Program 2
curated by Trisha Low
Friday, April 11, 2025 @ 9pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 62 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
逆立ち逆立ち : If pinholes were right side up, I would be doing handstands
Kioto Aoki
2024 | 3 minutes | USA | 16mm | b & w | silent
The inversion of the body is a familiar and natural state in gymnastics, where handstands (逆立ち / sakadachi in Japanese) are an essential part of the physical lexicon. Camera obscuras share a similar state: the image is upside down. In both handstands and camera obscuras, the inverted body is the correct orientation.
Inside a pinhole camera, we are always inverted, always upside down, except when in an actual handstand. Only then are we right side up, in an upside down handstand. This recurring logic of formal and conceptual reorientation found its way into a vignette using in-camera mattes that playfully inverts and subverts other systems of logic. -KA
Heritage Architecture
Lily Jue Sheng 盛珏
2024 | 9 minutes | USA/China/Taiwan | 16mm | color | sound
Heritage Architecture is a landscape film that plays over three 100' rolls of 16mm, loosely interweaving street scenes from Chinese and Taiwanese port cities through the interstitial space-time of alleyway homes, street markets, and festivals. In the city of Shanghai, heritage architecture is encapsulated within the petite bourgeois memory of longtangs; in Taiwan, this materializes through the spiritual economy of traditional temples. In the end, the hauntologies of these places are preserved in their heritage character which reveal simultaneously national, local, and personal histories that twist and turn alongside changing political powers and rapid urban development. -LJS
Half Light
Ryan Marino
2023 | 10 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Shot over a period of three years in a single interior space, this film explores sensory perception through the textural surface of expired film stock, light and layered images. Ephemeral moments meld into voids of grain. -RM
Zero Woods of the Wild Place
Josh Weissbach
2023 | 12 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Zero Woods of the Wild Place explores the forest that cannot conceal the trauma, the house that cannot listen while dying, and the labyrinth that spirals into the ethics of audio recording. -JW
Apfelesser Guter Küsser? (Appleeater Good Kisser?)
Ulrike Schild
2024 | 3 minutes | Austria | 16mm | color | silent
Apfelesser Guter Küsser is a film project that delves into an Austrian childhood myth: Can you tell if someone is a good kisser based on how they eat an apple? A group of men pose for the 16mm camera, each eating an apple in their own unique way. The focus lies on the intimate, almost symbolic gesture of eating, which can be interpreted as both mundane and sensual. The project explores the subtle differences in behavior and implicitly asks whether the way someone eats an apple can reveal anything about their kissing abilities - playful yet profound reflection on physical expression and personal experience. A key visual element is the uniform clothing of the men, all dressed in the same shade of red, which acts as a literal and metaphorical thread throughout the film. The uniform creates an intriguing dialogue between tradition and modernity and balances intimacy and anonymity. -US
A Trojan House
Sharon Couzin
1981 | 25 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
A house of trick cards, the woman as house. -SC
"Architectural structures become the structures of relationships, establishing the windows of communication (between parents and children, between lovers) while preserving a sense of enclosure, isolation." -Dave Kehr
Kioto Aoki (青木希音) is a Chicago-based artist, educator and musician, whose studio practice navigates various mechanisms and propositions of spatial and visual acuity that respond to, are formed by and creates observations or experiences of the body in space. Primarily rooted in analogue image-making traditions of photography and cinema, Aoki integrates architectural, biographical and geographic histories that balance material and research-based approaches through nuances of material form, spatial play and exhibition strategies. In her work the body often activates, holds, and navigates propositions of sight and relativity and becomes an inflection point that oscillates between assertions of personal, communal or universal experience and cultural histories. Aoki has performed and exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), the Chicago Cultural Center, 6018|North (Chicago), Gallery Kobo Chika (Tokyo, Japan), The Lab (San Francisco), and the Barbican Centre (London); among others.
Lily Jue Sheng 盛珏 is an artist/filmmaker, cinema worker, and organizer local to New York City and New Jersey (Lenapehoking).
Ryan Marino is a New York–based artist working with film and sound. His 16mm films have screened at film festivals and venues worldwide, including: Anthology Film Archives, Crossroads, New York Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Uplink, RPM Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, WNDX Festival of the Moving Image, Fracto Experimental Film Encounter, Transient Visions, Celluloidra Revolverrel, Ribalta Experimental Film Festival, Spectacle Theater, Engauge Experimental Film Festival and the Pacific Film Archive.
Josh Weissbach is an experimental filmmaker. His films have been shown worldwide in such venues as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, 25 FPS Festival, First Look at Museum of the Moving Image, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, and Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris. He has won jury prizes at Montreal Underground, Videoex, ICDOCS, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, Berlin Revolution Film Festival, and Haverhill Experimental Film Festival.
Ulrike Schild's paintings and films illuminate the significance of social and nature-based community. When recording analogue film and painting on canvas, she explores motifs that oscillate between concrete form and abstract dissolution. Groups and individuals become subjects of magical realism as they often unveil forms of contemporary tradition. The incompatibility in her juxtaposition of human fragility with the monumentality of earth, bears evidence of the absurdity of contemporary human endeavor. Schild lives and works in Vienna and Cologne.
Sharon Couzin (1943-2019) was a Chicago experimental filmmaker, painter, and poet who began making films in the early 1970s. Her work is known for its complex visual layering that reflects a personal, autobiographical point of view. In addition to her filmmaking work, Couzin was a significant figure in building and promoting the experimental film community in Chicago, Illinois. In 1983, while teaching filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Couzin helped found the Experimental Film Coalition, an organization that held regular monthly screenings, created the Onion City Film Festival and published several periodicals. Couzin served as the Coalition's President until 1988. Couzin studied filmmaking at SAIC, earning a BFA there in 1976 and an MFA in 1977. After continuing on to teach at SAIC, she served as Chair of the Film Department for a decade.