Curators Luis Arnías and Matt McWilliams have been collaborating and showing locally in Boston since 2009 -in galleries, backyards, and living rooms. Now they are taking this cinema of attractions on the road and sharing works that would not otherwise be accessible except in an academic setting or through the festival establishment.

Homemade Apple Cider will be available during the screenings and all works will be screened in their original 16mm or super 8 format.

We will be showing the following films:

Program runtime 90 min.

Sundress by Adam Paradis, 6:00 min.

Penumbra by Kim Forero-Arnias, 5:45 min.

Masses by Matt McWilliams, 3:00 min.

Imperceptihole by Rob Todd, 15:00 min.

Albumleaf by Paul Turano, 4:30 min.

Don’t Look Directly into the Sun by Kathleen Rugh, 9:00 min.

To Another/To Quit, To Quiet  by Josh Mabe, 0:45/3:45 min.

Beautiful Things by Ben Mosca, 8:46 min.

 This Must Be The Place by Luis Arnias, 6:00 min.

Rhymes with dreamer / Routes in too by Lily Sheng, 1:43 min.

 Between Gold by Jonathan Schwartz, 10:42 min.

 La Luz Del Perdon by Eileen Richardson, 3:00 min.

The Ancestors by Douglas Urbank, 8:00 min.

Seeing Double by Amtonia Kuo & Lily Sheng, 2:45 min.

Luis Arnias (b. 1982) is a photographer, filmmaker and sculptor from Venezuela who currently lives and works in Boston, MA. In 2009, he completed the diploma program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Matt McWilliams is a New England native who works in film and electronics. Graduate of Emerson College ’09, he works and screens in microcinemas in Boston.

The Museum of Modern Art has announced its 11th annual Documentary Fortnight festival will be opening on February 16th with film archivist Jim Hubbard’s “United in Anger: A History of ACT UP” and Tatiana Huezo Sanchez’s “The Tiniest Place.” Hubbard and Sanchez will both be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A sessions.

Special events include a retrospective for Paper Tiger Television with two screenings of “Paper Tiger Television: Thirty Years of Alternative Media” on February 24 & 25th and two “Guided Tours to the Interactive Documentary” on February 18th.

Off-site special events include two screenings of D.A. Pennebaker’s “Elizabeth and Mary” at Nitehawk Cinema in Greenpoint and Williamsburg on February 21st.

The festival will close on February 28th with U.S. premieres of Zeljka Sukova’s “Marija’s Own” and Orri Jonsson, Kristen Bjork Kristjansdottir, and Ingibjorg Birgisdottir’s “Grandma Lo-fi.”

For more info and screening times:
http://press.moma.org/wp-content/files_mf/momafilm_docfortnight2012_pressrelease.pdf

The 2012 Jean Rouch International Film Festival is now open for entries. The deadline to submit a film is 15th April 2012. This deadline is for all films completed after 1st January 2011. You will find the online entry form here:

http://www.comite-film-ethno.net/festival-international-jean-rouch/2012/entry-form.html

The Festival Jean Rouch, previously known as Bilan du FIlm Ethnographique, was created in March 1982 by anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch. Over the past thirty years, the Festival’s aim has been to showcase the most innovative and relevant trends in ethnographic filmmaking and visual anthropology, and to promote dialogue between cultures.
Organized by the Comité du Film Ethnographique, this international film festival is held in Paris (France). Each year, it brings together filmmakers, academics, students and producers, in an attempt to promote discussions and debates amongst ethnographic film practitioners and their many public, and to favour the diffusion and the distribution of the films.
We welcome documentary films without restriction to theme and length.

For more information see:

http://www.comite-film-ethno.net

“Contro-Sguardi”, in collaboration with the Anthropological Section of the Department Man and Environment (Uomo e Territorio) of the University of Perugia (Italy), the Comune of Perugia, Informagiovani and the cultural association Macadam, promotes the fourth edition of “Contro-Sguardi: International Anthropological Film Festival”. Theme of the year 2012: “For a culture of work”. With this call we invite to send documentary films, works of fiction and ethnographic, photographic exhibitions, and proposals for theatrical and musical performances related to the topic in question.

