Archive: Year Two
May 4-8, 2022 〰️
Maysles 〰️
MoMI 〰️
Anthology 〰️
May 4-8, 2022 〰️ Maysles 〰️ MoMI 〰️ Anthology 〰️
2022 GROUND GLASS AWARD
Christopher Harris
Prismatic Ground awarded the second annual Ground Glass Award for outstanding contribution in the field of experimental media to filmmaker Christopher Harris.
Museum of the moving image / Wed, May 4, 2022
Maysles documentary center / Thur, May 5, 2022
Constant (Sasha Litvintseva, Beny Wagner)
wave 1
look at that
round ass shit
featuring:
Sim Hahahah
Fabio Andrade
Matt Whitman
G. Anthony Svatek
Jodie Mack
Lydia Nsiah
Sasha Litvintseva
& Beny Wagner
-
Sim Hahahah (2 min)
Someone demonstrates a formula to recount memories. The process is safe and virtually painless.
-
Fabio Andrade (10 min)
“Open the leaves I will see my body turned into flower.” - Gabriel Joaquim dos Santos.
-
Matt Whitman (16mm in person, 9 min)
That was when I thought I could hear you: on petals, on fire, and on the edge of the bridge.
-
G. Anthony Svatek (5 min)
Tropical fruits and vegetables radiate on a blizzard-struck street corner in Brooklyn, NY. A visual oxymoron, tugging at the edge of an interconnected and collapsing global order.
-
Jodie Mack (5 min)
A world tender and unhatched, Future chaos in repose, in slumber. Yggdrasil. Microcosmos. Batter in a bowl. A living wreath. Oleander hyacinth blow away dandelion, particles of an interplanetary lullaby. Dedicated to the one I love. Desiccated attic must momento mori in grace engraved. With the loss of the imaginary and the real, I am unspeakable as one remembers I once was this... before myself, and then nothing, before I could touch the envelope that is right before me, translucent, When I could cry but could not answer. - Darcy Shreve
-
Lydia Nsiah (8 min)
Recordings from server farms and data centers, which are the result of various translation processes between World Wide Web, expired 16mm films, and digital video, are sent into a metaphorical and literal maelstrom - becoming a mechanical eye that looks back and looks at us, the viewers.
-
Sasha Litvintseva, Beny Wagner (40 min)
For most of recorded history, the human body was the measure of all things. Constant asks what led measurement to depart from the body and become a science unto itself. The film explores three shifts in the history of measurement standardization, from the land surveying that drove Early Modern European land privatization, to the French Revolution that drove the Metric Revolution, to the conceptual dematerialisation of measurement in the contemporary era of Big Science. Each chapter traces the relationship of measurement standardization to ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power. Cinematic and technical images that begin as products of measurement systems are stretched beyond their functions to describe the resistance of lived experience to symbolic abstractions.
Autoethnography (Iván Reina Ortiz)
wave 2
wings
featuring:
Paige Taul
Yashaddai Owens
Maliyamungu Muhande
Iván Reina Ortiz
Helen Peña
-
Paige Taul (3 min.)
A film about a girl and her js. A meditation on the politics of style, collectivity, and personal taste.
-
Yashaddai Owens (3 min)
A black trumpeter searches for the truth of this world, but doesn't know which path to take until he's confronted by the image of self.
-
Maliyamungu Muhande (6 min)
Burned, scratched, and painted film guides a reflection on healing from colonial trauma; physical scars blend with damaged film.
-
Iván Reina Ortiz (15 min)
Artist Iván Reina Ortiz explores their gender identity through examining archival material, personal footage, and how they came into feeling freedom between the gender spectrum.
-
Helen Peña (13 min)
A ritual portrait of a Miami woman as she grieves her sister’s passing and prepares for new life in Clearwater, FL.
What We Shared (Kamila Kuc)
wave 3
the memory of
a memory
Co-presented by Triple Canopy
featuring:
Camila Galaz
Miatta Kawinz
Karthik Pandian
& Andros Zins-Browne
Kamila Kuc
Younes Ben-Slimane
-
Camila Galaz (21 min)
Against the backdrop of the 2019 Chilean social uprising, 'Vecino Vecino' deconstructs an archived TV news report about the MAPU Lautaro—a left-wing armed organisation who fought against the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile in the 1980s.
