PROGRAM 1 | 3:00 PM
Yaangna Plays Itself
Adam Piron | USA | 16mm to HD digital file | 2022 | 8 min
An ode to the memories of El Aliso, the sycamore tree that once stood at the center Yaangna, the Indigenous Gabrieleño village that Los Angeles grew out from. All elements sourced in the film are from the original site and the nearby Los Angeles River.
Adam Piron is a filmmaker based in Southern California. He belongs to the Kiowa and Mohawk Tribes. Piron’s work has played in MoMA Doc Fortnight, True/False Film Festival, the New Yorker’s Documentary series, ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, AFI DOCS, and San Francisco International Film Festival among other festivals. He is also a co-founder of COUSIN, a collective supporting Indigenous artists expanding the form of film. Piron currently serves as Director of Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program and was formerly the Film Curator for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Light Signal
Emily Chao | USA | 16mm to HD digital file | 2022 | 11 min
A keeper’s log, a score for light, a script for sound. A reconstruction, a slow reclamation. To begin where there is light.
Emily Chao is a filmmaker and independent curator based in the Bay Area. Her ongoing series of diverse, short-form nonfiction films focus primarily on identity and diaspora, history and representation, and the interaction between space and memory. Her films have screened at the Viennale, IFFR, Sheffield DocFest, BAMPFA, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Istanbul Experimental, Wexner Center for the Arts, and elsewhere. She is a co-programmer of Light Field, an international exhibition of recent and historical moving image art on celluloid, held in the San Francisco Bay Area and a founding member of Black Hole Collective Film Lab in Oakland, CA. She is from San Jose, California and earned her MFA in Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts.
Quarries
Ellie Ga | USA / Sweden / Portugal | HD digital file | 2022 | 40 min
Quarries follows the mysteries surrounding prehistoric stone tools from Kenya alongside the neglected labor of stonemasons who paved the streets of Lisbon.
The humble gesture of these artisans, stooped over the pavement, morphs into a confrontation with the hubristic act of monument building. For the artist’s brother, the struggle to regain the use of his hands after a serious injury transforms into a narrative about agency in the face of being forgotten, marginalized and deemed of no importance.
An out-of-print photography book on Portuguese stone pavements leads to a series of improbable connections. A tour of a neurobiology lab leads to an examination of a Cold War re-education camp where prisoners were forced to dig up stones to create replicas of antiquity while covertly drawing on stone shards to mark and then bury a trace of their stories. In Quarries, Ga extracts stories of resistance from unlikely places and on overlooked surfaces.
Ellie Ga is a New York City-born artist and writer. Her narrative based-videos and performances reflect a passion for multi-disciplinary knowledge exchange told through everyday conversations, poetic sidesteps and obsessive research. Her wide-ranging investigations address pressing social issues, often in unexpected contexts: from the submerged ruins of the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria (Square Octagon Circle) and the charting of the quotidian in the frozen Arctic Ocean (The Fortunetellers) to a study of messages in bottles, both as tools for studying oceans currents and as metaphor for exile (Strophe, A Turning; Gyres 1-3). Ga was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Previously, she was the recipient of a Swedish Research Council artistic research grant. Her work is in public collections including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; The Whitney Museum of American Art; Albright-Knox; The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College; FRAC Besançon; The Swedish Public Art Fund and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. She is the author of Square Octagon Circle and North Was Here. She is a recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film-Video.
Some Kind of Intimacy
Toby Bull | UK | HD digital file | 2021 | 6 min
I try to communicate with the sheep living where my parents are buried. - Toby Bull
Toby Bull is a writer and filmmaker living in London, UK. His current filmmaking focuses on legacies of orphanhood. His films have screened at over 60 festivals, including Visions du Réel, the Viennale, and Sundance London, winning seven awards and screening on platforms such as Tënk,True Story and PBS’s POV. Bull studied documentary filmmaking at the UK’s National Film and Television School and was a juror for the IDA Awards. His writing has appeared in publications such as Self & Society, 3:AM, and 4x3.
gewesen sein wird / will have been
Sasha Pirker | Austria | 16mm to HD digital file | 2022 | 17.5 min
gewesen sein wird / will have been is a poetic ramble through the apartment of Heinz Frank (1939–2020), Viennese artist and architect, who transformed his apartment into a work of art during his lifetime. His daughter Lilli Breuer has been fighting for the preservation of this little treasure since his death.
