wave 4

black strangers

(Dan Guthrie, 8 min)

11:00am @ Light Industry 

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In staging an impossible dialogue in the British countryside between present-day Dan, and his purported 18th century namesake in the Gloucester Archives, artist Dan Guthrie stretches the contours of what can be done with archival traces. The cinematography of black strangers revels in close visual framings — a hand in the archives, a back in the woods, or a wallpaper — thus gesturing at the trappings and dissimulations embedded in proximity. Dan’s wanderings in the woods offer a rumination on the incommensurability between the speculative, whimsical, feverish weight of his questions, and the silence of the person reduced to the label “black stranger” in the archives. - Chrystel Oloukoi

rupture

(Zkonqu, 18 min)

11:00am @ Light Industry 

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Many of the musings that appear in rupture are about the disconnection that occurs in socially mediated life. Yet the film’s emphasis is ultimately inward, and closer to the texture of thought itself. Typewritten notes appear over a slowly rotating and abstracted image of tree leaves in shadow. These express ideas that sometimes repeat, contradict each other, or trail off. Others mingle with the words of major Black thinkers, expressed in audio and video clips: bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Prince. Aside from these archival sources, the image is almost entirely abstract, though it quivers with an intensity suggestive of an active and questioning mind: a prism of introspection. - Genevieve Yue

Mélodie de brumes a Pàris

(Julius-Amédée Laou, 23 min)

11:00am @ Light Industry

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In Mélodie de brumes à Paris, a West Indian man named Richard (Greg Germain) struggles to repress traumatic memories from his time fighting on behalf of France in Algeria. A run-in encounter with his father turns the film into a mournful lament on life under colonialism, before a cameo by the filmmaker (playwright Julius Amédée Laou) spins it in an entirely different direction. This is the North American premiere of a new restoration made from the original 35mm negative at LTC Patrimoine (Paris) under close supervision from Laou, in partnership with Jesse Pires (Lightbox, Philadelphia) and film programmer Steve Macfarlane.

Coaley Peak (A Fragment)

(Dan Guthrie, 6 min)

11:00am @ Light Industry

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Selected by Exeter Phoenix for their 2021 Artists’ Moving Image commission, Dan’s idea was to make a film about Blackness and belonging in the English countryside, taking a family photo of some of his relatives at the Gloucestershire viewpoint Coaley Peak as a starting point. Whilst making the film, something happened. —Dan Guthrie
 

Exterior Turbulence

(Sofia Theodore-Pierce, 11 min)

1:00pm @ Light Industry

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Prismatic Ground alumnus Sofia Theodore-Pierce reliably constellates disparate styles of image-making into rich emotional atmospheres, perched just on the far side of legible narrative. Here, the stars are signifiers of last century’s bohemia: reclining nudes, languid novels, overfull apartments, cigarettes. As the camera tilts and pans, surveying them with a loose rhythmic formalism, intertitles inject snatches of daily experience, erotic encounters, standard anxieties. All together, the mood lands near one of the foundational lines of American poetics: “While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem.” - Phil Coldiron

No Tomorow

(Ryan Clancy, 12 min)

1:00pm @ Light Industry

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A sober sexual reawakening gives rise to a speculative communion with neanderthals. —Ryan Clancy

Fin de siglo

(Maike Höhne, 15 min)

1:00pm @ Light Industry

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A young Argentine woman comes to Cuba to make a documentary about prostitution. But instead she gets herself a black Cuban lover and the boundaries of prostitution start to fade. A taxi- driver also gives his opinion on the subject of prostitution.

—Maike Höhne

I Cannot Now Recall

(Kersti Jan Werdal 15 min) Followed by a Q&A

1:00pm @ Light Industry

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In I Cannot Now Recall, Kersti Jan Werdal guides the viewer through a selection of Yvonne Rainer’s dreams, chosen by the filmmaker from a collection of Rainer’s journals archived at The Getty Museum. Constellated first through Werdal’s selections, and then refracted through the readings of a street-cast filmed in LA High Memorial Park, Rainer’s dreams appear as nodes on an anxious psychic ecosystem. As the material distills from private reflection into script into performance, what emerges is a vital interchange between desire and disquiet. References to the medium of film seem to further entangle the relationship between filmmaker and subject, as well as the relationship between film and viewer. Joined by doubles and guides, in unfinished buildings and the depths of outer space, the dreamer explores her subconscious with a probing appetite for expansion and wholeness – but who the dreamer is exactly remains an open question.  —LD Deutsch

Close, but no Cigar (trilogy)