From the 2010 the festival, founded to bring together works of anthropological cinema, it is open to multiple supplies Visual character. From this year became biennial, and every edition will concentrate his attention on a specific and central thematic of the socio-cultural dynamics and contemporary policies. Contro-Sguardi 2012 will propose study and discussion meetings on the broad range of phenomena related to the “culture of work”, trying to reflect on the crisis of the economic and social models that progressively shrinking the spaces of work especially of young people with many repercussions for personal and social life. Specifically for “Culture of Work” we mean the multiplicity of social contexts, anthropological, economic, political and emotional that define the job as practice, knowledge, existential status of the human being through it is realized and for self-determination.

The call here proposed intends to gather materials and experiences, national and international, that address the issue in its broader facets and issues: the relationship health/disease, socio-economic inequalities, the protests for the place of work in a precarious world, and including the political uses of music, theatre and cinema. Through the presentation of the materials, try to create a space of comparison beetwen different actors involved in the field of work, such as associations and civil society, political institutions, academia and research, the “virtuous” that despite a strong crisis manage to maintain a standards positive of production, or that, bucking, create employment by investing in cutting-edge work patterns.

In the awareness of social research, which increasingly requires a dialogical and experimental comparison with new techniques and technologies with their visual productions, opens a Call for video aimed at filmmakers, students, researchers and teachers.

More Info: www.controsguardi.com & controsguardi.blogspot.com

Vocalist/composer Samita Sinha and video artist Dani Leventhal met at Bard in 2008, and since 2009 they have been working side-by-side and in collaboration. In their collaborations, Leventhal makes videos in which Sinha performs and/or creates sound. In their side-by-side practice, Sinha sings and sounds while Leventhal draws. They take inspiration from each other’s images and sounds, allowing their creative practices, which are generally solo and rather singular, to become permeable to each other’s influence and energy. Both work from a place of intuition and make work that is deeply embodied.

Time Out New York wrote that Sinha’s voice is “mesmerizing. This is fusion… in the best sense: she effortlessly, seamlessly weaves [sounds] yet keeps their distinct flavors intact.” Cinema Scope magazine recently wrote that “Leventhal’s videos are not the triumph of an all-seeing subjectivity but rather an effort to reduce the barrier between her and the rest of the world, whether human, animal, or inanimate… Leventhal aims for immanence, for the roiling, beautiful mess of existence, documenting life from moment to moment through images both eloquent and enigmatic.”

Cipher by Samita Sinha

Cipher is a solo work that begins from the question: how does sound come out of my body? Sinha explores this question using the “nonsense” sounds of tarana—a genre of song in Indian classical music invented in the 13th century that mixes Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit syllables that are said to encode mystical meanings. Cipher is performed with a “band” of four electronic boxes, including electronic tabla (drum box) and electronic tanpura (drone box), which have trapped a centuries-old tradition of acoustic finery into a convenient, portable form.

We will be showing the following films:

Program runtime 30 minutes

54 Days this Winter 36 Days this Spring for 18 Minutes by Dani Leventhal, 2009, 16 mins.

Dani Leventhal gathered material for 9 minutes each day, then condensed it down to this 16-minute video montage of impressions which has a cumulative effect, accessed and read differently depending on the mental connections the viewer makes. It is presented as short scenes: documentation of the quotidian, on-camera monologues, and performative or expressive shots that are constructed. The material, while mostly generated as a diary, is heterogeneous enough to include just about any kind of footage.

Hearts Are Trump Again by Dani Leventhal, 2010, 9 mins.

By way of lush formal and associative shifts, Hearts Are Trump Again evokes the ever-present tension between seemingly polarized states of experience. Desire and repulsion; freedom and constraint; pain and pleasure all find articulation in images of ferocious dogs and mock conversations about childbearing. Tonally complex and viscerally rich, Hearts Are Trump Again is a lyrical exploration of emotional weather. –Brett Price

Tin Pressed by Dani Leventhal, 2011, 6 mins.