-
Younes Ben Slimane (21 min)
At night, a stranger digs graves, buries the dead and watches over them. In the dark, he reveals the personal belongings of the deceased to us.
-
Miatta Kawinzi (12 min)
SHE GATHER ME, titled after a line from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, is a poetic meditation on the resonance of different physical and mental landscapes of the African Diaspora. Through analog and digital film, video, and audio, this piece presents alternative ways of considering place and the search for a space of belonging & refuge.
-
Karthik Pandian, Andros Zins-Browne (35 min)
A portrait of Zakaria Almoutlak, a sculptor and media activist from Homs, Syria, who fled the civil war in 2015. A triptych of songs, co-written by Andros Zins-Browne and Karthik Pandian with Almoutlak and performed by singers Aliana de la Guardia and Ganavya Doraiswamy evoke memories of his fractured homeland, from his imprisonment by the Assad regime to dancing at a wedding under bombardment. News footage, YouTube videos, and speculative reenactments staged by Pandian and Zins-Browne supplant a missing visual record of Almoutlak’s experiences. Presented in a vertical format (ubiquitous in everyday life, but unique in the cinema), Three Songs without Z. renders moments of joy and pain that are so often edited out of stories of survival.
-
Kamila Kuc (69 min)
Seven inhabitants of a de facto state on the Black Sea unfurl a web of stories about loss and displacement through the re-imaginings of dreams and memories of the 1992-93 war in Abkhazia. To question the unstable distinction between fact and fiction, these re-imaginings are interwoven with auto-fictional narration and archival materials that have been processed through an AI technology. The Black Sea permeating the film’s world acts as a metaphor of both an idyllic holiday destination of utopian happiness; as well as a perilous force, a place of conspiracy and death. What We Shared employs emotive soundscape and imagery to produce a sensory reflection on artistic practice as a powerful binding force and an act of resistance to dominant power structures.
Maysles documentary center / FRI, May 6, 2022
wave 4
open sky /
open sea /
open ground
featuring:
Libertad Gills
& Martín Baus
Razan AlSalah
Suneil Sanzgiri
Lev Omelchenko
Tulapop Saenjaroen
-
Libertad Gills, Martín Baus (4 min)
From a point of view-listening that is both animal and elemental, between the air, the ocean and the sand, relationships emerge between humans, birds and marine life.
-
Tulapop Saenjaroen (14 min)
Mainly shot in the peripheral areas of the ever-expanding Laem Chabang port in Chon Buri, Thailand, Notes from the Periphery interrogates the notion of territoriality, globalized networks, and ownership through fragmented relations of the affected sites and communities nearby, shipping containers that become a policing tool against protest in Bangkok, and the life cycle of a barnacle.
-
Razan AlSalah (8 min)
I walk on snow to fall unto the desert. I find myself on unceded indigenous territory in so called Canada, an exile unable to return to Palestine. I trespass the colonial border as a digital spectre floating through Ayalon-Canada Park, transplanted over three Palestinian villages razed by the Israeli Occupation Forces in 1967.
-
Suneil Sanzgiri (19 min)
What is liberation when so much has already been taken? Who has come for more? Golden Jubilee takes as its starting point scenes of the filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India, created using the same technologies of surveillance that mining companies use to map locations for iron ore in the region. A tool for extraction and exploitation becomes a method for preservation. The father, sparked by a memory of an encounter as a child, inhabits the voice of a spirit known locally as Devchar, whose task is to protect the workers, farmers, and the once communal lands of Goa.
-
Lev Omelchenko (50 min)
Lida takes place on the day of Lida Omelchenko's 70th birthday. This already special day is made more unusual by the recent arrival of her grandson, Lev, who had immigrated to the United States with his family in 2001. Returning to Ukraine for the first time as an adult, Lev documents his grandmother as she tends to the small homestead and prepares for the birthday celebration in the rural village in Ukraine. By capturing moments of arduous labor, as well as through personal conversation, Lev inquires into his grandmothers relationship to her home, land - and their family.
Pretend You're There (Katie Colosimo)
wave 5
after months of
total darkness
CO-Presented by The Future of Film Is Female
featuring:
Katie Colosimo
Gloria Chung
Sofia Theodore-Pierce
Gillian Waldo
Eavan Aiken
Divya Sachar
Alex Reynolds &
Alma Söderberg
-
Katie Colosimo (2 min)
Pretend You’re There is about how the internet, movies, TV, daydreaming and growing up can influence how your reality feels.
