Using both found footage and her own material, Nina Fonoroff recollects the memory of her father. Constructing and deconstructing a portrait, she weaves family and friends’ remembrances with an inquiry into her own work process. Her searching attitude suggests that with the loss of her father came a question of the role, not of a particular father, but the father figure—a refusal of authority, and an appreciation of her father’s cycles of learning, teaching, learning. As Danny Kaye, playing Hans Christian Andersen, tells a group of children the story of the piece of chalk that saw itself as a the source, not the transmitter of knowledge, one senses Fonoroff’s sorrow at the loss inherent in the film image, and a yearning for the source of the image, not just its projection.
A short experimental film about a fire hydrant, a busy sidewalk nestled between an electrical post and a building.
Shortly before his death, Romitelli together with his friend Paolo Pachini and the poetess Kenka Lèkovich, resurrected the dream of a total scenic art (a furnace of sensations, they called it, an_ initiation rite_) in the manner of the Futurists: rhythms and gleams of light striking metals (for the video part), poems in iron and chrome singing of fusion with matter (Kenka Lekovich), acoustic/electric music highly amplified, filtered, spatialised, in as artificial a manner as possible. An Index of Metals bears vigorous witness to this determination to go beyond: sizzling orchestration, electric and psychedelic; a voice which plays on effects, murmurs with reverb, cackles into a megaphone, screams like a pop star; and an electric guitar score of a kind that no ‘serious’ composer has ever written, sliding across an infinite range of tones with a lightness of touch and blurring of contours.
White Sands is a 3 screen projection 16mm film installation which reflects on the visible and invisible manifestations of the nuclear fuel chain on the land, air, water and people of New Mexico.
If Not is a meditation on love, inspired by If Not, Winter by Sappho, translated by Anne Carson. Filmed in Ephesus and Brooklyn.
An amateur stand-up comedian seeks company online after the bar closes on a winter's night, but fails to connect with her surroundings and herself.
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.
Doodles keep dripping down from the mouth of an idiot.
A film that places the bright and dark sides of life close together. From an understatement beginning, the movie drives up to an ecstatic highlight with a love act between two young people. The orgasm becomes an enormous image flow into the crematorium's death machine.
Burford met Breer in February 1992 and filmed his actions. Breer manipulates some of his mutoscopes: he leafs through some cards of his film in the making, Sparkill Ave! A dome-shaped sculpture slowly moves across the space.
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.
“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.
This experimental video breaks the many silences surrounding lesbians and AIDS. Interweaving the voices of two friends, Internal Combustion reflects on the often unspoken tensions within this epidemic of survival and power and mourning and loss .
A story about a woman descending into mental illness.