Opening with jarring violence, Dani Leventhal’s Tin Pressed proceeds to negotiate a balancing act between the bewildering tonal variances of daily life with all of its unnamable and enchantingly fragmented specifics and the gravitational urge to construct both private and shared narratives. The world discovered through these images revolves around multiple centers. The camera’s odd equanimity feels both generous and dangerous. Leventhal’s deft oscillation between elision and inclusion reveals a brief but vast taxonomy of beauty, peace, longing, and terror. –Jeremy Hoevenaar

Dani Leventhal has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, among them the Wexner Center Film/Video Residency, the Milton & Sally Avery Fine Arts Award and the Astraea Visual Arts Award; her films have been screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, Migrating Forms, The Museum for Contemporary Photography, Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum, and P.S.1. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The University of Illinois at Chicago and Yale University.

The Bootstrap Arts Festival has emerged out of NYFA’s on-going Boot Camp which is designed to help define concrete steps to building a business plan that can lead to greater financial security. The Bootstrap Arts Festival, a vibrant new cornerstone of the New York City arts scene, is rolling out in February with a series of arts events covering a wide range of disciplines. Taking place throughout the month, at various locations across the five boroughs, the festival includes performing, literary, visual and media arts. The Bootstrap Arts Festival is presented by Artspire and New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).

Look here for the full Bootstrap Arts Festival Lineup.

We will be showing the following films:

Total Runtime: 50 minutes

Anna May Wong: In Her Own Words by Yunah Hong USA, 28 minutes (excerpt)

Anna May Wong: In Her Own Words presents a vivid picture of the first Chinese American movie star – both an architect and a victim of her times.

Forget Me Nots by Dempsey Rice, 2010, USA, 17 minutes

Memory is the key to our identity, a passageway to the stories and experiences that make up our lives. Forget Me Nots invites the viewer to reflect on their own memories and personal stories. In this way, Forget Me Nots can begin a conversation about gathering personal memories and building bridges between individuals both living and dead.

WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO PEACEFULLY PROTEST by Ama Birch, 2010, USA, 10 min.

WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO PEACEFULLY PROTEST is an experimental documentary created out of video that was taken at the Prop 8 rally in Los Angeles, California in 2009. This film was shown in San Francisco, California in December of 2011 as part of EPILOGUES: Another Positivist (trans)formation- Artists’ Television Access screening.

3 Natures Mortes by Lisa Crafts, USA 2011, 2 min.

3 Natures Mortes is a self-contained part of a larger work-in-progress entitled Overgrowth, which is about examining and coming to terms with the Anthopocene era. This piece references the golden age of still life paintings, which coincided with the age of exploration, and the ramifications of the capitalism, industrialization, and exploitation that ensued. The animation combines stop-motion animation, video, photographs, and audio design.

ours be the tossing Venus by Mary Billyou, 2005, USA 7 minutes

“Why sing when nobody hears?” No response is made to the letters read in this film of lonely island landscapes. Meetings are imagined, but are never realized. Intimate yearnings and unknown bliss intermix over flickering home movies.

Venus by Melissa Hacker, 2010, USA, 4 minutes
Venus will be presented as an instillation prior to the program

Venus is a silent encounter with the Anatomical Venus, an enigmatic 18th century wax model in the Josephinum Medical Museum in Vienna. Venus examines, explores, circles around, reveal and conceals the anatomical Venus. This piece will be playing as an installation prior to the screening.

Yunah Hong is an award-winning filmmaker, based in New York City. She has made eight films. All of them focus, in one way or another, on Asian American women. Between the Lines: Asian American Women’s Poetry is a one-hour documentary that weaves together autobiographies and readings by 16 poets.

