Bisagras (2024) by Luis Arnías
Saturday, August 31, 2024, 3:30 pm
CROSSROADS 2024 – program 4
obscured by clouds
A hinging program of personal and generational portraiture and the reveration of martyrs. Enactments of intimacy, public yet silently private, precede ruminations on introspection, solitude and travel, giving way to considerations of legacies of global resistance, rippling across history, and testaments to survival. These bitterly poisonous times will pass.
SCREENING:
Bounded Intimacy (2024) by Ayanna Dozier (US); digital video, color, silent, 6 minutes. It’s Just Business, Baby (2023) by Ayanna Dozier (US); digital video, color, silent, 6 minutes. On Margate Sands (2024) by Julia Dogra-Brazell (UK); digital video, black & white, sound, 9 minutes. Glistening Seagull (2023) by Chae Yu (South Korea); digital video, color, sound, 11 minutes. Oculto (Hidden) (2023) by Sebastian Wiedemann (Columbia/Peru); digital video, color, sound, 9 minutes. Ripple Effect (2024) by Niyaz Saghari (UK); digital video, black & white, sound, 9 minutes. Bisagras (2024) by Luis Arnías (Venezuela); digital video, black & white, sound, 16 minutes. TRT: 65 minutes
PROGRAM TICKETS: $12 General/$10 Cinematheque Members, Gray Area Members & students (with ID)
FESTIVAL PASSES: $110 General/$88 Cinematheque Members, Gray Area Members & students (with ID)
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CROSSROADS 2024
Bounded Intimacy (2024) by Ayanna Dozier
Bounded Intimacy (part of the trilogy of Super 8mm shorts It’s Just Business, Baby) examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea and Tribeca districts, renowned as a sites for sex work, sex clubs and illicit sexual activity. Bounded Intimacy explores the seduction of a nameless woman and the camera. The relationship between the two remains unknown and ambivalent as to whether or not the encounter is “authentic.” The nature of their relationship is irrelevant as the camera captures the authenticity of the desire in the encounter between the two. (Ayanna Dozier) world premiere
It's Just Business, Baby (2023) by Ayanna Dozier
It’s Just Business, Baby is also part of the trilogy of the same name. The film captures an encounter between a client and a working girl where the lines of care are blurred following a session. The film repeats this encounter with the same actors switching parts to trouble the relationship of power that exists between that dynamic. (Ayanna Dozier) bay area premiere
On Margate Sands (2024) by Julia Dogra-Brazell
An acoustic response to six lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, revisiting sounds from the harsh, beguiling and elusive coast where the words were written. (Julia Dogra-Brazell) world premiere
Glistening Seagull (2023) by Chae Yu
You moved as if shimmering and rippling water and I danced above like a seagull. The film explores visual reminders of objects and surroundings of memory to the void and absence tied to it, offering a path for the mechanism of memory. The imagery is contradicted by found sounds that operate as triggers of the past or as debris in the present. The film notes a new category of space-time. (Chae Yu) north american premiere
Oculto (Hidden) (2023) by Sebastian Wiedemann
The celestial bodies enunciate something in the midst of their mystery. The moon turns red, the planet cries, the fall is deeper than we could imagine. Hidden, something lurks. In the middle, a requiem or perhaps an elegy. The uncertain as a path that leads us to a catastrophe that we do not know if it is past, present or future. But which is undoubtedly a deep memory of a dark secret. The broken whispers of a wounded jungle. (Sebastian Wiedemann) US premiere
Ripple Effect (2024) by Niyaz Saghari
The diver plunges into the sea (death), but also into life (eternity), where he will rediscover the primordial waters of life. This quote from Pierre Lévêque about the illustrations in Tomb of the Diver resonated when I watched the viral video of a young man who was executed in Iran in 2020. A few days after his death, the grainy mobile video of him was released. He ran in slow motion and dove into a pool. Like an act of preservation, I filmed the video with a super 8 camera. The camera became a tool of magnifying and grieving. Three years later, men and women still chanted his name in protests. Like the waves after a dive, injustice has a ripple effect. (Niyaz Saghari) US premiere
Bisagras (2024) by Luis Arnías
A film exploring the enduring here and elsewhere of black consciousness. Finding a connection through the film’s emulsion and my skin, Bisagras holds my experience as a person of Afro-Caribbean descent during a visit to the House of Slaves in Gorée Island, Senegal and the port of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. In these places I dare to imagine my ancestors’ history of the journey of African slaves to America and draw a line that goes through me. (Luis Arnías) bay area premiere
Ayanna Dozier (US), PhD, is a Brooklyn-based artist-writer. Her art practice centers performance, experimental film, printmaking and photography using auto-fiction, surrealist, conceptual and feminist methods. She is currently working on a narrative short examining the emotional interiority of dominatrixes. She is an assistant professor in communication, emphasis in film, at University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020).
Julia Dogra-Brazell (UK) has been making narrative experiments through film and video since the late nineties. Her films have been screened at festivals including Ann Arbor, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and BFI London Film Festival, as well as in media programmes in association with LUX, Serpentine Gallery London, Uplink Shibuya Tokyo and McEvoy Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco.
Chae Yu (South Korea) has an inclination for the experimental stream of filmmaking. She is particularly interested in experiencing different expressive positions in sound and image, filmed on both digital equipment and a 16mm camera. Her films have been presented at Image Forum Tokyo, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival; EXiS, Seoul; Kyocera Museum, Kyoto; Museum of Contemporary Art Busan and Asian Artist Moving Image Platform, New York, among others.
Sebastian Wiedemann (Columbia/Peru) is a Colombian filmmaker-researcher and philosopher-practitioner of cinematic modes of experience. His works investigate liminal intersections animated through experimental cinema and philosophy, aware of a possibility for thought-cinema as living poetic ecology and a surface for the affirmation of a cosmopolitics of image. His award-winning films including Obatala Film and Deep Blue have screened in venues around the world and at retrospectives in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Spain and Ireland. In 2015 Wiedemann’s Los (De)pendientes was included in Artforum’s list of the best films of the year and in 2017 his Abismo was included in the film series Ism Ism Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America at Los Angeles Filmforum.
Niyaz Saghari (UK) is a UK-based Iranian filmmaker. She has studied Cinema in Tehran’s Art University and earned an MA in animation from Newport University, UK. She directs documentaries and experimental films about the aspects of urban and cultural life that she feels are in danger of being forgotten. Her work has been screened at Ann Arbor, Alchemy, Brazier film festivals.
Luis Arnías (Venezuela) is a filmmaker and artist who currently lives and works in Boston. In 2009, he graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and in 2020 received his Masters in Film/Video from Milton Avery Graduate School at Bard College. His films have screened at MoMa Doc Fortnight, Toronto International Film Festival, Punto de Vista, New York Film Festival, Berlin Critics’ Week (Woche Der Kritik) and BlackStar Film Festival. He was a fellow at the FSC at Harvard University, the recipient of the Herb Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship 2022 and a 2023 Boston Artadia awardee.