Sasha Pirker (b. 1969, Austria) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Vienna. She studied Linguistics and Architecture in Vienna and Paris. Since 2006 she has been teaching at the University of Fine Arts in Vienna. Pirker’s work was the subject of a retrospective at the 2011 Viennale and she was represented in Breaking Ground: 60 Years of Austrian Experimental Cinema. Her films have been shown at over 50 festivals such as the Venice Film Festival, Anthology Films Archives NY, Oberhausen, FID Marseille, Cinema du réel Paris, Lisbon, Rotterdam, Tokyo, Busan, Melbourne, Fogo Island, Diagonale, Viennale, Kassel, among others.
Kicking the Clouds
Sky Hopinka | USA | 16mm to HD digital file | 2021 | 15.5 min
Kicking the Clouds is a reflection on descendants and ancestors, guided by a 50 year old audio recording of my grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother. After being given this tape by my mother, I interviewed her and asked about it, and recorded her ruminations on their lives and her own. The footage is of our chosen home in Whatcom County, Washington, where my family still lives, far from our homelands in Southern California, yet a home nonetheless.- Sky Hopinka
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media. His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial and Prospect.5 in 2021. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He has had a solo exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2020 and in 2022 at LUMA in Arles, France. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018- 2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, an Art Matters Fellow in 2019, a recipient of a 2020 Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and was a 2021 Forge Project Fellow. He received the 2022 Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography, and is a 2022 MacArther Fellow.
The Fruit Tree
Isabelle Tollenaere | Belgium / USA | HD digital file | 2022 | 15 min
In The Fruit Tree a young woman, Sharleece, wanders through a house that is available to rent in the sleepy desert town where she lives, California City. Looking out of the window evokes unexpected memories of her childhood home in Los Angeles.
Isabelle Tollenaere is an independent filmmaker/artist from Belgium, making short films, feature length films and installations, playfully moving between the codes and conventions of documentary and fiction, film and contemporary art. In her practice she mainly explores the connections between the current shifts in reality and the memory of the past. Her filmography includes the short films Viva Paradis (2011), The Remembered Film (2018), and The Fruit Tree (2022), and the feature length films Battles (2015) and Victoria (2020) . She’s currently developing a new feature film called Paris, Paris. Her films have been shown at the Venice International Film Festival, Berlinale Forum (Caligari Film Prize 2020), IFFR (Fipresci award 2015), Centre Pompidou, Viennale, Visions Du Réel, FID Marseille, IDFA, CPH:DOX, IndieLisboa (Special Jury Prize 2020), and many others.
Program 1 Tickets
PROGRAM 2 | 6:00 PM
Bouquets 31-40
Rose Lowder | France / Italy | 16mm | 2014-2022 | 10 min
Rose Lowder’s ongoing Bouquets series are one-minute 16mm films meticulously composed in the camera with a precise use of single frames. Lowder describes her filming as “weaving in-camera visual aspects of the filmed reality in order to bring into existence specific features of the cinematographic image, hopefully placing us on a boundary outside the traditional roles of description or abstraction.
Bouquets 31-40 continues, like the previous Bouquets, to explore different places, which for various reasons, are ecological. For 31-40 they are in France, in Ardèche, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Tarn and Vaucluse and also in Piemont, Italy”.