Becoming an Actress in New York (40:00) follows three hopefuls as they trek to auditions, work with coaches, strive to be noticed in workshop productions and labor at day jobs. Yunah Hong has made several experimental films, including Memory/all echo, based on the work of multimedia artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Dempsey Rice is the daughter of a therapist and an avid amateur photographer – her father took over 2,000 family photos when she was a child. When she was in High School her classmates used to groan when she asked ‘yet another question.’ Is it any wonder that Dempsey grew up to become a documentarian? It was the only profession where she could ask questions, listen to the stories people tell and document them using visual media. Dempsey is currently a SPARC Artist in Residence at the Council Center for Senior Citizens in Midwood, Brooklyn where she is creating THE LISTENING PROJECT: MIDWOOD, a web site and installation that is based on a series of informal oral history interviews conducted with members of the Council Center. Dempsey’s short documentary Forget Me Nots (2010) is currently in distribution with Aquarius Healthcare Media. Her debut documentary, Daughter of Suicide (1999) , premiered on HBO Signature in May of 2000 — it is the story of her mother’s death by suicide and the process of family and friends’ healing after that suicide. In 2003, Dempsey received a New York Emmy Award for being the Series Producer of IMNY, a youth documentary series produced by Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV) for WNYE/Channel 25 in New York City.

Ama Birch is a writer, actor, and director. Her theater directing credits include Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones and Tony Kushner’s The Illusion. Some of her film writing and directing credits are A PLUMBER’S TALE and LOVE IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL. She has an undergraduate degree in Theater Arts from the State University of New York at New Paltz and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the California Institute of the Arts. She lives in New York City.

Lisa Crafts is an award winning animator whose independent work has screened at museums, theaters, on television and at festivals worldwide. Her recent short, The Flooded Playground played the festival circuit, including Slamdance, and ran for two weeks at Film Forum in New York City. Crafts received grants from the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and was a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts video fellow. Her film, Desire Pie, was awarded a New York Women in Film and Television film preservation grant, and screened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2010, and at Tribeca Film Festival in 2011. In 2010, she was awarded a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. Her commissioned work includes animation created for independent documentary filmmakers including Michel Negroponte and Cindy Kleine, music television, and segments for Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and American Movie Classics. She teaches at Pratt Institute in New York.

Melissa Hacker is a filmmaker who works with themes of memory, family, war and exile. Melissa made her directing and producing debut with the documentary film My Knees Were Jumping; Remembering The Kindertransports which was short-listed for Academy Award nomination. My Knees Were Jumping tells the story of the Kindertransports, a rescue mission that saved the lives of nearly 10,000 children in the months before World War II, and was seen in film festivals worldwide, released theatrically in New York City, aired on PBS as well as the IFC channel and Oxygen; in Britain on the Film 4 channel, the Sundance Channel Canada, and in Israel. My Knees Were Jumping was released on dvd by the Independent Film Channel and Docurama and is available on netflix, SundanceNow, and itunes. Recent projects include Letters Home, a short film that premiered in the Stranger than Fiction screening series and is currently showing in festivals, including the Black Maria Film and Video Festival and the New York Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center, and Venus, an experimental video, that was included in the group exhibition “Objects of Devotion and Desire: Medieval Relic to Contemporary Art.”

Mary Billyou is a filmmaker living in a Greenpoint converted loft building, which once had been a knitting factory. Her work has shown at Art in General, Rotunda Gallery, Images Festival in Toronto, The New Museum, Sundance International Film Festival, and The Chicago Underground Film Festival. In 2010, she received a Jerome Foundation Filmmaking Grant for her upcoming film, GUN, HAT, GIRL… She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and attended The Whitney Independent Study Program. Her interests include alternative spaces, collaboration, street photography, and going for long walks with the dog.

PRESENTED WITH:

The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) was founded in 1971 to empower artists at critical stages in their creative lives. Each year it provides over $1 million in cash grants to individuals and small organizations. The NYFA Learning programs provide thousands of artists with professional development training and the website received over 1 million unique visitors last year and features information about more than 8,000 opportunities and resources available to artists in all disciplines.

The Bootstrap Arts Festival has emerged out of NYFA’s on-going Boot Camp which is designed to help define concrete steps to building a business plan that can lead to greater financial security. The Bootstrap Arts Festival, a vibrant new cornerstone of the New York City arts scene, is rolling out in February with a series of arts events covering a wide range of disciplines. Taking place throughout the month, at various locations across the five boroughs, the festival includes performing, literary, visual and media arts. The Bootstrap Arts Festival is presented by Artspire and New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).

