Program 3
curated by Zachary Epcar
Saturday, April 12, 2025 @ 5pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 69 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
NYC RGB
Viktoria Schmid
2023 | 7 minutes | Austria | 16mm | color | sound
“With NYC RGB Viktoria Schmid shows us a view of New York that we’ve never seen before, made possible by historical color film processes. The material, triple exposed with different color filters, mixes colors, space, and time to a perception that is possible only in film. Evidence of cinema’s potential for bursting open reality. The film is part of a series of works in which Schmid looks back to early color film processes.” -Light Cone
This Quality
Rosalind Nashashibi
2010 | 4 minutes | Egypt/UK | 16mm | color | sound
“This Quality is a film shot in downtown Cairo. It comprises two halves: the first shows a 30-something woman looking directly at the camera, and sometimes acknowledging the existence of others around her who we cannot see. She has a beautiful face with eyes which seem to see internally rather than outwardly, they almost have the appearance of being painted on, suggesting the blindness of a mythological seer. The second half shows a series of parked cars covered with fabric. Each car suggests a sightless face, as the fabric stretched around the machine turns it into a face but also seems to hood the car so that it is conspicuously hidden, like a child covering his eyes.” -LUX
Before Need Redressed
Gunvor Nelson & Dorothy Wiley
1994 | 42 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Does aging bring perspective to this life, often lived by absurd Standards of Behavior, when all soon turns to dust? (We started with some actors, friends, and relatives.) The humans, as they struggle to construct their reality, seem preoccupied by words, problems, and abstract theories while surrounded by a luminescent reality radiating mysterious objects. The Before Need of the title refers to the signs that mortuaries place on burial plots, gravestones, or urns that have been purchased but are not yet needed. -DW
Plastic Aortas
Malic Amalya
2024 | 10 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Plastic Aortas is a portrait of the black plastic encasing the Fells Reservoir in the unceded land of the Massachusett, Pawtucket, and Naumkeag indigenous peoples. The lining was placed there by conservationists in order to mitigate the invasive Common Reed, which is killing native plants. However, the lining also interferes with wildlife and contaminates the water.
The film’s title references Roland Barthes' 1957 essay, "Plastic," in which he writes, “The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas.” 65 years after Barthes’ essay was published, in 2022, microplastics were found in human blood and, in 2023, in human heart tissue.
In this 16mm film, tension rises between the benefits and hazards of plastic or, as Barthes describes, between plastic and “life itself.” -MA
Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke
Tomonari Nishikawa
2023 | 6 minutes | Japan/USA | 16mm | color | sound
The visual shows the alternation of the shots of fireworks filmed at a summer festival in Japan, producing a distinctive yet organic rhythm, as well as a gap in time between the visual and sound, both of which are produced by the photographic images on the 16mm filmstrip. -TN
Viktoria Schmid is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Vienna, who is working at the interface of the cinematic and the exhibition space. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in exhibitions and film festivals. She studied filmmaking at the Friedl Kubelka School, holds a BA in Cinema Studies from the University of Vienna and a Masters in Time-Based Media from the University of Art and Design Linz. The different mediums she uses, like film, video and photography are the co-authors of her work - she enjoys that their specific characteristics form her pieces.
British-Palestinian artist Rosalind Nashashibi is a painter and filmmaker. Her films are often non-linear, punctuated by manifestations of power dynamics and collective histories. Subjects have included non-nuclear family structures, the multiple personae of the artist and chronicling Palestinian life. In her painting, sentimental or overbearing motifs such as a pair of swans or a X, intrigue us into looking at them anew, and her references to historical paintings are dives into the past to bring back new experiences.
Malic Amalya (b. 1980 - Burlington, VT) is an experimental filmmaker working across 16mm, video, and performance. His films are situated between formal avant-garde traditions, the anti-assimilation subculture of queercore, and intersectional feminism. His creative framework is informed by prison abolition, decolonization, anti-racism, gender self-determination, disability justice, anti-capitalism, and climate justice.
Malic is an Assistant Professor of Experimental Media and Film Production at Emerson College. He earned an MFA in Moving Image from the University of Illinois-Chicago, an MA in History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a BA from Hampshire College. He was an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and has been an artist in residence at Signal Culture and the Vermont Studio Center.
Since 2014, Malic has been collaborating with his boyfriend, Nathan Hill, under the name Vitreous Chamber. They live and work together in Boston, MA.
Gunvor Nelson (1931-2025) moved from Sweden to California in the early 1950s. She made her filmmaking debut with Schmeerguntz (1966), a film she co-directed with Dorothy Wiley. This amusing, grotesque attack on the ideal of the American woman was the start of a film oeuvre that has comprised 20 films in 16 mm, six videos and several installations, as well as another series of artistic works.
Trained as a painter, Nelson conceived film as a plastic medium, expressed through her fascination for pigment and the play of light and shade on the flat surfaces of her sensory, ambiguous and poetic images. Nelson often subjectively altered the material by means of overprints, collages, paintings, drawings, etc., in a way that is sometimes openly emotional and expressive, other times contemplative and calm. The effect of language and sound on the moving image heightens the dream aesthetic in her films.
As friends living in Marin County, Nelson and Dorothy Wiley began making films together in the 1960s that foregrounded their personal experiences while examining issues of family, parenthood, partnership and domestic life in the context of artist filmmaking in Northern California. Featuring original soundtracks, their collaborative and solo films explore the poetics of everyday life, from portraits of motherhood to close studies of various bodies.
Tomonari Nishikawa’s films explore the idea of documenting situations/phenomena through a chosen medium and technique, often focusing on its process. His films have been screened internationally, and he is currently teaching in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University.