Program 1
curated by Syd Staiti
Friday, April 11, 2025 @ 7pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 63 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road & 97th Street
Christina Battle
2002 | 3 minutes | Canada | 16mm | color | sound
highlighting the repetitive nature of oil wells in northern alberta, this hand processed film documents a sighting common to the canadian prairies. -CB
Shot in the artist’s home province in Alberta, the mechanical rising and falling of an oil well is subject to a suite of rephotography applications (recoloured, superimposed, speed changes). Views of far and near are juxtaposed. Theme and variations, not with a piano, but an oil derrick on a prairie field, rising and falling. [Mike Hoolboom, 2007]
Songs Overheard in the Shadows
James Edmonds
2025 | 22 minutes | Germany | 16mm | color | sound
Balanced on the edge of what is visible, everything comes from nothingness and returns to nothingness. Strands of consciousness trying to convene with each other. Forms of personal significance in a time of crisis, set free into random motion through chance operations. Recurring details point towards a centre. -JE
INCHOATRACIES OR EVERYTHING IS AS IT GOES IN ANTEROGRADE
Zack Parrinella
2024 | 2 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
An antagonizing balance between the existence and perception of things. -ZP
Color Negative
Sara Sowell
2023 | 5 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Guesstimating the ecological impact of artist film across the private airlines of the Kardashian-Jenners. Film turns facts into flicker. Hand-processed color negative film. -SS
Bagatelle I
Jerome Hiler
2016 | 16 minutes | USA | 16mm, 18fps | color/b&w | silent
Bagatelle I is a film with a thread of portraiture running through it. We meet an artist clinging to a fence during a break from his workplace. The walls of his world are formidable and highly energetic. Still, there are spaces where solitary work can transform a chaotic world. -JH
Private Movie
Naomi Uman
2000 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | sound
This love story in three parts recounts the amorous journeys of one woman, in love with places, pets, men and nostalgia. -NU
Easyout
Pat O’Neill
1972 | 9 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Has to do with a consideration of one possible conceptual model for human existence: that of a primitive form of yard chair, upon which sits The Creator, impassively observing the inexorable flow of His mountains. The name "Easyout" is derived from a commercially available bolt and stud-extracting tool, whose function seemed strangely parallel to that of the film. -PO
Christina Battle is an artist based in amiskwacîwâskahikan, (also known as Edmonton, Alberta), within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Her practice focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster: its complexity, and the intricacies that are entwined within it.
James Edmonds is an artist-filmmaker from England living in Berlin. His work is driven by personal observations and a poetic approach to the everyday that is both formalistic and lyrical. His films have been shown at various international festivals including TIFF Toronto, NYFF New York, MoMI New York, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Curtas Vila do Conde, Open City London, FICUNAM Mexico City, and EXiS Seoul. Alongside cinematic works he creates paintings and installations, texts, poems and music. Since 2022 he collaborates regularly with artist Petra Graf. He also teaches workshops in various art fields, and organises occasional film screenings and exhibitions.
Zack Parrinella is a film enthusiast, making films sometimes by hand processing in darkrooms and sometimes by working with commercial film labs, and usually both. His work often centers around dissonance and decay, sometimes more lighthearted and sometimes more anxious.
Sara Sowell is an artist and experimental filmmaker. Her films, installations and performances reanimate legacies of art and media production through haptic aesthetic interventions. Her work has been exhibited in artist-run spaces, galleries and international film festivals including Microscope Gallery (New York, NY), CROSSROADS (San Francisco, CA), Baltic Analog Lab (Cēsis, LV), and IFFR (Rotterdam, NL).
Jerome Hiler has been making films since 1964. For most of his life, he has only been sharing his work with friends and colleagues. Starting in 2010, he has been screening and distributing new work and some films that incorporate earlier material. He has been shown at many film festivals internationally. In 2012 his WORDS OF MERCURY was included in the Whitney Museum's Biennial. Retrospectives were also held at the New York Film Festival and the Harvard Film Archive.
Naomi Uman creates work marked by her signature handmade aesthetic, often shooting, hand-processing and editing her films with the most rudimentary of practices. Naomi's films have been exhibited widely at the Sundance and Rotterdam International Film Festivals, The New York Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival among others; she has also screened her work at the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney, the Smithsonian, and Mexico City's Museo de Arte Moderno.
Pat O'Neill has been deeply involved in Los Angeles culture since the late 1960's. A founding father of the city's avant-garde film scene, an influential professor at CalArts and an optical effects pioneer, he is best known for his short works from the early 1960's onwards which are highly graphic, layered and reflexive assemblages based on a mastery of optical printing techniques. Several of his films between 1963 and 2006 include 7362 (1967), Runs Good (1970), Saugus Series (1974), Water and Power (1989), Trouble in the Image (1996), and The Decay of Fiction (2002).