Look here for the full Bootstrap Arts Festival Lineup.

We will be showing the following films:

Program runtime 45 minutes

Freedom by Isabel Sadurni, USA 2006, 2 mins.

This work documents answers to the question ” What does freedom mean to you?” from an international and all-but-American pool of responders visiting the Statue of Liberty.

Tu Me Souviens by Isabel Sadurni, FRANCE/USA 2005, 7 mins.

Part documentary, part-fiction, part-tragedy, part love-story, TU ME SOUVIENS (YOU REMEMBER ME) delves into the chaotic world of a woman who is rapidly losing her memory. To retain some sense of her identity, she hires a photographer to follow her and document her life . Narrated (by Denis Jousselin) and shot from the perspective of the photographer who falls madly in love with his subject, the film paints a landscape of growing obsession. Ultimately, the story is one of a woman who chooses not to descend into existential trauma but instead turns her illness into a workof art. Composed largely of still photographs, the film finds poetic balance between documentary, narrative and experimental modes.

Rushing River by Michelle Chai, 2006, USA, 15 minutes, digital projection

A Chinese immigrant with a professional past is initiated into New York through the only work he can get – a bicycle delivery job at an East Village Chinese restaurant.

StereoTYPEd by Frances Lozada, 2008, USA, 24 minutes, digital projection

StereoTYPEd is a mockumentary about Latinos depicted in the entertainment business. Also focuses on other common stereotypes of different cultures.

Ex Libris by Melissa Hacker, 7 min (preview of a work-in-progress).

An animated documentary film tracing the vanished world of the ex libris (also known as bookplates) collection my grandfather commissioned, created, and lost in Vienna between the two world wars. Ex Libris explores the intimate, intricate, universe my grandfather created in his ex libris collection, and the exploding world he recorded in his diaries.

Venus by Melissa Hacker, 2010, USA, 4 minutes, digital projection. Venus will be presented as an instillation prior to the program

Venus is a silent encounter with the Anatomical Venus, an enigmatic 18th century wax model in the Josephinum Medical Museum in Vienna. Venus examines, explores, circles around, reveal and conceals the anatomical Venus.

Isabel Sadurni’s documentary films have won the prestigious CINE Golden Eagle Award in collaboration with the 100 People Foundation and are included in the collection of the Musee de l’Homme in Paris. Isabel was recently a featured artist in Ninthletter, an on-line arts and literary journal, in celebration of her award-winning short film Tu Me Souviens which she directed and wrote in French in collaboration with artists living in Paris. The film became an imprimatur for her collaboration with people in foreign cultures all around the world. With family of multiple-nationalities living on three continents, Isabel believes in our shared global citizenry and highlighting the common values we share. Her next project, Mumbai Love Story, to be shot in INDIA, is a fiscal sponsoree of New York Foundation for the Arts and is being produced under her new fictional film company Citizen Pictures. Isabel is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley and Stanford University.For more info see: www.isabelsadurni.com

Michelle Chai was raised in Houston, Texas, but never caught the accent. She has written and directed projects in and out of New York University’s graduate film program and served as everything from producer to grip on many others. She is currently developing Purple 8s, a feature film comedy inspired by her experience in the New York salsa dancing scene. The project participated in the Emerging Narrative program at the 2010 IFP Filmmaker Conference and was a winner of the ActNow Foundation’s “Next 15 Minutes” screenwriting competition. She is also proud to have crewed on Icon Productions’ Emmy award-winning Carrier television series. While at NYU, she served as Spike Lee’s teaching assistant and received a Tisch Scholarship, Leopold Schepp Foundation Scholarship, Institute for Humane Studies’ Film and Fiction scholarship, and Women in Film Scholarship. Michelle holds an M.F.A. in Film Production from NYU and a B.A. in Communications from Stanford University.

Frances Lozada is a dedicated actress/writer/dancer who has appeared in various independent films and theatrical productions. She is also a Mambo/Salsa Dancer who has even opened for the legendary Jazz Musician Wynton Marsalis at the House of Tribes theater. In film she has played various roles ranging from a doll in the film’ MUNECA where her stillness makes people wonder if she is real or not and a gang member in a feature film called GANG GIRL who leaves the gang to become a Christian. ‘Gang Girl’ is being sold now at Amazon.com and Blockbuster.com. She just co-produced and appeared in a film called 36 SAINTS which will be coming out later this year.