Rose Lowder (b. 1941, Peru) studied fine arts in Lima and the UK before working as a film editor in London. She relocated to Avignon, France in 1975 where she continued her work on the visual aspect of the cinematographic process. Invited by Jean Rouch and his department at the Université Paris X, Lowder presented a part of her research for a Phd. From 1977 onwards, Lowder has been active as a film programmer, co-founding the Archives du film expérimental d’Avignon (AFEA, 1981); publishing several books on cinema and experimental film; and was Associate professor at the Université de Paris I (1996-2005). Since 1978, Lowder has created over seventy-five films.
Cinematographie
Philipp Fleischmann | Austria | 2x16mm | 2009 | 3 min
The film strip as a measuring tape that provides a survey into space: Philipp Fleischmann positions his custom-built pinhole camera in a forest – a circular structure approximately 30 meters in circumference. Two 16 mm film strips sit side-by-side in the camera with their emulsions facing toward the center as well as the outside of the circle. A number of people lift a manual shutter for a short instance so that the space surrounding the construction is imprinted on the two surfaces simultaneously. Rather than being fragmented into single frames, each film strip now holds a continuous image. When projected, we see an image of space passing by from a specific point in time: Here, movement is purely the relocation of the filmic gaze. While time stands still, light has been written on the film strip, not to record change but to re-experience space. -Alejandro Bachmann
Philipp Fleischmann is an artist and filmmaker based in Vienna. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he studied video and video installation with Dorit Margreiter. He also studied photography and film with Friedl Kubelka. Since 2014, he has served as the artistic director of the School Friedl Kubelka for Independent Film. Exhibitions and screenings include mumok kino, 34th Bienal de São Paulo, 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, Austrian Film Museum, One Work Gallery, Vienna Secession, Berlinale Forum Expanded, Toronto International Film Festival, Viennale, Diagonale Graz, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Belmacz Mayfair, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Media City Film Festival, and Anthology Film Archives.
So Is This
Michael Snow | Canada | 16mm | 1982 | 45 min
“A silent film of 45 minutes consisting of single words of this script or score placed on the screen one by one, one after another, for specific lengths of time… Several different strategies were employed on timing words/passages of the film. Image quality changes too, and the situation of an audience reading a film is a special one, not to be duplicated by reading this.” – Michael Snow.
“With formalist belligerence, So Is This threatens to make its viewers 'laugh cry and change society,' even promising to get 'confessional.' Although the film does reflect Snow's personality - his Canadian-ness, preference for humor over irony, obsession with art world chronology (who did what first) - its only confession is the tacit acknowledgement that he's sensitive to criticism. Snow takes full advantage of his film’s system of discourse to twit restless audiences… A lot of this is pretty funny but So Is This is more than a series of gags. Snow manages to defamiliarize both film and language, creating a kind of moving concrete poetry while throwing a monkey wrench into a theoretical debate (is film a language?) that has been going on sporadically for 60 years… If you let it, Snow’s film stretches your definition of what film is – that’s cinema and So Is This.” – J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Michael Snow (December 10, 1928 – January 5, 2023) was a Canadian artist who worked in a range of media including film, installation, sculpture, photography, and music. Snow was born in Toronto, where he studied painting and sculpture at the Ontario College of Art from 1948 to 1952. In 1956, Snow completed his first film, the animated A to Z. While working as a painter, sculptor and photographer between New York and Toronto from 1964 to 1971, Snow created some of his most acclaimed works, including Wavelengths (1967), <----> or Back and Forth (1969), and La Région Centrale (1971). Other notable films include "Rameau's Nephew" by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974), Presents (1981), So Is This (1982), See You Later – Au Revoir (1990), *Corpus Callosum (2002), and SSHTOORRTY (2005).
Since the 1950s, Snow was a professional musician, focusing on free improvisation, with concerts in Canada, USA, Europe, and Japan, often with the Toronto-based ensemble CCMC. His visual artworks are broadly collected and have been exhibited worldwide, including solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), The Hara Museum (Tokyo), The Museum of Modern Art (New York) and Centre Pompidou (Paris). His films have been the subject of numerous retrospectives and have been shown extensively in festivals (London, New York, Rotterdam, Berlin) and are in such collections as the Oesterreichisches filmmuseum (Vienna) and Royal Belgian Film Archives (Brussels). Snow considers his work "sensuous philosophy" and he asks, "What essential aspects of a medium distinguish it from other mediums?"
