wave 5

(Susan Youssef, 4 min)

10:00am @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

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Actress Maisa Abd Elhadi was shot while protesting in 2021. This short reimagines the moment the actress danced with the forces and through creativity removed all obstacles, for herself and those before and after her. —Video Data Bank

(Søren Lind & Larissa Sansour, 21 min)

10:00am @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

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Søren Lind and Larissa Sansour deliver a haunting opera lament which dovetails the personal grief of a Palestinian mother with that of a people. Performed by soprano Nour Darwish, the opera is constituted of a single aria which fuses together the Palestinian folk song Al Ouf Mash’al and Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Lind and Sansour’s post-apocalyptic landscapes of desolation take on a domestic bent in barren interiors which nonetheless honor the labors of grieving mothers— the living-room and bathhouse, with exquisite emphasis on garment, fabric and embroidery.  Split across screens, Anna Valdez Hanks’ wrenching cinematography sculpts abstract, geometric blocks of light, resistant opacity and pure darkness, speaking to how ongoing histories of occupation distort foundational spatial and temporal coordinates. - Chrystel Oloukoi

(Wu Tsang, 43 min)

10:00am @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

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In overlapping frames, one emerging from a point of view links two worlds, two views. On one side is portrait and myth: the fictionalized story of Yassmine Flowers, a transgender migrant from Morocco who, in Tsang and Flowers’s collaborative retelling, becomes a woman scorned by her family, poisoned by a king, revivified by a goat, then finally settling at the bottom of the sea. On the other is landscape and documentary: the farmers, fishermen, and the rugged coast of Lesbos where migrants have sought refuge, often tragically. In an early shot, goats hesitate before jumping over a shallow creek. Many don’t quite make it, and splash awkwardly before regaining their footing. One emerging from a point of view exists in the space of such leaps, both in the hope of crossing, and in the ethereal beauty that comes from these momentarily blended realms. - Genevieve Yue

(Miryam Charles, 7 min)

11:30am @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

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In her brave, vivid & tender debut feature ‘Cette Maison’, Charles confronted the trauma surrounding the death of a cousin, and her family’s deep enduring connection to Haiti. This film serves as a coda; Miryam’s aunt reflects on the days following her daughter’s death while we bob at sea in a quiet dinghy. Bird song, the wind, a dynamic, menacing score and crackling as if from fire combine to create a complex aural reminder of the forces of life and death, while a hard red film strip exposure line punctuates the fresh wound of loss and persistence of memory. Time and the landscape are one, and suffering seems eternal. - Inney Prakash 

(Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, Blake Williams, Real3D, 81min)

11:30am @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

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In Real3D. Three filmmakers of wildly different sensibilities come together for this epistolary narrative of one woman’s attempt to shape her isolation into something from which she might make sense, or even meaning. The woman is Deragh Campbell, continuing the role of Audrey Benac that she’s played across four prior films with Sofia Bohdanowicz, whose soft 16mm interiors comprise the film’s ground note. Alone in a Parisian flat, Benac receives footage from Blake Williams (3D explorations of spaces IRL and online) and Burak Çevik (crisp HD master-shot compositions), and begins editing this material to her own ends. Intimations of romance creep into the edges, but what lingers is the joy and pain of seeing through absent eyes. - Phil Coldiron

(Viktoria Schmid, 5 min)

1:20pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

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This gentle trip from Viktoria Schmid surveys the architecture of Manhattan in a series of fixed-frame compositions, each exposed three times, through red, green, and blue filters. The city’s range of beiges, browns, and grays remain steady, while highlights and shadows splinter into geometric arrays of color. This tension between consistency and change draws the mind toward one of the traits of modern New York which Schmid avoids: its glass-facade new construction. The matter of what goes into making a city durable as both idea and place is a heavy one, though the film’s opalescent skies do help to lighten it. - Phil Coldiron

(Zhuoyun Chen, 16mm, 4 min)

1:20pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

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A ghost, a face, lucid minerals, vague landscapes... What do you see when my words fall? —Zhuoyun (Yun) Chen

(Jodie Mack, 16mm, 8 min)

1:20pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

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In a dizzying swirl of stop-motion animation, the petals in M*U*S*H* are made to dance in a Dionysian frenzy. Half-shriveled, they are already on their way to becoming a potpourri mulch. Then new petals are thrown on top, a riot of red, yellow, and violet, the occasional fragment of a leaf. The earlier flowers might be buried, or they might have disappeared into the alternating black and white backgrounds that peek through this density of organic matter. The image moves too quickly to allow for careful study, but then, the progression slows and stills. The camera trembles slightly. Movement — life — is discernible from within this wilted flower offering. - Genevieve Yue