Melissa Hacker is a filmmaker who works with themes of memory, family, war and exile. Melissa made her directing and producing debut with the documentary film My Knees Were Jumping; Remembering The Kindertransports which was short-listed for Academy Award nomination. My Knees Were Jumping tells the story of the Kindertransports, a rescue mission that saved the lives of nearly 10,000 children in the months before World War II, and was seen in film festivals worldwide, released theatrically in New York City, aired on PBS as well as the IFC channel and Oxygen; in Britain on the Film 4 channel, the Sundance Channel Canada, and in Israel. My Knees Were Jumping was released on dvd by the Independent Film Channel and Docurama and is available on netflix, SundanceNow, and itunes. Melissa is also a freelance film editor who has edited two Academy Award nominated documentary shorts: Sister Rose’s Passion and The Collector of Bedford Street‘ as well as documentary programs for HBO, MTV, National Geographic Television, and the PBS/BBC American Cinema series, and a wandering adjunct professor.

 PRESENTED WITH:

The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) was founded in 1971 to empower artists at critical stages in their creative lives. Each year it provides over $1 million in cash grants to individuals and small organizations. The NYFA Learning programs provide thousands of artists with professional development training and the website received over 1 million unique visitors last year and features information about more than 8,000 opportunities and resources available to artists in all disciplines.

We are excited to welcome our friends at Light Industry (along with Triple Canopy and the New York Public School) to the neighborhood at their new space at 155 Freeman Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Their screening of Torse tomorrow (Tuesday, January 24, at 7:00 PM) marks the start of their regular Tuesday evening screenings. Upcoming are screenings of  Yvonne Rainer’s Kristina Talking Pictures on January 31,  Jennifer Reeves’s Chronic + Sadie Benning’s Flat Is Beautiful on February 7 and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Naked Spaces on February 8.

For more inforamtion check out Light Industry’s website:

http://lightindustry.org/calendar/

The presentation is based on a recitation of a personal journal, offering an imaginary manifestation of a soldier’s (namely Kareem) recollection of events around the 2011 Egyptian revolution, accompanied by audio recordings and a projection of a digitized album containing images and illustrations, some collected and others drawn. Caught between the legacy of the army as a national revolutionary-defense force in the glorious days of the 1950s and the notoriety of other brutalizing state security forces in the last three decades, Kareem ponders over the utterly unfamiliar encounter with everyday security dynamics in 2011 Egypt. Through swelling interaction with the public, Kareem evolves, flustering engrained characterizations of the soldier in collective imagination.

Drawing on her fieldwork in Egypt, Menna extends and manipulates medium – images, narrative, and sound – deploying a sensorial montage in an attempt to strike a balance between aesthetic and academic method, steering the documentation of narrative in a space where non-fiction and fiction (writing and image making) are muddled.

The presentation will be followed by a discussion with Yosra Sultan Moussa and Mohammad Shawky Hassan.

This Program is part of ArteEast’s series “Making the Real: Practices of Documentation”

Menna Khalil is an independent researcher and writer working between North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States, interested in pursuing further graduate studies in Anthropology. She holds a MA in International Human Rights Law from the American University in Cairo, and a BA in International Studies, Economic Theory, and Art History from DePaul University in Chicago. Menna’s academic interests in anthropological approaches to language, sensorial mediation, and aesthetics have guided her work on translation and forms of storytelling. She has been carrying out ethnographic work on the relationship between citizens and the Egyptian army following the ouster of former President Mubarak.

Yosra Sultan Moussa is a PhD candidate in the Middle East and Islamic Studies program at New York University. As an aspiring historian with a focus on 19th Century Egypt, she looks at the aesthetics and practices of urban life in Cairo. More specifically, she is interested in chronicling the interchangeable experiences between inhabitants and the city.