-
Divya Sachar (19 min)
The artist examines her schizophrenia, and wonders if trauma is passed down through generations.
-
Gloria Chung (7 min)
Places that exist at the border(s) of memory and physical terrain.
-
Sofia Theodore-Pierce (7 min)
"And there are other tidal effects, mysterious and intangible." –Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea
Catamenial seizures, tidal correspondences, a sonic EEG, and a lullaby in partial translation. Highlighting the seams with the darts. An exploration of epileptic rhythms and sensations through moving image practice.
-
Alex Reynolds, Alma Söderberg (23 min)
A voice says ‘bird’ and a bird appears in the eye, when only a second ago it was a hand, or a tree, or a whistle.
-
Gillian Waldo (15 min)
An essay film seeking to make legible the forces acting upon the city of Baltimore through changes in its landscape and personal reflections.
-
Eavan Aiken (13 min)
Human and animal kin are instrumentalised; units of production, their substrate exhausted. Can we conceive a future where technology serves all and look forward with Promethean vigour? White Hole spirals through space and time, seeking the ideal moment for opportunity.
Acts of Love (Isidore Bethel, Francis Leplay)
wave 6
touch me
don’t touch me
featuring:
Astria Suparak
Rhea Storr
Bill Morrison
cherry brice jr.
Isidore Bethel
& Francis Leplay
Pablo Alvarez-Mesa
-
Astria Suparak (1 min)
Tropicollage is a short, looping video that collages footage from thirty years of futuristic sci-fi movies and television shows that employ a fetishized tropics trope. White-made media reinforces a racialized, exotic vacation trope, training their cameras on and constructing sets with gangly palm trees, pristine beaches, glistening oceans, and deferential Pacific Islanders, Asians, Caribbean, and/or Indigenous peoples. This is the cherry-picked, colonialist view of tropical lands, which are presented as escapist fantasies and prizes for white Americans and Europeans. People of color are the global majority and within a couple decades the tropics will be home to more than half of the world’s population. Yet white science fiction filmmakers and television creators insist on creating protagonists from a white minority who sojourn to a distant, tropical paradise centuries and millennia into the future.
-
Rhea Storr (10 min)
Contains flashing images. From Beyonce to Miley Cyrus to Diana ross, all have worn Josephine Baker’s now infamous Banana Skirt, performed by Baker in 1926 in a show entitled 'La Folie Du Jour' (The Madness of the Day). The Banana skirt is an exoticisation of the Black body, yet it continues to be worn in homage and appropriation. Madness Remixed examines the fetishisation of Josephine Baker’s body through data moshing analogue film. Seen here in Siren of the Tropics (1927) washing the whiteface from her body in the bath, Josephine Baker is compared with a film fetish, a 16mm abstraction optically printed with latex and glitter. Cultural labour is contrasted with plantation labour, what unfolds is a questioning of which images of Black bodies should be reproduced and on what terms.
-
Bill Morrison (5 min)
A woman attends a party where she is first observed by, and later meets, a mysterious guest.
-
Pablo Alvarez-Mesa (25 min)
Found answering machine recordings bring voices longing for a receiver into the realm of the theater, offering hope for connection through a collective experience.
-
cherry brice jr. (11 min)
an eleven-minute celebration of masturbation [explicit].
-
Isidore Bethel, Francis Leplay (71 min)
When his older boyfriend loses interest in him, the filmmaker relocates to Chicago and uses dating apps to cast new lovers in an amorphous project that his mother hates.
Centerpiece / Anthology Film Archives
Maysles documentary center / SAT, May 7, 2022
wave 7
to report an
incident
featuring:
Ryan Clancy
Jamie Weiss
& Michael McCanne
Kersti Jan Werdal
-
Ryan Clancy, 14 min
An attempt to regain attachment following a period of heroin addiction, near-death experiences, and oxytocin deficiency. The camera shifts between moments of fragile devotion as it searches for a higher power in threads of shared suffering. Oliver, is heaven only for the high?
-
Jamie Weiss, Michael McCanne (17 min)
In 1988, a mysterious man enters the US on a fake passport. Ronald Reagan tours a collapsing Soviet Union. A road trip through rural America ends in a terrorism arrest outside of New York City. What becomes of those lost to the currents of history? Do they leave some trace behind? Or do they simply disappear?
