Program 4 - When Was I
68 Minutes
Light Matter is Curated by James Hansen
Saturday Nov. 2nd, 3:30 PM
Entre tu ojo y el mío
Sofia Tudela, Spain, 2024, 4 minutes
North American Premiere
"Entre tu ojo y el mío" is a film made during the years 2023-24 from the obsession with confusing my father’s face with that of his pet, Theo. For a while I was observing the relationship that both had, coming to think that the distance between one animal and the other was not so great.
Here are Some Images
Yannick Mosiman, Switzerland, 2024, 6 minutes
North American Premiere
“Here are some Images” is an short film exploring the interplay between internal and external images, using hand-processed 16mm footage and musings on perception and memory.
Happy Ending
Tiago Madaleno & Joana Patrão, Portugal, 2024, 6 minutes
North American Premiere
“Happy ending” is part of the ongoing project “Glossolalia”, which proposes the construction of a shared place through the subversion of the road-movies’ individualistic tradition. Taking as a motto a fiction about a couple who finds an idea of home in their car trips, the video explores a place of duration within the non-representable space beyond the resolution of a happy ending (a convention that marks the end of the dramatic interest of a story). Through repetition and loop, it plays with the archetype of the tunnel (space of passage and transformation), remaining in an intermediate state, between escapism and ecstasy, light and darkness, speed and continuity. Unforeseen elements such as reflections and optical effects, radio sounds and interferences, laughter and breathing, become symbols of being on a journey, where directions are influenced by improvisation and attention is tuned, permeable to the elastic time of a shared experience.
Things We Swallow
Carleen Maur, United States, 2024, 4 minutes
New York Premiere
One ticket to the Husband Store. Tongue tied no more. Gulp.
POND
Kate Solar, Canada, 2022, 3 minutes
USA Premiere
Digital footage of the river near the artist’s childhood home is laser-printed directly onto 16mm film, creating a shifting, liquified halftone; a kind of macro-film grain. Animals and figures emerge from this abstraction, then sink back into it. The memory of a specific landscape dissolves into the texture of time. It is impossible to return to. This digital-to-physical process exposes the paradoxes of celluloid film-making. Running the film through a projector decays the laser toner image even further. The imprecise, ultra-DIY printing process frequently bleeds onto the film’s optical sound strip. The harsh noise of the projector’s optical sound reader blends with the original field recordings. As the image is obscured, so is the soundtrack. In this bizarre dreamscape, cinematic conventions are overruled by the physical reality of the film medium.
The Year
Grace Mitchell, United States, 2024, 10 minutes
New York Premiere
A film where an alley acts as a calendar, charting the progression of a year. Mixed into the linearity is a rolodex of the everyday in no particular order.
An Inimitable Place Called Home
Jolene Mok, Hong Kong, 2023, 6 minutes
This work was created to reflect a constant wanderer’s overdue homecoming before yet another departure. The numerous possibilities of navigating Hong Kong are truly extraordinary. The film’s basic premise is to show Hong Kong’s unique cityscape visualised through land, sea, and air. For example, various mass transit vehicles traverse the city recurrently and are juxtaposed with free-flying sparrows living in their very own humble neighbourhoods. I am drawn to the poetry found in mundane, everyday scenes in Hong Kong. I wanted to magnify this uniqueness and beauty by using the analogue medium of black and white 16mm film. I hand-processed the film stock myself. The flaws that appeared during the film-handling process, such as the dust traces and scratch marks, are important assets that work with a beautiful poem by Hong Fu to present an orchestrated work to audiences.
Monolithic Tenderness
Kyle Petty, United States, 2024, 7 minutes
New York Premiere
A tessellating flicker film that seeks to undo the cold, impersonal architecture of the city by dousing it in organic and domestic forms. Featuring a collaged soundtrack of spam phone calls, pulsing synth chords, bagpipe drones, and a lullaby sung to my daughter while in-utero. FLICKER WARNING: This film contains stroboscopic imagery
Nomadism, Temporal Connection and New Feminine Longings
Maria Bilbao Herrera, Venezuela, 2024, 3.5 minutes
Caraqueña & nomad by nature, Maria has lived and worked in 9 cities in the last 20 years. Artist & organizer she merges creative expression, critical thought and self ♫ proposing participatory, collaborative/experimental experiences that incorporate performance video/sound.
Midsummer
Masha Vlasova, United States, 2024, 3 minutes
Midsummer is a cyanotype, sun-printed film. The film was conceived during Juhannus, the celebration of the longest day of the year in Finland, when the sun doesn’t set for 24 hours. The light of the sun is both material and collaborator in creating this film-poem.
Slideshow
Janie Geiser, United States, 2024, 8 minutes
World Premiere
Slideshow reveals moments in time in the lives of strangers. Strangers to me, but maybe not to each other. Found in a Berlin flea market in the 1990's, these slides originated in the DDR (East Germany):an embossed DDR decorates the top of many of the vivid plastic slide frames.
The slides' photographic images were made of ephemeral materials; the color of the images has shifted over time. However; the slides' vibrant plastic frames have retained their color. As objects, they
have a certain graphic power, especially when illuminated on a light table. They frame their content: families at home, friends sharing meals, outdoor gatherings, travel—familiar photographic subjects.
Scattered among the boxed-up slides were also a few educational slides highlighting working sites, like foundries, hospitals, schools. Additionally, there seem to be a few commercially produced images of soldiers, the border---these were in cardboard slide frames and may have been produced by West German companies.
Time and place are suggested---sometime before 1989, when the wall came down. Working with the slides, I came to feel that I knew some of the people. Many emerged across multiple slides. But I can only know their traces.
Half Light
Ryan Marino, United States, 2024, 10 minutes
Shot over a period of three years in a single interior space, this film explores sensory perception through the textural surface of expired film stock, light and layered images. Ephemeral moments meld into voids of grain.