Mohammad Shawky Hassan is an Egyptian filmmaker currently living in New York City. He holds a B.A. from the American University in Cairo (2004), and a graduate diploma in film directing from the Academy of Cinematic Arts in Cairo (2009). In the academic year 2010-2011, he was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Columbia University School of the Arts, where he made his last short fiction film It Was Related to Me – Balaghany Ayyoha Al Malek Al Sa’eed. He is currently ArteEast’s film programmer.

PRESENTED WITH:

ArteEast presents the works of contemporary artists from the Middle East, North Africa and their diasporas t a wide audience in order to foster a more complex understanding of the regions’ arts and cultures and to encourage artistic excellence. Through public events, exhibitions, film screenings, a dynamic virtual gallery and a resource-rich website, ArteEast supports artists and filmmakers by providing the platforms necessary for them to showcase groundbreaking and significant work. We also give the public the opportunity to learn more about and develop an appreciation for the talent of these established and emerging artists.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF ) is the longest-running film festival tour, having pioneered the concept in 1964. The 49th AAFF Tour runs from July 2011 through February 2012, screening in galleries, art house theaters, universities, media art centers and cinematheques throughout North America.

We will present the following films:

Program runtime 94 minutes

Home Movie by Braden King, USA, 14 minutes

Blurring the traditional boundaries between documentary and dramatic fiction, Home Moviereveals an intimate and somber portrait of a woman at home with her two small children as they cope with the unexplained absence of their father. Winner of AAFF Best Narrative Award.

Miramare by Michaela Müller, Zagreb, Croatia, 8 minutes

A look at life on the Mediterranean borders of Europe, where tourists try to relax while “illegal” immigrants struggle to get a chance for a better life. – MM

Atlantiques by Mati Diop, France/Senegal, 15 minutes

Sitting by the campfire, Serigne, a young man from Dakar, tells his two friends the story of his sea voyage as a stowaway. Not only he, but everyone in his surroundings seems to be continually obsessed by the idea of trying to cross the sea. His words reverberate like a melancholic poem. A story about boys who are continually traveling: between past, present and future, between life and death, history and myth.

Protopartículas (Protoparticles) by Chema García Ibarra, Spain, 7 minutes

The experiment was almost a success: protomatter exists.

Hand Soap by Kei Oyama, Japan, 16 minutes

A calm yet sultry animation about a family with a growing adolescent son. His insecurity, his obsession with his body and his ill-at-ease family are reflected in details and objects that occasionally lead a life of their own. Winner of AAFF Best Animation Award.

Point Line Plane by Simon Payne, England, 9 minutes

Shifting grids in black, white and shades of grey plot screen space and continuously reframe perspective. The increasingly complex matrix of layers produces an illusion of depth, beyond the surface of the screen, but with positive and negative switching, the piece also illuminates the viewer. – SP

These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us by Michael Robinson, NY, 13 minutes

Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escorts her favorite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi. – MR

Looking to a future beyond death, Michael Robinson’s These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us , one of the filmmaker’s most sophisticated found footage concoctions yet, combined Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time” music video with footage of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra and roughly a dozen other sources, creating for the late pop star a solemn passage into a bedazzled Egyptian afterlife tenderly ushered by his real-life confidante. – Genevieve Yue, Reverse Shot

Winner of AAFF Most Technically Innovative Film Award.

In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails by Fern Silva, USA/Brazil, 13 minutes [AAFF Best Experimental Film Award]

“O mother of waters! Great is your power, your strength, and your light…Let your greatness be the greatest wealth you dispense to me… surrounded by sweet melodies springing from your own self…” –prayer to Iemanjá

Fern Silva’s In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails suggests a future already arrived, merging the destruction with the creation of life as seen in the tiny turtles crawling their way to the sea, or heard in the crackling of a Geiger counter as a masked man sprays plants with pesticides. Though only 13 minutes, the film’s span is enormous. As revelers in Salvador, Bahia, parade through the streets, a gnat-sized Mercury passes across the surface of the sun, and men slowly make their way up the giant steps of an ancient temple; the film resides in a well of deep time, civilizational history swallowed by the life of the planet. –Genevieve Yue, Reverse Shot