The Eyeball Person
| Japan
11:42
2023
|
- Yuri Muraoka
The Enlightenment
| United States,
12:09,
2023
|
- Stephanie Barber
The Instability of Clouds
| United States,
15:16,
2023
|
- Zazie Ray-Trapido
Reversal
| United States,
6:34,
2023
|
- Diane Nerwen
I Would've Been Happy
| United States,
8:41,
2023
|
- Jordan Wong
VALERIJA
|Croatia,
15:00,
2023
|
- Sara Jurinčić
Total: 01:07:36 (67 mins)
The Eyeball Person
| Japan,
11:42,
2023
|
- Yuri Muraoka
This film is about gazes and goodbyes. An attempt to weave images with words and to weave a poem with images. I realize that living is suffering to see that Nemu, the one of my daughters, squirms with the struggle and sunflowers squirm to try to bloom.
The Eyeball Person
村岡由梨
Now that I’m older, if I crush the two evil eyeballs
idling in my hand all these years,
a pure, transparent jelly will ooze out.
I look up at the sunflower
and try to convince myself
that I don’t have to be ashamed.
Nemu taught me
what a beautiful, desperate flower that a sunflower is.
Translation：Annie Iwasaki
Yuri Muraoka was born in Tokyo in 1981.
Dropped out of the high school attached to Japan Women's University,
graduated the 26th class of Image Forum Institute of the Moving Image.
Continues to create moving images and photographic works of "self-portraiture".
All of her works are self-created and self-performed.
Her major works are Schizophrenia (2016), Transparent, the world is. (2019) and so on. Her latest film Transparent, I am. (2020) won the Grand Prix at the 67th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. She’s been working on poetry since 2018.
A mother of two daughters.
The Enlightenment
| United States,
12:09,
16mm
2023
|
- Stephanie Barber
Listing dangerously into poetry, philosophy and sound art, Barber's new film (distributed by Video Data Bank) finds Yon and Payola in a Victorian conservatory. They are companionable, disoriented and petulant––they whip wildly through these disembodied states. Payola reads an excerpt of their experimental essay on the age of enlightenment.
Payola's research, and presentation of this research, is a purposeful affront to empirical data, the scientific method and other enlightenment ideals, while reveling in the desire for the revolution and intellectual expansion those thinkers championed.
The concepts are undermined by the form and register of their delivery OR the concepts are strengthened by the poetry through which they are presented.
The soundtrack for The Enlightenment was originally commissioned by the Diffusion Festival for multi-channel sound work, curated by M.C. Schmidt for High Zero.
Stephanie Barber is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been focused on an expanded poetics resulting in the creation of films, books, installations and songs. This work sits between cinema and literature, science and spirituality, philosophy and comedy and manifests as a corpus that moves beyond allegiance to media and works hard at defying classification.
The Instability of Clouds
| United States,
15:16,
2023
|
- Zazie Ray-Trapido
Two neighbors bond after a shared traumatic event, a continuous home development creeps into nature's threshold, and a community celebrates freedom. The Instability of Clouds navigates an ecosystem in decay and growth while traversing across its spaces of comfort, spectacle, and disaster. Through the observation and construction of facets within a suburban neighborhood in Southern California, connections between landscape, neighbors, and environment ruminate on the American Dream and its resonances.
Zazie Ray-Trapido is a filmmaker from Philadelphia based in Los Angeles. Her films have been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Viennale, Curtas Vila do Conde, Maysles Documentary Center, ICDOCS, Crossroads, and more. She holds a Bachelor's degree from Bard College and a Master’s in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts.
Reversal
| United States,
6:34,
2023
|
- Diane Nerwen
REVERSAL combines images and sounds from movies released or broadcast in 1973, the year the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade. In the strange new reality ushered in by the Dobbs decision, the slogan "We won't go back" is recalled with bitter irony. This collage piece evokes the spectre of regression and repression that has followed the Court's decision.
Diane Nerwen is a video artist and art educator. She has shown her work internationally, including screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Guggenheim Museum, NY, the Tate Modern, London, carriage trade, NY and the Berlin Film Festival. She was awarded a DAAD Artist in Residence Fellowship in Berlin in 2001. Nerwen was born in Montreal and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
I Would've Been Happy
| United States,
8:41,
2023
|
- Jordan Wong
"I Would've Been Happy" attempts to map a fraught relationship through the use of intricately coded pictographs and schematic abstractions applied onto glazed ceramic tiles and quilted cyanotype fabric. The aesthetics of architectural language are used to reconstruct memories of my family's domestic spaces in the hope to uncover logic or reason to a broken home.
Jordan Wong
A collector of souvenir state spoons and overpriced Uni Alpha Gel lead pencils, Jordan Wong is a Chinese-American experimental animator and nonfiction filmmaker driven by emotional honesty and analog processes.
He received a BFA in Film/Animation/Video at Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA in Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts, and was most recently a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2022.
His films have screened internationally, including DOK Leipzig, NewFest, Animafest Zagreb, Japan Media Arts Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where he was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker for the film Mom's Clothes.
VALERIJA
| Croatia,
15:00,
2023
|
- Sara Jurinčić
This hybrid documentary takes us on a journey into a world without men. The island tradition is, that the women choose the image that will represent them on their grave after they're gone.
Reality and subconscious mix, as the author questions: “How does it feel to have a family tree consisting only of women? What do our ancestress’ whisper from their silent portraits?”
We’re following two women, traveling from the mainland to the island graveyard, to visit their Valerija.
On the journey, the author is questioning the archetype of an island woman and her own female heritage through a participatory process.
Sara Jurincic, architect and filmmaker (1989. Zadar, Croatia). Graduated at AF Zagreb 2015. Worked and exhibited with: W.O.R.M. Rotterdam, Klubvizija lab, CAFxCPH, Restart, KONTEJNER. In 2018. she established NOMAD STUDIO – art and spatial-experiment lab, involved in projects, exhibitions and workshops around Europe. In 2019. and 2020. she is part of Sarajevo Talents, EW Talent lab (Wiesbaden), Dok Leipzig Short n’ Sweet pitch (with the project “VALERIJA”). She won multiple awards for her debut film that has been shown on more that 30 international festivals, including Oberhausen film festival (international competition).