Program 2 Tickets
PROGRAM 3 | 8:00 PM
An Example of Lee-Roth Fog Isolated Under Laboratory Conditions
Ryan Betschart | USA | 16mm to HD digital file | 2022 | 3 min
Spiritual mists are a stand-in for the nuts and bolts details surrounding the life of enigmatic Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth. A personality perfectly captured in eruptions of ecstatic sound.
Ryan Betschart is an Ashkenazi artist from Los Angeles. He is co-director and head curator of San Diego Underground Film Festival and has programmed for the Slamdance Film Festival. He has taught at CalArts, UC San Diego, SDSU, Stephens College, and UNC-Chapel Hill. His films have screened at Fantasia, Slamdance, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Porto Post/Doc, Hammer Museum, REDCAT, Desert Daze, and have received awards at Slamdance, Indie Memphis, Arizona Underground. Ryan holds an MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and a BA in Visual Art from UC San Diego.
Lightning
Paul and Marlene Kos | USA | SD digital file | 1976 | 1.5 min
“When I look for the lightning, it never strikes. When I look away, it does”. Filmed inside a car, this tape focuses on observation of natural phenomena, presenting the obverse of the, "If a tree falls in the woods..." conundrum. Does observation change the course of events? Can you believe in things you don't see? In this experiment, the camera occupies a privileged position — showing the woman and what she sees, as well as what she cannot see.
Paul Kos began his work as an artist in the mid-1960s, first creating abstract fiberglass sculptures before turning to more site-specific art. During the 1970s Paul Kos collaborated with his former wife Marlene Kos, and together they produced numerous videotapes that explored the hypnotic and illusory aspects of the televised image and installation works that treated the video monitor as an essentially sculptural element with its own inherent structural language.
Receiver
Jenny Brady | Ireland | HD digital file | 2019 | 14.5 min
A crossed telephone line propels Receiver into a suite of heated and intimate conversations in which we encounter scenes of protest at a university for deaf students, Q&A cross-fire interrogation, vocal confrontations and lip-reading practice.In its various moods the film presents a heady and multi-layered assemblage of Deaf history, drawing on research into The Milan Conference of 1880 which led to a ban on teaching sign language in schools for the deaf. In considering how we both speak and listen, Receiver reveals communication to be a violent and fragile operation.
Jenny Brady (b. 1983) is an artist based in Dublin, working with the moving image to explore ideas around translation, communication and the relationship between sound, speech and meaning. Her films have been presented at LUX, Projections at the New York Film Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, MUBI, The Essay Film Festival, London Short Film Festival, International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Quote Unquote, Camden International Film Festival, EMAF, Videonale, Experimenta, Images Festival, November Film Festival, the Irish Film Institute, EVA International, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Whitechapel gallery and Tate Liverpool.
이것은 보이는 것과 다르다 (This Isn't What It Appears)
Heehyun Choi | USA / South Korea | Super 8 to HD digital file | 2022 | 19.5 min
Among everything obscure in an image, there is always the camera. This Isn't What It Appears reconstructs and radicalizes the ways to see and interpret archival photographs of Korean women taken in the 1950s by American soldiers stationed in South Korea. This film attempts to reveal the camera within the frame, not as an omniscient eye but as a reciprocal medium that subverts the hierarchy in an image.
Heehyun Choi is a moving image artist working with interests in the coexistence of physicality and virtuality in projected images, the unseen beings outside the camera frame, and the subjectivity and variability of the act of seeing. Choi received an MFA in Film & Video at California Institute of the Arts. Her films have been screened internationally, including at 25 FPS Festival, Vienna Shorts, Images Festival, and Ann Arbor Film Festival where she received the Mariam Ghani Juror Award.
