Program 4
curated by tooth
Saturday, April 12, 2025 @ 7pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 65 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
Lightly Heeled
Kioto Aoki
2024 | 3 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | silent
Remnants of hand processing animates the candlelight relevé. -KA
Study for Three Streams
Park Kyujae
2024 | 5 minutes | South Korea | 16mm | b&w | silent
Filmed at Hongjecheon in Seoul, Mokgamcheon in Gwangmyeong, and Gulpocheon in Incheon, the film captures the impressions of three streams in three different cities. Each of the three streams intersects and overlaps with images of the filmmaker’s own body. -PK
Holographic Will
Mike Stoltz
2024 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
A domestic swirl filmed while the building was being sold. How much longer can we afford to stay? A kaleidoscopic portrait of destabilization during the struggle to stay in a rent-controlled apartment amidst an affordable housing crisis. Shot frame-by-frame, moving the camera between every image. Single frames move forward in time, creating after-image combinations without superimpositions. A phased drum machine soundtrack emphasizes the percussive quality of the image. With gratitude to neighbors and the Los Angeles Tenants Union Northeast Local. -MS
BOSCO
Lucie Leszez & Stefano Canapa
2024 | 8 minutes | France | 16mm | b&w | silent
Three filmmakers bring back images of the forest, they are reworked and destructured with the means of the photochemical laboratory. Bosco is a visual breakthrough punctuated by a contrasted and hypnotic black and white. -LL & SC
Trágame nube
Esperanza Colado
2024 | 12:40 minutes | Spain | 16mm | color | silent
Initially conceived as an art installation in which two twin films are projected on the two sides of a screen, Trágame nube intends to deconstruct the single point of view of camera and projector, implicating the body into a complex dialectical cinematic space. The film is inspired by José Val del Omar’s ideas on cinema and perception. Val del Omar probably is the most important Spanish experimental filmmaker of the 20th century. Shot with Bruno Delgado Ramo, the two films that make Trágame nube have an exact complementary structure divided into three parts. The first one is an improvised play tag at the Alhambra palace in Granada, hometown of Val del Omar where he shot some of his most emblematic films. The second and central part is devoted to activating in playful ways the author’s original documents, held at the library of Reina Sofia Museum. The film apparatus is presented in the third part of the film as sculpture and theatre, in a loose association with Val del Omar's emblematic studio PLAT (Picture-Luminous-Audio-Tactile). Trágame nube was commissioned by the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. -EC
Cypris
Marcelle Thirache (1946-2025)
1995 | 3 minutes | France | super 8 | tinted b&w | silent
Abstract film made of moving and sensual matter. This film was made in black and white and then colored using successive turns.
-MT
Palestine Will Win
Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan
1969 | 28 minutes | France | 16mm | b&w | sound
"I was also very drawn in by the Palestinian issue. I didn't try to make a big film, but just wanted to have a propaganda film, an intelligent one and, in fact, that is how it worked out. At that time, support for the Palestinian struggle was growing, so there were many activist committees that needed such a film. I've been told it was not only in France, but also in Germany, so it served as very good support for all of these committees around the world. I think the film has been viewed by thousands and thousands of people. The whole thing was just shots of photographs that were hung on the wall. That was the whole film and we didn't have an archive. Mahmud Hamshari and Eiz Eldien Qalaq tried to find us as many photos as they could from Palestine, then we chose from them, put them on the wall, and that was it. At the end, we used a real archive of Vietnam, which I think I took from Joris Ivans." -JOdS
“The film was called Palestine Will Win and it got lost - even De Sardan himself hasn't seen the film since 1972.” -Palestine Cinema
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.
Park Kyujae makes films using Super 8, 16mm, and digital formats, exploring the play of light, personal themes, and natural landscapes. He organizes film screenings on a non-regular basis and translates films for film festivals and cinematheques in South Korea.