(Ayanna Dozier, 16mm, 11 min) Followed by a Q&A

2:30pm @ Light Industry

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Dozier users her own image across three films to playfully but incisively unpeel the layers beneath performed sexuality and love’s gaudy desperation. Referencing commercialism and excess— with nods to a Japanese ad featuring Faye Dunaway & Charles Matton’s ‘Spermula’, respectively— and satirizing the darkness of innocence lost, the trilogy enlists the artist’s body as an empowered guide to its own complex history amid a sea of cultural signifiers. - Inney Prakash

Aidol

(Lawrence Lek, 83 min) Followed by a Q&A

3:30pm @ Light Industry

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Building on his Sinofuturist project, which contemplates an Earth society dominated by the ubiquity of AI, Lek guides us through a dense apocalyptic environment with a series of chapter-oriented Socratic dialogues that contemplate the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. In the lead up to the corporate-sponsored 2065 eSports Olympics, in which humans and handicapped “Synths” face off on computers, a pop star named Diva poses profound questions about the nature of originality, ultimately enlisting our AI philosopher-guide Geo’s assistance in staging her comeback. In a world where the algorithm dictates power, violating its dictums can entail serious consequences— while machines must face their own qualms about appeasing human nature. Lek’s lushly orchestrated score creates a dreamy, liquid atmosphere in which to consider the film’s many provocations. —Inney Prakash

Bibi Seshanbe

(Saodat Ismailova, 50 min)

5:45pm @ Light Industry

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Bibi Seshanbe is a film that occurs at the intersection of dream, folklore, and ethnography. In frequent closeups of women’s hands at work, it weaves between the life of Bibi Seshanbe Ona, Central Asia’s version of Cinderella, and the women who, in hushed tones, appeal to her protection in ritual practices. Against a flat and hazy city backdrop, there is a velvety richness to the spaces where women gather. Every texture, from the glowing orange of a plastic milk pail to a sheet of sesame-crusted bread, beckons. For the followers of Bibi Seshanbe, her story offers solace, and hope for sumptuous if fleeting joy. - Genevieve Yue

The Apocalyptic is the Mother of All Christian Theology

(Jim Finn, 64 min) Followed by a Q&A

7:00pm @ Light Industry

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The story of Paul the Apostle’s life, ideology and influence is told by piecing together 20th Century 16mm and cassette propaganda, board games, animation, reenactments, Roman Empire doom metal and covers of Catholic liturgical music. The gentle Paul themes with flute, acoustic guitar and mellotron contrasts with the Demonic Roman Empire themes of electric guitar, drums and synth. Performance artist Linda Montano and Usama Alshaibi portray Paul on his journey. The film tries to capture the disturbing reaction Paul and his letters had in the early days of Christianity. The use of live action, animation, found footage and original music was a way to recover his biography from the brains of 20th Century humans so that in some perhaps misguided Utopian impulse, we can build something new out of it for the future.  - Jim Finn

Darkness, Darkness Burning Bright

(Gaëlle Rouard, 16mm, 70 min) Followed by a Q&A

9:00pm @ Light Industry

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Darkness, Darkness, Burning Bright is a stunning piece of pastoral surrealism in two parts, “Prelude” and “Oraison”, set to an electro-acoustic composition by analog filmmaker Gaëlle Rouard. Combining in-camera visual effects, such as split screens, exposure shifts and superimpositions with handmade photochemical processing, the film strip becomes a record of rigorous and intoxicating experimentation. Rouard performs as both alchemist and painter, investing objects with a sense of stubborn, almost pictorial opacity. - Chrystel Oloukoi

Where 

(Tsai Ming-Liang, 90 min)

*MIDNIGHT SCREENING* 11:59pm @ Light Industry

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The latest of Tsai Ming-Liang’s “Walker series” locates Lee Kang-Sheng, dressed in the red robes of a Buddhist monk, in Paris. As with the earlier films and installations, Lee’s pace is slow to the point of being nearly still. He moves out of time, out of step, with the commotion around him, but his walk aligns with the camera’s frame, passing from one side to the other. He always appears amid the ruckus — an unexpected reveal by a passing bus is a classic instance of Tsai’s deadpan humor. Throughout, Lee is presented as someone who is seen, by passersby who gawk, snap photos, and in one case, verbally harass him. One of his observers is a young man, possibly an artist, whose solitary wanderings are intercut with the monk’s slow trajectory across the city. The two converge at the Centre Georges Pompidou, where on a large canvas stretched over the floor, they literally cross tracks. - Genevieve Yue