Hors-Titre
Wiame Haddad | France | Super 8 to HD digital file | 2022 | 4 min
One October evening in Paris, 1961. A man leaves his room to join a peaceful march for Algerian independence. A photograph reconstitutes the offscreen dimension of the event using fragments of a daily life in suspended time.
Wiame Haddad (b.1987) graduated from ESAD in Valenciennes, and from La Cambre in Brussels. The artist’s work can be considered as a photographic and cinematographic research project which investigates ethical issues and experiments with formal approaches. This research is coupled with a yearning for the unseen. Focusing on the forgotten bodies of History, her work takes shape around the hollow carved by these “invisibles”. Haddad develops artistic, sculptural photographic and cinematographic projects in which bodily tensions serve as political signifiers. She lives and works in Paris.
Moon Drawings
Carrie Schneider | USA | 16mm | 2015 | 3 min
Using the reflected light of the moon to “draw”, Carrie Schneider’s Moon Drawings is a 16mm film and series of photographs created over a full twenty-eight-day lunar cycle as observed from North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Working with a single roll of 100 feet of 16mm film, Schneider composed the work entirely in-camera, shooting, rewinding, and re-exposing the film multiple times throughout the lunar cycle, imprinting the various phases of the moon which were visible in the night sky.
Carrie Schneider is based in Brooklyn and Hudson, New York. She has presented her photographs and videos at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Galería Alberto Sendros, Buenos Aires, santralistanbul, Istanbul, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Kitchen, New York. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, ArtForum, VICE, Modern Painters, and The New Yorker. She received a Creative Capital Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Carrie serves on the boards of Iceberg Projects and A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, and is currently Wolf Chair of Photography at The Cooper Union in New York.
Lotus Eyed Girl
Rajee Samarasinghe | Sri Lanka / USA | HD digital file | 2023 | 6 min
Loosely based on the erotic poem “Caurapañcāśikā” by Bilhana, which was written in prison upon discovery of the poet’s clandestine affair with Princess Yaminipurnatilaka. The verses were written while awaiting judgment, not knowing if he was to be executed or exiled—his fate is unknown. Lotus Eye Girl ruminates on the curious and fractured intersections of death, desire, and class. Fading family photographs (from an uncle’s funeral to my mother on her wedding day), pomegranate arils, pulsating floral mandalas, and horror atmospherics culminate into an ecstatic collision of death and longing—echoing devastations of the past. Through principles of psychogeography, the systems of power that shape identity and desire, in the way that colonialism has altered human perception, are examined in an undulating and capricious form. - Rajee Samarasinghe
Rajee Samarasinghe was born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He later left for the United States where he is now based. He received his BFA from the University of California San Diego and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Much of his work examines sociopolitical conditions in Sri Lanka through the scope of deconstructing ethnographic practices and the colonial gaze in contemporary media. His practice was born out of a desire to understand the circumstances around his childhood and often navigates the terrain of memory, migration, and impermanence. Samarasinghe is currently working on his debut feature film, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, which explores post-civil war Sri Lanka. Samarasinghe was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020. He's had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and the Los Angeles Filmforum among others. Samarasinghe’s films have been exhibited at venues internationally including the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films by MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance, SFFILM Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival, BlackStar, CROSSROADS at SFMOMA, Media City, Prismatic Ground etc. He’s received the Tíos Award for Best International Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the Athens International Film + Video Festival, and an Honorable Mention Award at the Thomas Edison Film Festival among others.
Polycephaly in D
Michael Robinson | USA | HD digital file | 2021 | 23 min
Existential drift in the age of rupture. Leaping, falling, and meeting your new self in an earthquake. Losing one’s head, growing another.
