Wednesday OCTOBER 5, 2016 — 6 pm

SPECIAL GUEST FILMMAKERS Cinzia Sarto & Rebekkah Palov will join us for Q & A!

Click Here to view the Video of the Discussion

TALKING TO GOD
Curated by Lili White

TALK TO GOD; Lea Furnion; USA; 10.07 Between tourism, beliefs and paganism, Talk to God draws a parallel between the population of the ephemeral Black Rock City (Nevada, US) and the archaeological site of Teotihuacan in Mexico. This video conversation depicts people who dedicate themselves to the celebration of their own eccentric community while buses full of tourists continuously arrive at Teotihuacan, creating a canvas between cosmogony and travels.

ELFMÄDCHEN; Mirka Morales; USA; 16mm film to digi; 16.00 min; Music: bruce haack, tipsy, people like us and ian pooley Winner of Chicago Underground Film Festival Best Animation Award 2009. elfmädchen (elfgirls) is an abstract portrait of a narcoleptic girl, a fairy tale without a prince charming set amongst the urban decay of soma, san francisco. her dreams become weirder, more lucid, flowing in & out of reality. each dream study has its own feel, from tropical to wacky to ominous and back to childlike. It’s a pseudo-scientific sleep study and an ultra-feminine exploration of female unconscious ephemeral spaces.

ANÓME; Lena Ditte Nissen; voice: Mareike Hein; music: Francis Rossignol; GERMANY: 13:00 Interweaving documentary images from the two matrilineal tribes of the Moshu (China) and the Kuna (Panama) this film connects alleged female societies from continent to continent. The link between these two worlds is the filmmaker herself, trying to cope with the otherness of what is seen and the strangeness of the inner experience. Refusing to see at times, unable to make visible.

FALL; Ella Mikkola; CANADA; 3:07
FALL is a short diary film. The film explores the shared virtual reality of two lovers, physically far away from each other, using imagery that includes cell phone messages. This film is a representation of a timeless space, where the relationship is kept alive with memories that are slowly drifting away.

THE SILVER TRADE; Rebekkah Palov; USA; 12:40; digi Appearing: Peer Bode, Zihao Chen, Ed Halter, David Jones, Shuchun Li, Ting Liu, Jonas Mekas, Rebekkah Palov, Joseph Scheer, Georg Steinmeyer, Hanne Steinmeyer, Lili Zhao
Addtional Footage: NASA; music for NASA courtesy Vangelis
I had attended an exhibition of Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s work, which then called up Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, these two artistic ideas led to the slide I took in making THE SILVER TRADE. I was just trying to figure out what the videos mean in the time since they were recorded and indulging in second and third thoughts & also being OK with these personal and ‘poor images’* (*Hito Steyerl. In Defense of the Poor Image). Shot on a Canon Powershot SX160 IS), running them through low resolution effects processing and cutting them with audio from NASA, a service call and dinner being served. THE SILVER TRADE is a close-in diaristic remix of global trade which I see manifested in my everyday life and adventures.The finished piece tenuously postures a global- historical formulation, which neatly called up the title reference to the 16th to 18th century Global Silver Trade. Also within the finished piece there is an imagined critique and fright at looking toward shifting balances in current global trade.

play and repeat; Lana Z Caplan; USA; 3:20
play and repeat is a technological rendering of a cityscape and the experience therein. A sequence of altered still images shot in New York is repeated, each time manipulated and layered over the artifacts of the previous sequence. Images of concrete and pavement are digitally smeared, transmogrifying the architectural structure of the street. Billboards and graffiti become the passage of color and texture through the 2-dimensional space of the screen.
play and repeat takes both the city and digital video itself as subject and explores the effect of the addition and removal of the representational image on perception and memory.
The five-part structure is loosely based on his five-part DOG STAR MAN, in which Stan Brakhage manually manipulated layers of film to create effects like scratching and tinting in a way unique to film. The digital images in play and repeat shot on the way to a screening of THE ART OF VISION (the expanded form of DOG STAR MAN) are layered and manipulated using software-generated effects unique to video. Composition, color and movement give way to accumulation and eventual disintegration into its own ephemerality.

LOST IN A GLASS OF WATER; Cinzia Sarto; ITALY; digi; 2.06
This video is part of a series called “roving with a glass of water” (a disjointed view in need of a compass) a documentation of my walking filmed in Kerala, in Rome and at Coney Island’s beach in New York, three different moments where I was facing the sea and filming who was there. The irony of the title mirrors the elusiveness of losing oneself in a handful of drops or in a glass that can contain an entire sea, leaving us with the question of how we perceive our self and what surrounds us. I was interested in filtering the act of taking images with a gesture that was also an invitation toward others. I needed a gift to offer and chose the element most present inside my body, a liquid that could also move with each one of my steps. Water became a magnifying lens, an instrument to clean the eye, a compass and an offering, it contained both the possibility of drowning and floating while the rhythm of the falling drop underlined the necessary following step of the journey. If my eyes could see through the water they might learn to follow its vagabond nature, its capacity of constant transformation from the single drop on the bird’s wing to the vapor density of fog, to the liquid embracing us.