-
Kersti Jan Werdal (60 min)
Through the showery urban and sleepy suburban landscapes of the American Pacific Northwest, Kersti Jan Werdal’s Lake Forest Park follows a group of adolescent friends in the wake of a mysterious shared loss.
Strangers (Rajee Samarasinghe)
wave 8
love as a cry
of anguish
featuring:
Brandon Wilson
Tiff Rekem
Alexis McCrimmon
Carl Elsaesser
Rajee Samarasinghe
Joie Lee
Erika Etangsalé
-
Brandon Wilson (5 min)
A film about ancestry, transformation and loss. Each shot was created by covering and uncovering the lens with the hand. The footage was then arranged in a layered sequence so that images interact as they appear and disappear.
-
Tiff Rekem (29 min)
The culmination of a three-year collaborative shoot between the filmmaker and her father in their home in Redlands, California, 'Declarations of Love' is a fragmentary rumination on the aging father figure and his nearness to the gender-reveal party fire that scorched the San Bernardino foothills in 2020. Oscillating between fiction and nonfiction, micro and macro, subject and object of the gaze, 'Declarations' contextualizes his rage within the existential anxieties of our times.
-
Alexis McCrimmon (4 min)
Heron 1954 - 2002 is a visual eulogy that taps into the phenomena of makeshift memorials and small gestures of mourning. Honoring the life of a loved one who died due to an accidental opioid overdose, the film materializes the process of overdue bereavement by invoking a fragmented presence at the periphery of the mind. The use of a scanner and 16mm film produces soft-focused images of broken glass and debris, the warped image of a man's face shifting in place, the balance between the beautiful and the grotesque. Still-life serves as an offering in the form of his favorite brand of cigarettes, flowers, and a bronze figurine of the film's namesake, Heron.
-
Carl Elsaesser (30 min)
“Stretching and blurring the boundaries of video essay, experimental film and home movie, traces of a 1950s homemade melodrama by amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin intermingle with a mournful homage to the author’s grandmother and her vacated home. A powerful mélange of cinematic and domestic spaces, past and present.” – Kevin B Lee
-
Rajee Samarasinghe (11 min)
As a child, my mother was sent away to live with other relatives for a number of years, away from her own parents and siblings. This footage was shot shortly after the civil war in Sri Lanka on the occasion of my mother’s long-delayed reunion with Kamala, the aunt she lived with during that time. Kamala was living a life of solitude at this point and has now since passed away—this film is dedicated to her.
-
Joie Lee (3 min)
Untitled is an epistolary exploration of my mother’s untimely passing.
-
Erika Etangsalé (51 min)
Jean-René is a retired workman who has lived in Mâcon, France, since emigrating from Reunion Island at the age of 17. Today, for the first time ever, the quiet man recounts his story to his daughter. His journey is interspersed with enigmatic dreams and pains that are rooted in the wounds of the French colonial past.
Maman Brigitte (Ayanna Dozier)
wave 9
in the prison of
his days / teach the free
man how to praise
featuring:
Yehui Zhao
Ben Balcom
Ayanna Dozier
Sapphire Rachael Goss
Sharlene Bamboat
James Edmonds
-
Yehui Zhao (21 min)
The filmmaker and a mannequin explore the world through its solar terms. The mannequin embodies the soul of Lin Hei'er, the leader of the Red Lanterns who resisted and fought colonial invasions during the late Qing Dynasty, China. Through poetry and performance, the filmmaker resurrects and unravels the many layers of Hei’er’s spirit. They relive a life of love and revolution.
-
James Edmonds (9 min)
The little personal myths and structures we set up to aid the survival of the psyche in times of low harvest.
-
Ben Balcom (10 min)
Filmed on the former grounds of Black Mountain College, Looking Backward is a brief elegy to the legacy of a utopian college and other impossible projects.
-
Ayanna Dozier (3 min)
Maman Brigitte stitches together the intimacy of a private manifestation Hoodoo vevue of Maman Brigitte (the barrier between the living and the dead) with the aurality of the body (spitting, running, vomiting, etc.). These “interior” corporeal practices are juxtaposed against sweeping landscapes to draw out film/ritual’s capacity to manifest.
