Program 5
curated by Syd Staiti
Saturday, March 14, 2020 @ 9pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 59 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
A Preface to Red
2010 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
A single recording, recorded in a tunnel that one passes through after exiting a boat taking you from one continent to another, where people are selling bright colored toys and bright white sneakers. for the brief variations in the movement on the periphery.
-JS
Grabados del Ojo Nocturno
2016 | 7 minutes | Ecuador/Morocco | 16mm | b&w | sound
A collage of collected memory turned ritual travelogue and sensory vision: from the Sahara to the oceans of South America, passing through an old ancestors abode.
-JJM
...And So We Start Again
Ei Toshinari & Duy Nguyen
2019 | 9 minutes | Japan/USA | 35mm | color | sound
This is the end, but also a new beginning. We hear voices and we see a family. There is rain and there is the sun. We see a bird and we hear singing. There is a dog. There is a cow. There are flowers and there are landscapes. Heisei ends and Reiwa begins. A new era is coming and we feel old. And so we start again.
-ET & DN
ALTIPLANO
Malena Szlam
2018 | 16 minutes | Chile/Argentina | 35mm | color | sound
Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguitain Northern Chile and Northwest Argentina, ALTIPLANO takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes. Fusing earth with sky, day with night, heartbeat with mountain, and mineral with iridescent cloud, ALTIPLANO reveals a vibrating landscape in which a bright blue sun threatens to eclipse a blood-red moon
-MS
Something to Treasure
2019 | 3 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Warm Showers Make Me See Stars.
-AK
Gutai
2019 | 8 minutes | China/USA | 16mm | color | sound
Wenhua took on a radical use of single frame image capture and examines his strange and familiar hometown Wuhan in China (Summer before the virus outbreak), which he has been away from for nearly two decades. The film title comes from postwar Japanese avant garde artist group Gu-Tai. The kanji (Chinese) used to write 'gu' means tool, measure, or a way of doing something, while 'tai' means body. The film is the result of intense looking and seeing what might not be there.
-WS
(tourism studies)
2019 | 8 minutes | USA | 35mm | color | sound
A collection of unused footage/home movies accumulated over ten years that became too much of a weight. The material became a Rorschach test, I saw an accepting cloud.
-JGS
The Island
2017 | 2 minutes | Canada | super 8 | b&w | sound
A penultimate late summer trip to Toronto Islands.
-LS
Jonathan Schwartz was a filmmaker, teacher, and source of inspiration for all his friends and students. Jonathan incorporated found and collected materials in many of his films, and simultaneously developed his unique 16mm vision through intimate exchanges with his subjects, handheld gestures, in-camera superimpositions, and a profound attention to the transient qualities of the world around us. Whether in his short collage films or works shot in his home, on his many walks, or during cinematic journeys to Israel, India, Turkey, or Iceland, his work simultaneously embodies a devotion to the ephemerality of external worlds and a gestural responsiveness to evanescent internal states. Often incorporating aurally textured poetic readings, and other times eschewing all words, Jonathan's films both lacerate and console as we confront his unique cinematic expression of sorrow, disquiet, and exultation.
Jonathan received his MFA at Massachusetts College of Art where he studied under professors Mark Lapore, Erika Beckman, and Saul Levine. Over the years he taught courses at the School of Museum of Fine Arts and Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston and at Bennington College in Vermont. From 2008 to 2018 he was Associate Professor at Keene State College in New Hampshire. He lived in Bratteboro, Vermont.
Jean-Jacques Martinod is a filmmaker and multimedia artist. His works oscillate between modalities of hybrid cinemas using methodologies that experiment with archival materials, celluloid film, analog tape, digital media, synesthetic operations, personal mythologies and travelogues. His work has been exhibited in festivals that include FIDMarseille, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Images Festival, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Cámara Lúcida, Sheffield Doc/Fest, among others, as well as museums, galleries and clandestine DIY screenings. He is also co-founder of EVIDENCE, a micro-publishing project that releases radical poetry, visual arts, photography, and also para-essayistic works within the world of avant-garde cinema. Originally from the city of Guayaquil, he currently resides in the high deserts of New Mexico.
Ei Toshinari & Duy Nguyen live and work in Los Angeles. They previously collaborated on Running in Circles (2018) and Dog in the Shade (2016).
Born in Chile, Malena Szlam is an artist and filmmaker working at the intersection of cinema, installation, and performance. Her practice explores the relationship between the natural world, perception, and intuitive process. The poetics developed through her time-based works and in-camera films engage the material and affective dimensions of analogue film practice. Szlam’s work has been exhibited in numerous festivals and museums including Rotterdam, Toronto, New York, Edinburgh, Media City, 25 FPS, Mar del Plata, and Hong Kong Film Festivals, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Oslo), and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark). Solo screenings have been presented at Los Angeles Filmforum, San Francisco Cinematheque, and FIC Valdivia (Chile).
Annapurna Kumar is a filmmaker who makes work about mortality, fertility, and the hypocrisies of consumerism. Her animated shorts embrace improvisation, and collage appropriated images and sounds from pop culture alongside drawing and CGI.
Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Light Field, Experiments in Cinema Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Big Muddy FilmFestival, MUFF, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: A Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary Art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival.
Joshua Gen Solondz is a film/media artist and musician. He’s shown work at a variety of festivals including MOMA’s Documentary Fortnight, Images Festival, video_dumbo, Toronto International Film Festival, Lima Independent Film Festival, Onion City, Chicago Underground, FICValdivia, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, CAAMFest, and the New York Film Festival. Josh also has screened at venues such as Light Industry, UnionDocs, Harvard Film Archive, Parsons Hall Project Space, DINCA, Plug Projects, and New York University.
Leslie Supnet is a moving image artist based in Winnipeg. She uses animation and found media to create work about our relationship to loss, time and change. Her work has screened at micro-cinemas, galleries and film festivals internationally such as TIFF Short Cuts Canada, Melbourne International Animation Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Antimatter, amongst others. She has taught animation for various artist-run centres, community-based initiatives and at OCAD University.