Butterfly as verb. The monarch migration and an unearthed cassette tape correspondence form a storm speaking towards motherhood, loss, expectation, care and legacy. An elegy. An ode to uncertainty. A cry for radical optimism and a reordering of splendor.
In an abandoned shopping center outside of Cleveland, the story of the last remaining grocery store is told through recent google reviews.
"In medical terminology, absence of genitalia in females is referred to as "gynatresia". In other words, an extreme defect that goes beyond a mere illness" Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive
Set in Charlottesville during the early 1990s, "Pride" follows an aspiring writer as she finalises stories for the latest issue of "Pride", a student run newspaper at the University of Virginia. Over a hectic two-day period, she puts the finishing touches on the upcoming issue. Despite the looming deadline, she moves with a calm confidence.
An exploration of the Cultural Revolution that depicts both its chaotic later years – through the story of a squad of Red Army guards running amok in the countryside – and its continuing legacy in today’s China.
Life drums the playfulness out of a boy as he grows up.
(Always) Next to Me is a 16mm film that pairs abstract sequences of plants developed directly on the film emulsion with intertitles briefly describing what was going on for me personally at the moment the plants were collected. I started the film at the beginning of the pandemic, just after I found out I was pregnant for the first time in April 2020 and finished it just before the birth of my baby in December of the same year.
Dear features the interior world of two teenage Chinese girls in New York City, whose diary entries reveal their concerns related to growing up as immigrants amidst the ever-gentrifying landscape of Chinatown.
Bubble is a short film performed by Zeena Parkins and the Plastic Girls, Eleanor Hullihan and Erin Cornell in a public park in Brooklyn, NY.
The town Minot is home to a U.S. Air Force base that guards 150 nuclear missiles buried in northern North Dakota. The weapons of mass destruction placed there 50 years ago are still targeted at Russia. Minot, North Dakota portrays an American landscape where people live with nuclear bombs in their backyard.
Alex and José, is a 16mm single channel projection that explores gender, movement and form.
A silent film portraying winter across three continents.
The PSA Project is a series of 15 videos that speak out against the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the act of war.
Still Life gazes unflinchingly at the violence of war, observing the eerie architecture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip collapsed under Israeli occupation. This portrait provides brutal witness to how government sanctioned destruction metes upon structures of home and State. Unlike the mediated images of current warfare, Still Life examines the effects of the destruction of Occupation through the details of cinematic landscapes and its inherent inhabitants. In its relentless questioning reaffirmed with a unique and unremitting soundtrack by composer Zeena Parkins, Still Life forces us to focus on details of devastation.
A sparing and minimal travelogue of Istanbul. A foreigner meditates on the unraveling of a relationship while moving from hotel room to hotel room. In a city simultaneously devoted to Islam and secular nationalism, she finds refuge in the frailty and severity of the rituals of devotion.
Clapperboard claps, from rushes from a film I worked on as an editor, synced with gunfire.
Dialogue-free short detailing the daily tasks of a man and his wife.
A video reconstruction of the 1977 Wooster Group production Rumstick Road, an experimental theater performance created by Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte after the suicide of Gray's mother. Archival recordings are combined with photographs, slides, and other materials to recreate the original production.
“Past Perfect” is a spirited meditation on the elusiveness and inaccessibility of (Jewish) history as conveyed through sightseeing tours of “Jewish” Poland, a grandmother’s recollection of life in America during War II, and memoir-like “last moments” of a great aunt believed to have died in Treblinka. Shot almost entirely in contemporary Poland, “Past Perfect” lyrically portrays the relentless yet ultimately futile attempt to resuscitate a history literally gone up in smoke.
Sites Unseen is a 3 channel 16mm projection of the Jewish cemetary in Warsaw, a photograph of a great Aunt who died in Treblinka, and my late grandmother eating her morning cornflakes.