-
Sapphire Rachael Goss (31 min)
"A little later a thousand hungry eyes are bending over the peepholes of the stereoscope as though they were the attic windows of the infinite..." Baudelaire, On Photography, 1859
Attic Windows of the Infinite is a completely unique film shot on analogue 35mm using different stereoscopic, lenticular and toy action capture cameras animated together to make a world that layers and freezes time, dancing back and forth in space. The viewer is invited to slip through the screen between the flickering pixels into a realm of shifting dimensions, tracing the triangulated narratives of surface, depth and time.
-
Sharlene Bamboat (68 min)
If from Every Tongue It Drips explores questions of distance and proximity, identity and otherness, through scenes from the daily interactions between two women—a poet and a cameraperson.
KŌ (Nathan Howe, 30 min)
wave 10
destroying the earth,
over and over again
featuring:
OJOBOCA
Edgar Jorge Baralt
Linnea Nugent
Nathan Howe
Jean-Jacques Martinod
& Bretta C. Walker
Christopher Thompson
Anti-Banality Union
-
OJOBOCA (30 min)
The three films you will see are shot-for-shot reproductions of the compilation film Instant Life (1981). Each film in Instant Life (1981) was a remake of an earlier film also called Instant Life (1941). The earlier Instant Life (1941) was a single film, not a compilation.
-
Edgar Jorge Baralt (20 min)
In an imaginary look back at the present from the year 2049, an exile returns to Los Angeles decades after being displaced by large scale social and environmental collapse.
-
Linnea Nugent (6 min)
Secrets of experiencing and the wandering of mind from an initial landing place through the haptic view of a lens.
-
Nathan Howe (30 min)
KŌ is a non-narrated, experimental documentary and the final act of the Hawaiian sugar epoch.
-
Jean-Jacques Martinod, Bretta C. Walker (18 min)
A farmer discovers a fallen meteorite in the high deserts of New Mexico. The Alien Earth and the Earth Alien commingle under the spell of a deadly nightshade.
-
Christopher Thompson (9 min)
Deep Impact explores our deep fatalistic tendencies to design our own catastrophic scenarios in order to enrich our monotonous lives through our simulations of collapse.
-
Anti-Banality Union (97 min)
Earth, present day. With human civilization facing ever-worsening climate calamities, the captains of industry set their sights on a new planet. Starring Keanu Reeves, Will Smith, and Matt Damon, EARTH II reminds us that no matter how far into its final death spiral our species might be, life finds a way.
Maysles documentary center / Sun, May 8, 2022
We Cannot Love What We Do Not Know (Alex Johnston, Kelly Sears)
wave 11
the blessings
of liberty
featuring:
OJOBOCA
Jason Osder
Esy Casey
Alex Johnston
& Kelly Sears
Chanasorn Chaikitiporn
Christopher Harris
Katie Mathews
& Jess Shane
-
OJOBOCA (8 min)
In-person only. Sunday, May 8, 2022 at Maysles.
-
Jason Osder (8 min)
Mysterious wartime naval films reveal early military phycological operations.
-
Esy Casey (6 min)
Reveberations of US military occupation through three generations of women in the Philippines and US, contemplated through wartime archives and the silent atrocities behind smiles in family pictures.
-
Alex Johnston, Kelly Sears (3 min)
We Cannot Love What We Do Not Know takes viewers on a chilling phantasmagoric journey into the paranoid soulless soul of right wing historical propaganda, through an unflinching interrogation of the Trump Administration's cynical, divisive, and factually incorrect 1776 Project.
-
Chanasorn Chaikitiporn (18 min)
All the Things You Leave Behind interrogates the effects of America's influence on Thai people and society.
-
Christopher Harris (3 min)
Surveillance mapping and police scanner audio combine to form a frenetic urban portrait of the carceral state.
-
Katie Mathews, Jess Shane (13 min)
What are the sounds of Guantánamo Bay Detention Center? In 2015, poet Jordan Scott set out to record the ambient sounds of the prison as a means of bypassing its strict media censorship rules. Today, former detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, recalls how sound shaped his experiences there— both of torture and of hope. Approaching the 20th anniversary of the prison, Scott’s field recordings and Adayfi’s memories come together to create a visceral new landscape of this notoriously secret place.
