbell’s fictional narrative, concerning a pair of American anthropologists en route to the Irish village of Dún Chaoin, expands into a reflective investigation of filmmaking ethics and a portrait of a small community forced to confront the changing tides of traditions.

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