Program 2 - Friday, November 11th, 2016 @ 9pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 69 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale (advance tickets here)
350 MYA
Terra Long
2016 / 5 minutes / Morocco/Canada / 16mm / sound
The Tafilalt region in the Sahara Desert was once the Rheic Ocean.
350 MYA conjures the ocean's presence in the landscape, deep time in the folds of space.
-TL
Resin
Kimberly Forero-Arnias
2016 / 16 minutes / USA / 16mm / sound / world premiere
Through intimate performances, the surfaces of the skin and the screen become plastic and the body's viscous secretions slip between stimulation and discomfort.
-KFA
Despedida (Farewell)
Alexandra Cuesta
2013 / 10 minutes / USA / 16mm / sound
Shot in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, this transitory neighborhood resonates with the poetry of local resident Mapkaulu Roger Nduku. Verses about endings, looking, and passing through, open up the space projected. A string of tableaus gather a portrait of place and compose a goodbye letter to an ephemeral home.
-AC
Composite/De-Composited
Eva la Cour
2015 / 3 minutes / Belgium / 16mm / silent / US premiere
Composite/De-Composited juxtaposes picturesque visions of authenticity in urban space with narratives of the High Arctic and the 20th century phantasmagoric medium of film. The short 16mm film is shot at a construction site in Brussels characterized by facadisme. In architecture, this is when a building is demolished and rebuilt from within while the exterior of the building is preserved. The film recording is merged with an account of mine extraction in mountain formations on Svalbard, and together the two elements form the story of creating an image: The film subtly addresses the relationship between planetary raw material and the landscape-as-image. Or, the relationship between the façade as raw material and the city as scenery.
-ELC
Sleeping District
Tinne Zenner
2014 / 12 minutes / Russia/Denmark / 16mm / silent
Shot on 16mm film in the outskirts of Moscow, Sleeping District is a document of the residential, concrete structures built during the Soviet Era. Static shots of massive apartment blocks and interior views of private apartments form the visual side, which is intercut with a textual side constructed of observations and memories of the residents, translated from Russian into a broken English. Entering private homes built on tangible experiences, memories and imagination, the film questions how we think of collective memory and how the present may hold traces of history, family relations and a fallen political ideology in the shapes of physical objects and structures.
-TZ
Remembering the Pentagons
Azadeh Navai
2015 / 23 minutes / Iran/USA / 16mm / sound
A slow, rhythmic and contemplative journey into filmmaker Azadeh Navai's earliest childhood memories. With an old 16mm Bolex and a hand-made pinhole camera, Navai returns to Tehran and Esfahan, Iran, where the perceptions and recollections of places, emotions, and scents serve as vehicles through which she exposes a deeply personal landscape. She asks - what is the texture of memory? In what ways does time - the light, wind, and air of history - wear upon the monuments and the images of the past? Her camera, gliding through mosques and the heady wares of a bazaar, provides grounding to narrative themes of childhood wonder and familial tragedy. But, as in memory, there is trouble in the image. The convulsions of recollection are perceptible even in the shifting grains of the film image - kaleidoscopic in their geometries of instability and flux.
Born in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, Navai seeks to access a time of personal turmoil both for her family and for her birth country in this poetic capturing of place, history and memory.