RPM Film Festival and the Brattle Theatre are proud to announce the screening of solo artist Sasha Waters.
A moving image artist trained in photography and 16mm cinema, Sasha Waters pursues ecstatic, metaphorical realism through the relations and materials of ordinary life in her films. Creating across a range of forms—feminist experimental, essay, and biography—she illuminates the interior lives of women and mothers while crafting portraits of artists and others chasing wild dreams and radical futures. Her work is shaped by a deep passion for archives, buried histories, and poetry.
Sasha’s experimental films, usually shot in 16mm on a wind-up Bolex, embrace a personal, artisanal approach to craft. Since 2022, she has completed three new short essay films that turn an anti-colonial and feminist lens onto the history of photography and cinema – cyanotypes in Ghost Protists, magic lantern glass slides in Fragile, and popular romance in Ashes of Roses. She has had solo shows and retrospectives at Fisura Festival of Experimental Film, CDMX; the Library of Congress; Microscope Gallery in NYC, and ADA Gallery in Richmond, and screened at Kassel Dokfest, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; Anthology Film Archives; Pacific Film Archive; the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of the Moving Image; Union Docs; the Speed Art Museum and the Gene Siskel Film Center, among other international venues. Selected festivals include IMAGES in Toronto, the Telluride Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Rotterdam, Tribeca, Ann Arbor, Woodstock, Chicago Underground, Big Sky Documentary, Vancouver International, Traverse Vidéo, and Palm Springs Film Festivals.
Sasha has received support from the Catapult Film Fund, Field of Vision, the Denver Film Society, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Jerome Foundation, and more. Her first film Whipped (1998)–a portrait of three dominatrixes in pre-9/11 New York – was funded in part by Sub Pop Records, selected for the first-ever Sundance Producers conference and aired nationally on the Sundance Channel. Her next film, Razing Appalachia (2003) was the first-ever feature documentary about the devastations wrought by mountaintop strip mining; it aired nationally on Independent Lens and globally as a part of the ITVS television series True Stories: Life in the USA. She has been a fellow at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; was awarded a 2019-20 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and was the 2016 recipient of the Helen Hill Award from the Orphan Film Symposium.
Sponsored by RPM Festival, Art and Art History & Cinema Studies UMass-Boston and Brattle Theatre.
Post-screening discussion:
Sasha Waters & Jim Finn
Jim Finn is the writer/director of what have been called "Utopian comedies." His Communist trilogy of short features is the permanent collection of the MoMA. The first Interkosmos (71 minutes, 2006) is about an East German space colonization mission. The second feature La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (60 minutes, 2007) is about a day in the life of a Shining Path women's prison cellblock. The third film in the trilogy The Juche Idea (62 minutes, 2008) is about an artist residency in North Korea. He has been making short films and videos since 1999. His work is available through VDB, Ovid TV, and DA Films.
Burn Out the Day
2014, 4 minutes, 16mm
This Existence is Material
2003, 10 minutes, 16mm
The Waiting Time
2005, 17 minutes, 16mm
Our Summer Made Her Light Escape
2012, 4.5 minutes, 16mm
Respiration
2019, 4.5 minutes, 16mm
You Can See the Sun in Late December
2010, 6.5 minutes, (16mm) to digital
A Partial History of the Natural World, 1965
2015, 6.5 minutes, (16mm) to digital
Fragile
2022, 8.45 minutes
Ghost Protists
2024, 4.5 minutes, Digital Animation
Total: 70mins
Burn Out the Day
2014, 4 minutes, 16mm
The passing of a decrepit totality; wounds and traces left by fire and light as an abandoned home burns to the ground. Mute observers and memory fragments remain. The pleasures and terrors of rural domestic comfort.
This Existence is Material
2003, 10 minutes, 16mm
Two tales - one of an unlikely friendship between an elderly male writer and a young female filmmaker, the other of
a poet who flies to Rome to incite an uprising against fascism in the 1930s. In Esperanto with English subtitles.
The Waiting Time
2005, 17 minutes, 16mm
The Waiting Time is a thinking woman’s sex education film that explores desire, conception and the long waiting time of gestation. The film is an experimental diary of my first (desired) pregnancy, that unfolds seasonally/chronologically in nine chapters.
Our Summer Made Her Light Escape
2012, 4.5 minutes, 16mm
Our Summer Made Her Light Escape explores the beauty and the quotidian cruelties of the natural world right outside one’s door. A wordless portrait of interiority, maternal ambivalence and the passage of time.
Respiration
2019, 4.5 minutes, 16mm
From inspiration to expiration, breathing is the only work to be enacted now. A feminist, visual scrapbook-like meditation on river naiads and backyard deities – because nothing noticed is lonely. Respiration is a 16mm collage of ephemeral film imagery (pulmonary medical education and home movies) optically reprinted frame-by-frame, and original 16mm footage shot on a wind-up Bolex of domestic and natural worlds.
You Can See the Sun in Late December
2010, 6.5 minutes, (16mm) to digital
Beautiful emptiness, anguish and calm, absence rendered visible and present in the winter light, all intensified by the damned (non) question of motherhood. We feel fine. Or do we?
A Partial History of the Natural World, 1965
2015, 6.5 minutes, (16mm) to digital
A feminist meditation on the violent struggle for independence in southeast Asia and butterfly metamorphosis. Framed by excerpts from Sylvia Plath's poem "Tulips," A Partial History of the Natural World, 1965, reminds us that comfort is a privilege and denial of the suffering of others is not an option. With a live 1965 performance of Bartok's Solo for Violin 3.
Fragile
2022, 8.45 minutes
"Maybe I will cast a younger woman to perform me, the 'hockey mom' in the voiceover..." And so I did: six women a decade or more younger than I am, all artists I admire, speak a personal meditation on the early history of cinema, the anxiety of aging, and the woeful comedy of professional envy. 16mm footage of six “magic lantern” glass slides from the turn of the last century wryly evoke the Structural film tradition of anti-illusionist cinema and demystification.
"Hockey mom" performed by T.J Dedeaux-Norris, Lori Felker, Kelly Gallagher, Penny Lane, Jesse McLean and Courtney Stephens.
Ghost Protists
2024, 4.5 minutes, Digital Animation
A protist is an organism that is neither animal, vegetable, nor fungi. Plant-like protists are called algae – such as those “flowers of the sea” cyanotypes created by Anna Atkins and published in a landmark book in 1843. In a mesmerizing frenzy of images and text, Ghost Protists transforms her images into a protest of the historical erasure of the colonial violence that enabled their creation.