Last Will and Testament (Frank Heath)
wave 12
industrial capitalism
and the world
featuring:
Chris Kennedy
Amanda Katz
James Thacher
Frank Heath
Merete Mueller
Joële Walinga
Evan Schwartz
-
Chris Kennedy (8 min)
“As Benjamin had predicted, nothing brings the promise of happiness encoded at the birth of a technological form to light as effectively as the fall into obsolescence of its final stages of development.” – Rosalind Krauss
-
Amanda Katz (16 min)
On Brooklyn's East River waterfront, a new park built on tenuous ground, a new residence converted from a formerly industrial shell, a promise of lives of convenience. A film that circles around rhythms of labor and leisure.
-
James Thacher (1 min)
The clouds in Jacob van Ruisdael’s landscape paintings appear both massively imposing and ephemerally vaporous. Clouds loom over us today as a metaphor for a vast apparatus of power thirsty servers that can never be turned off. A man-made climate system with its own tidal movements. Data ‘packages’ break apart and reassemble briefly as images and text on our screens but they “live'' within the vast northern data center archipelago where the climate cuts down on the cost of cooling the machines. Echoes of original images serve as the raw materials of this film, emerging from the cloud, processed by hand and returned to the cloud.
-
Frank Heath (16 min)
Pondering recent trips through the Suez Canal and to Onkalo, Finland (soon to be the world’s most secure nuclear waste site) a man consults an estate lawyer to discuss an eccentric plan for his mortal remains.
-
Merete Mueller (12 min)
In two US prisons, participants in a mental health experiment watch nature videos on loop, prompting them to reflect on isolation and wilderness.
-
Joële Walinga (68 min)
A tapestry of footage collected from surveillance cameras over the last four years, Self-Portrait moves from moment to moment around the world, beginning with the frozen storminess of winter, to the melt of spring, the lush heat of summer, and finally the decay and cooling of autumn: the dawn of winter.
-
Evan Schwartz (6 min)
A personal essay on bipolar disorder, created before I knew I had it.
Elephant (Maria Judice)
wave 13
i am feeling unwell
featuring:
Anna Hogg
Lindsey Arturo
& Rachel Lane
Tulapop Saenjaroen
Jason Robinson
Maria Judice
-
Anna Hogg, Lindsey Arturo, Rachel Lane (2 min)
A reflection upon the way we relate to one another as individuals, scratched into 16mm black leader.
-
Federica Foglia (4 min)
Several layers of 8mm films merge to create a camera-less portrait of the filmmaker. The first layer is an 8mm orphan film from the 1970s of a woman dancing, the original box titled "woman dancing with a dog." The second layer is an 8mm found footage film that has been buried for some weeks. While covered in soil, the film emulsion has been eaten by bacteria in the ground, plus some bacteria from yeast and sugar. The third layer is an 8mm home movie that has been first decayed in soil, using the technique mentioned above, then hand-painted with ink.
-
Tulapop Saenjaroen (18 min)
Squish! is a meditation on the self through lurid and liquid forms; filtered through both old and foreseeable technology informed by Thai animation history and contemporary culture, and a constant process of constructing and deforming new selves to simulate ‘movements’. By extrapolating and redefining the terms of ‘movement’, be it through psychological, physical or political understandings, the work interweaves the medium of animation with a state of depression.
-
Jason Robinson (8 min)
Wear and Tear is an autobiographical poem and an honest reflection on a very weird year. Filmed with a thrift store Super 8 camera mid-pandemic on a family vacation during a moment of massive uncertainty, the beach serves as a refuge and a temporary escape from reality. Journal entries, email fragments, voicemails and other digital ephemera are stitched together into a somnambulistic narrative about losing touch, self doubt, and the toll of prolonged stress on our brains and bodies.
-
Maria Judice (96 min)
A woman struggles with day-to-day life in her apartment after witnessing the murder of a young boy by a police officer. The fear keeps her captive for a year. Regular visits from her community and virtual sessions with her therapist helps rebuilds her mental strength to be in the world again. She uses the 'green energy' of plants as her protection, guarding her door and the surrounding space. She finds comfort and a place to mimic resilience by caring for the plants. Community check-ins support her healing, adding to her investigation of grief. As the year passes she moves through the grief eventually leaving her apartment. Her return to the community comes as a witness in the trial of the young boy’s murderer. Elephant is a visual meditation on the physiology of grief. The film explores the body, space, and mental health of those witnessing/undergoing oppression, assault, trauma, and loss.