Michael Robinson is a film, video and collage artist whose work explores the emotional mechanics of popular media, the nature of heartache, and the instability of the reality we inhabit. Riding the line between nostalgia and contempt, these works invoke a queer balancing of dark humor and bald sentiment - indulging the seductions of dramatic formulas and aesthetic excess amidst heavy doses of manipulation, abstraction, and damnation. His work has shown internationally in both solo and group shows at venues including London’s National Portrait Gallery, The 2012 Whitney Biennial, REDCAT Los Angeles, The Austrian Film Museum, The Walker Art Center, RHA Dublin, MoMA, and MMCA Seoul, and has been regularly included in major film festivals like Rotterdam, New York, Berlinale, London BFI, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Sundance, Oberhausen and Toronto.
Michael's work has been supported by Teton Artlab, FIDlab Marseille, a MacDowell Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, a Wexner Center Artist Residency Award, a Kazuko Trust Award presented by The Film Society of Lincoln Center, a residency from The Headlands Center for the Arts, and his films have received awards from numerous festivals. His work has been discussed in publications such as Art In America, Frieze, Artforum, Film Comment, Cinema Scope, Dazed, The Nation, BOMB, The Irish Times, and The Brooklyn Rail. Michael has curated programs for San Francisco Cinematheque, Whitechapel Gallery, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Cornell Cinema, and The State Contemporary Art Center in Moscow, and served on the awards juries of film festivals including Ann Arbor, Aurora (Norwich, UK), Milwaukee Underground, Big Muddy (Carbondale), and Migrating Forms (NYC). He holds a BFA from Ithaca College, an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and has taught at CalArts, Bard MFA, Otis College of Art and Design, Binghamton University, and UIC. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
T
Keisha Rae Witherspoon | USA | HD digital file | 2021 | 14 min
A film crew follows three grieving participants of Miami’s annual T Ball, where folks assemble to model R.I.P. T-shirts and innovative costumes designed in honor of their dead.
Keisha Rae Witherspoon is a Jamaican-American independent filmmaker currently based in South Florida, her birthplace. Her work is driven by interests in science, speculative fiction and fantasy, as well as documenting the unseen and unheralded nuances of diasporic people. She was one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film 2020" and a 2022 United States Artist fellow. Her most recent film T has screened at BlackStar, Sundance, New Directors/New Films and Berlinale, where it won the Golden Bear. She is currently writing a Black sci-fi set in Opa-locka, Florida which will be her feature directorial debut. She is co-founder of Third Horizon, a Caribbean artist collective.
Lungta
Alexandra Cuesta | México / Ecuador | 16mm to HD digital file | 2022 | 10 min
: Analogue image and sound composition.
:: Illusion of movement. Apparition. Dispersion.
::: Lungta (horse wind, internal air).
Alexandra Cuesta is a filmmaker and photographer born in Cuenca, Ecuador who currently lives and works in Quito. Cuesta’s films and videos combine experimental film traditions along with documentary practices, and investigate the reciprocity of the gaze in time based representation. Some of the ideas she explores include the construction of place, instances of displacement, and social structures. Her images often depart from the public sphere, and highlight the poetics of the common experience. She received her MFA in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts and her BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design. In 2018 she was awarded a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and residency.
Territorio (2016), her first feature length film, premiered in the Official Selection of the FID Marseille Film Festival in France in 2016. It has screened in a number of festivals, museums, and cultural institutions, including the Viennale International Film Festival, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles MOCA, First Look Festival at the Museum of the Moving Image, BAFICI, Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo de Cuenca, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the III Fronteira Festival Internacional Do Filme Documental E Experimental in Goiania- Brazil, where it received a Special Jury Award (2017). Recently, Territorio was selected among the 25 best Latin American films of 2017 by Cinema Tropical. Her award winning 16mm films Despedida, Piensa En Mi, Recordando El Ayer, and Beirut 2.14.05, have been presented in the New York Film Festival, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Cinema Du Reel, Palacio Nacional de Bellas Artes, Habana Film Festival, BFI Film Festival, Oberhausen, Courtisane, FICValdivia International Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Image Forum Tokyo, among others. Early in her career Cuesta was included in 25 Filmmakers for the 21st Century by Film Comment Magazine. In 2018, Cuesta was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.