Program 6
curated by Emily Chao
Sunday, March 15, 2020 @ 5pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 66 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
Double Ghosts
2018 | 31 minutes | Chile/UK/Taiwan | 35mm | color | sound
Double Ghosts explores the status and potential of unrealised and fragmented histories from the legacy of Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz (1941 - 2011) to animist cinematic traditions in Taiwan. The project takes as its starting point an unfinished film shot by Raúl Ruiz in Taiwan in 1995. Based in Paris since the late 1970s Ruiz came to Taiwan to film 'The Comedy of Shadows / La comedie des ombres' with a script inspired by the Taoist philosophy of Chuang Tzu's 'Wandering on the Way' and Luigi Pirandello's 'Six Characters in Search of an Author'. The project was filmed at Chin Pao San cemetery with a Taiwanese cast and crew but never finished.
The incompleteness of Ruiz's film is the starting point for 'Double Ghosts', that considers the echoes of this unrealized project to explore cinematic and political phantoms. Drawing on research and collaborations with filmmakers Valeria Sarmiento and Niles Atallah as well as Chilote fishermen, the film is staged as a series of actions seeking to reactivate this lost film. Filmed on 35mm film in Chile and Taiwan, 'Double Ghosts' follows traces across the Pacific from Ruiz's birthplace in Puerto Montt to the mountain cemetery in Taiwan.
-GC
The House is Yet to be Built
2018 | 35 minutes | USA/Portugal | 16mm | color | sound
A travelogue to places that were created under a utopian impulse and which defy the surface of the world. Some built by artists and intellectuals, others by common people; all of them inhabited by visions to which they knew how to give shape – figura. In order of appearance: an ideal palace built by a postman after each of his daily rounds; a red house designed by a socialist agitator; a pacifist tower erected against the movements of History; an exuberant garden engendered in the feminine; and a merry cemetery, which conjures a community of equals in the outskirts of Europe. To ensure we risk our joy for those who act in their own time.
-SDF
George Clark is an artist, writer and curator. His work explores the history of images and how they are governed by culture, technology and social political conditions. Recent projects have sought to build new models of assembly, exhibition and moving image production. His films have shown at festivals and museums internationally including New York Film Festival (2019) Berwick Film and Media Art Festival (2019), Hanoi Doclab (2019), Taiwan Biennale (2018), AV Festival (Newcastle) (2018), Focal Point Gallery (Southend-on-Sea) (2018), Yunsun Museum (2018); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art / MMCA, Seoul (2017), Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2017) and Museo de Artes Visuales / MAVI (2016) among others.. He is co-founder of the West Java West Yorkshire Cooperative Movement, a collaborative project with the Jatiwangi Art Factory and Pavilion. He has curated projects for museums, galleries, cinemas, and festivals with a focus on broadening the histories of film and video practice globally. He has curated projects for museums, galleries, cinemas, and festivals with a focus on broadening the histories of film and video practice globally.
Sílvia das Fadas is a filmmaker, a researcher, a teacher, a wanderer. She studied cinema and aesthetics, committing herself to the material learning of film at The Portuguese Moving Image Archive and the Portuguese Cinematheque in Lisbon. Driven by a militant nostalgia, she moved to Los Angeles where she continued to craft her personal films in 16mm, at the California Institute of the Arts. She worked as a visual history researcher for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and collaborated with Los Angeles Filmforum until her visa expired and she moved to Vienna in search of a lively film culture. There she worked as a film projectionist for the Austrian Film Museum, while teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts, where she is currently a participant in the PhD in Practice program.
She is the recipient of a Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/ FLAD Scholarship, a CalArts School of Film/Video Scholarship, an Akademie Schloss Solitude Cooperation Fellowship with Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, and a FCT Doctoral Fellowship. Her films have been shown at numerous festivals, cinematheques and minor cinemas. She is interested in the politics intrinsic to cinematic practices and in cinema as a way of being together in restlessness and brokenness.