Mike Stoltz is a Los Angeles-based moving image artist whose practice is dictated by process, working directly with the tools of cinema (images, sound, and time) to reexamine the familiar, the communal, and the medium itself. His works are rooted in a bodily encounter with the subject. This manifests on screen in instances of engaging with performers from behind the camera, chance-based interventions in landscape, moving the camera in concert with architectural structures, and directly addressing the audience. Special effects are created by hand through in-camera techniques, rephotography, and directly manipulating video signals. Physicality continues in the process of editing the pieces, cutting directly on 16mm film and composing the soundtracks from tape music and live sound generated with collaborators. Stoltz's 16mm films and videos have screened internationally at venues such as Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Courtisane, Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival (BAFICI), Light Field, International Film Festival Rotterdam, REDCAT, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. He has programmed film screenings for Magic Lantern Cinema, The Echo Park Film Center, VISIONS, and The Arroyo Seco Cine Club.
Lucie Leszez began a PhD thesis in 2018 at the University of Grenoble on gestures in experimental and contemporary documentary cinema. Co-organizes at the ENS-Ulm the seminar "Gestures of documentary cinema" with Mariya Nikiforova and Lucile Combreau, and the film club "To film the social field." Member of the review Documentaires. Member of artist-run film labs L'Abominable and MTK.
Stefano Canapa was born in Turin (Italy) in 1977. Holder of a Master's degree in History and Technique of Cinema, he has been making films since the late 90s. He was a member of the Groupe Zur, a collective of artists from different backgrounds who work at the crossroads of the visual arts, theatre, music, and film. For over twenty years he was part of the film-makers‘ collective in charge of the artists' film laboratory L'Abominable, making shorts and feature films, documentary and experimental, as well as performances and installations with musicians from the field of experimental music. In a way, his approach is located at the intersection of these different genres, linking a manual and poetic reason with the exploration of the possibilities offered by the tools of film. He often constructs his films from images taken from his everyday life, from simple scenes that he reworks using the resources of the photochemical laboratory. Marked by anthropological and visual concerns, his films focus on tenuous stories, the transmission of which is based on the development of a cinematographic language in tension between documentary and experimental as much as between figuration and abstraction. His work has been presented and awarded in numerous international festivals, exhibitions, and alternative venues as Locarno, Rotterdam, Berlin, Oberhausen, Marseille, and Paris.
Esperanza Collado is a Spanish artist-researcher. Her performance-environments, site-specific works and critical texts investigate the dematerialization of film in art practices, the performativity of writing and the figure of the artist as metahistorian. Often focusing on the phenomenological and situational aspects of cinema and projection, her interdisciplinary works explore the conditions and paradoxes of the performative materiality of the film apparatus at the end of the film age. Recent works revolve around the spatial, sculptural, political, social and choreographic dimensions and potentialities of a cinema by other means. Her book ‘Paracinema: la desmaterialización del cine en las prácticas artísticas’ (Paracinema: the dematerialisation of film in artistic practices), a short version of her Ph.D, won the Spanish Writings on Art Prize from Fundación Arte y Derecho in 2011. She co-founded the editorial project LEVE, releasing 7 records on 45rpm vinyl of site-specific field recordings made by invited artists. Collado's work has been shown at Museum of Moving Image (New York), Taipei Contemporary Art Center (Taiwan), Bristol Experimental and Expanded Cinema (UK), Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (Dublin), Close-Up Cinema (London), MNCARS (Madrid), Images Festival (Toronto), Palais des Beaux Arts (Brussels), MacVal (Paris), Tabakalera CICC (San Sebastian), Centro de Arte Digital (Mexico), Biennial of Havana (Cuba), Image Forum (Tokyo), Anthology Film Archives (New York), Lajevardi Foundation (Teheran), etc.
Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan is Professor of Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Marseilles and Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris.
Marcelle Thirache: Born in 1946 in Ivry-sur-Seine. She begins with the practice of photography and exhibits her work as soon as 1978. First, her discovery of Marguerite Duras with the dissociation between sounds and images, and then the films of Germaine Dulac, foster a growing interest for cinema and finally lead her to choose the Super-8 in 1982. In 1987 she shows her films to yann beauvais and Miles McKane. In 1984, she develops a peculiar skill consisting in hand painting directly on a Super-8 filmstrip. To complete this cinematographic practice, she starts classical painting in 1999