presented by San Francisco Cinematheque and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

anticipated artists in person: Lyndsay Bloom, Lucy Kerr, Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, Shona Masarin and Diana Sánchez
pictured above: The Pull (2017) by Elena Artemenko

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ADMISSION DETAILS
Single Screening Admission: $12 general/$10 Cinematheque and SFMOMA members with member code. Single Screening advance tickets available here.
CROSSROADS festival day pass (Saturday & Sunday only): $25
CROSSROADS festival day pass provides admission to all daily CROSSROADS screenings and general admission access to SFMOMA galleries (including Pat O’Neill: Three Answers).
Saturday, June 8 CROSSROADS festival day pass available here.
NOTE: Admission to the special exhibition Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again is not included with the festival day pass but can be purchased here.

There are so many stories and none of them are true. Lucy Kerr’s video/performance hybrid while you were away grounds a program of ascending bodies and bodies in collapse, mirrored, uplifted and adrift in the universe. Images of absence expose distance between actual and virtual selves. Tenderness. Suspension. Turn the pages of a book. Are these the rules of the game?

SCREENING:

Ruins (2018) by Shona Masarin (Australia/US); 16mm, b&w, silent, 3 minutes, print from the maker world premiere
          Ruins imagines a landscape where the past and the present have been expunged, reduced to shadows. Here, in this silent and vacant future, geometric forms and planes of light melt into one another before disappearing into the film grain, lending only glimpses of a whole. A black rectangle floats in space, simultaneously a monolith and a portal. Unlike the shy shapes that open the film, the rectangle asserts itself, repeatedly making its presence known. Like the surface of a perfectly calm ocean, its pitch-black face disturbs us with all that is unknown hidden in its depth. (Shona Masarin)

Oven Scene (2018), Lyndsay Bloom (US); digital video, color, sound, 1 minute, exhibition file from the maker world premiere
          An experimental film reflection of the homicidal and suicidal American landscape. Sound recorded at the San Diego Police Department Revolver Club. Inspired by Chantal Akerman's first film, Saute ma ville (1968). (Lyndsay Bloom)

A Soft Place to Fall (2018) by Nan Wang (China/Netherlands); 16mm, color, sound, 69 seconds, print from the maker U.S. premiere
          Close-up footage of eyes emerge and dissolve in ocean waves, together with an optical soundtrack. A Soft Place to Fall creates a poetic dialog between the audience and the mysterious gazes from the film. A Soft Place to Fall was created with the usage of DtoA Printer, a DIY device made by the filmmaker which uses a smartphone screen as the image and light source for contact printing multiple layers of film. (Nan Wang)
          A Soft Place to Fall is part of 69 sec, a collaborative project of Filmwerkplaats, Rotterdam, Netherlands, a grouping of 20 films, each 69 seconds in duration, by 20 artists.

The Pull (2017) by Elena Artemenko (Russia); digital video, color, sound, 9 minutes, exhibition file from the maker  U.S. premiere
          This performance was created and choreographed for video camera. In the video, a collective body endlessly attempts to overcome gravity and to pull itself up by internal effort only, without support, against all Newton's laws. It's political work showing a small exhausted society, and as soon as one of the performers accumulates enough energy and inner forces to pull himself out, the others follow him like sprouts through the hardened surface of the earth. (Elena Artemenko)

A Study of Fly (2018) by Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu (Taiwan); 16mm, color, sound, 13 minutes, exhibition file from make bay area premiere
          A Study of Fly is a reflection on the relationship between insect, human, environment and the universe. The fly in this film can be approached as a living being, a metaphor for human desire to reach beyond, and a state that demonstrates the capacity to move between the realms of life and death. Artifacts from hand-processing and color filters are emphases of our physical intervention, manipulation and violence against nature. (Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu)

while you were away (2019) by Lucy Kerr (US); digital video with dance, color, sound, 16 minutes, exhibition file from the maker world premiere
          In while you were away, projected video immerses the performers as an uncanny mirror of the collapsing bodies, at times reflecting those on stage and at times revealing what they are not and what they could be. The performers in the present moment are virtually othered by the reflections in the video, which show what could be past, possible and not present. These images of absence expose distance between actual and virtual selves, making visible the poetics of the imaginary. (Lucy Kerr)

Dorothy (2018) by Diana Sánchez (Mexico/US); digital video, color, sound, 2 minutes, exhibition file from the maker
          The fluidity of an artist’s vision and patience—alien memories and artistic detachments molded into personal domestic spaces and impressions of a former experimental filmmaker. (Diana Sánchez)

Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) (2017) by Ja'Tovia Gary (US); digital video, color, sound, 6 minutes, exhibition file from the galerie frank elbaz bay area premiere
          Set in Monet’s Giverny, Gary’s Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) challenges the overwhelmingly white, masculine nature of western art-historical narratives by bringing to the foreground a sense of the multiplicity of powerful cultural contributions made by people of color. (galerie frank elbaz)

Between Dog and Wolf (2018) by Julia Dogra-Brazell (UK); digital video, color, sound, 8 minutes, exhibition file from the maker world premiere
          Scenes from a coast where the Roman fleet is thought to have first landed in Britain. Screenplay, adapted from writings by Virginia Woolf and Raul Ruiz, in a language thought closest in sound to spoken Latin. (Julia Dogra-Brazell)

you are not alone (2017) by Esther Urlus (Netherlands); 16mm, color, sound, 69 seconds, print from the maker U.S. premiere
          you are not alone is loosely based on the sound on film experiments of Prof. Joseph Tykociner in 1921 and the golden record sent to outer space on a Voyager spacecraft in 1977 containing messages to anyone who might someday find them. (Esther Urlus)
          you are not alone is part of 69 sec, a collaborative project of Filmwerkplaats, Rotterdam, Netherlands, a grouping of 20 films, each 69 seconds in duration, by 20 artists.

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CROSSROADS 10 is generously supported by the George Lucas Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund/Grants for the Arts, the Willow Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Cinematheque’s Members and Donors.