(Lucy Kerr, 19 min)

1:20pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

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Lucy Kerr uses former stuntperson Jess Harbeck’s account of on-set recklessness as the foundation for this essay on the ethics of certain attempts to capture reality. As Kerr reads Harbeck’s first-person narrative in measured deadpan, she tests it against a pair of images: a black screen and then, after several minutes, a long downward shot of dark waves on a rocky shore. The third and final passage resolves this lightly stated contrast between testimonial and symbolic impulses—between documentary and fiction, if you’d rather—into a grim found-footage horror of practical effects. - Phil Coldiron

(Lucy Kerr, 7 min)

1:20pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

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Sitting, with appropriately adolescent uncertainty, somewhere between the conventions of the dance film, the performance document, and the coming-of-age story, Kerr’s film is acutely tuned into the social choreography of its tween-girl subjects. In a slumber-party setting, the girls run through a trio of “pieces” with exuberance and commitment: the classic “light as a feather, stiff as a board”; a kind of fast-paced charades; a gymnastic exercise in stacked bodies. There are, notably, no phones in sight. Kerr is respectful of the emotional privacy this age demands, leaving the messiness of experience to hum at the edges of precisely acted rituals. - Phil Coldiron

(Lawrence Lek, 12 min)

2:45pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

(Ashish Avikunthak, 96 min)

2:45pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

(Onyeka Igwe, 12 min)

3:00pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

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The Miracle on George Green centers around a public, natural space—specifically a single Chestnut tree within that space—and branches outward into a history of outdoor collectivity; its successes, its failures, its songs. Soft sunlight blurs the edges of Igwe’s frames. The organic pastels of the social and political movements that she documents are inviting. The fact that these documents are memories, imaginations and archival scraps points toward an uneasy sense of loss: in a world ever-teeming with privatized infrastructure, such harmony feels scarce. - Mackenzie Lukenbill

(Priya Sen, 40 min)

3:00pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

(Adam Piron, 8 min)

4:30pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]​

(Arthur & Corinne Cantrill, 16mm, 17 min)

4:30pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

(Erin Weisgerber, 35mm, 12 min)

4:30pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

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Imprinting successive layers of time in a ritual of repeated gestures, active attention, walked paths, shifting seasons, and cycling years, Dans les cieux et sur la terre combines the alchemical potential of photochemical film with the ritual of the filmmaker's performance. Filmed over 7 years in the neighbourhood around the filmmaker's Montreal home, a foundational local monument meets fleeting traces of urban flora. Bipacked with travelling mattes, the vibrant reversal filmstrips pass many times through the camera's gate, sedimenting layers of time. —Erin Weisgerber 

(Kevin Steen, 35mm, 14 min)

4:30pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

(Bill Brand, 16mm, 38 min)

4:30pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

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16mm restoration by BB Optics. Bill Brand’s 1984 document of unionized struggle in West Virginia makes clear that, contrary to current understandings, design and decoration are not antithetical to serious political commitment. As voices on the soundtrack recount the struggle against industrial bosses for safety and equity amongst the miners, the image flickers and flutters in optically-printed mosaics of location photography. We might take these as a brutally elegant visualization of the state of ravaged lungs, riven with patches of black. Form does not clarify a political understanding, it renders it indelible. With poetic text by Kimiko Hahn. - Phil Coldiron

(Declan Clarke, 72 min)

6:45pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

(Alexandre Larose, 35mm, 40 min) Followed by a Q&A.

8:45pm @ Anthology Film Archives [tickets]

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Alexandre Larose’s scènes de ménage presents film as a palimpsest, a surface that retains faint traces of previous impressions. Unlike a sheet of paper, film is highly sensitive, capable of registering subtle movements of light and air: the shadow of a person crossing a room, leaves gently swaying in the wind. In this alchemical transformation, matter multiplies, disperses, and recondenses. What initially appears to be a hazy accumulation of cigarette smoke becomes a man sitting down in a chair. Once opaque surfaces become translucent, and it is perhaps no surprise that Larose lingers at windows, watching as the dusty glass transform the attitude of the trees beyond. - Genevieve Yue