Teen Girl Fantasy (2023) by Marisa Hoicka
Saturday, August 31, 2024, 8:30 pm
CROSSROADS 2024 – program 6
can you tell me about the dream?
A soliloquy on loneliness, freedom, power and care opens a program of enactments, embodiments, memorials and portrayals of figures absent or lost. Films which explore intimate and universal experiences of childhood, adolescence, familial distance and mortality by opening reliquaries of retrospection, museums of grief, hermetic archives of trauma (private and collective) and the discovery of uncertain memories.
SCREENING:
Feather Family (2023) by Alison Folland (US); digital video, black & white, sound, 5 minutes. 1014 (2024) by Deborah S. Phillips (Germany); 16mm, color, sound, 9 minutes. Aurinkokirja (Solar Book) (2024) by Azar Saiyar (Finland); digital video, color, sound, 10 minutes, exhibition file from AV-arkki. Teen Girl Fantasy (2024) by Marisa Hoicka (Canada); digital video, color, sound, 10 minutes. why i never became a driver (2023) by Yuula Benivolski (Canada); digital video, color, sound, 12 minutes. Poem of E.L. (2023) by Maya Gurantz (US); digital video, color, sound, 20 minutes. TRT: 64 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)
program community partner: Screen Slate
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CROSSROADS 2024
Feather Family (2023) by Alison Folland
A voice-to-text soliloquy. A child tastes loneliness, freedom, power and care via an animal simulator game. Roles are rehearsed and reversed. (Alison Folland) bay area premiere
1014 (2024) by Deborah S. Phillips
My mother, Carol Frieda Herman P. Hirsch, Chaya bas Moshe ve Yehudit, died on June 23, 2022, at home, the way she wanted her last weeks to be. Self-determined, surrounded by majestic trees outside the windows, with birds chirping in the background. With her books on shelves nearby. Even when she lacked the energy to read, she was glad to have those books near her. And she enjoyed the smells of good food, her music and other simple things as long as it was possible. The choice to use film material that was way past its sell-by date corresponds with how, as one approaches the end of one’s life, things fall apart, gradually. A tribute. (Deborah S. Phillips)
Aurinkokirja (Solar Book) (2024) by Azar Saiyar
What remains and what gets lost, when a thing becomes a museum object? Many details have gone missing but the objects of Satakunta Museum bear a strong presence of waters running next to it: things that the river and the sea have carried, things that were born, that live and once lived because of them and beside them. (Azar Saiyar)
Teen Girl Fantasy (2023) by Marisa Hoicka
Hormones pulsate to the rhythm of fourth-period marching band practice. Cheer for the boys! Stay upbeat! Feel the rush of desire! Breathe the rage in deep. Make sure you aren’t late for the bell or he might make you stay after school, alone together. These are the lurking aggressions in Teen Girl Fantasy. But whose fantasy was it anyway? (Cristina Kolozsváry-Kiss) bay area premiere
why i never became a driver (2023) by Yuula Benivolski
Three women engage with the medical system to confront strange dreams that may not belong to them. Early one morning, I regained consciousness in a hospital bed as the sun was coming up. I was sixteen. First thing I heard was the news: Princess Diana had died in a car accident. Two hours earlier, I was hitchhiking home from a party with friends. We were picked up by a Toyota hatchback; the driver was drunk, but we were desperate. At the bottom of the twisted mountain road we crashed into the wall surrounding my town’s cemetery. As I watched updates on Diana from my hospital bed, images of her smashed-up car crept into my mind and imprinted as my own. (Yuula Benivolski) north american premiere
Poem of E.L. (2023) by Maya Gurantz
In 2013, a woman’s last known movements, captured by elevator surveillance and released by the LAPD to identify her body, went viral, exploding online into thousands of conspiracy theories, becoming fodder for horror and true crime exploitation. Poem of E.L. explores Elisa Lam’s unsolved death by dismantling the tired tropes used to tell her story, translating the elevator footage in three ways: as physical re-enactment; as a speculative POV journey cutting between memory and hallucination; and as an immersive fugue in found footage. (Maya Gurantz) bay area premiere
Alison Folland (US) is a filmmaker and performer based in Somerville MA. Her short hybrid films engage questions of affect, play, and truth-value and are directly informed by her work as an actor in the commercial film industry. Alison’s films have been screened at festivals such as Athens International Film and Video Festival (Ohio), Athens International Film Festival (Greece), Antimatter, Winnipeg and Milwaukee Underground Film Festivals. She is a member of AgX Film Collective and teaches 16mm filmmaking at Emerson College.
Deborah S. Phillips (Germany) works in a number of different fields: as an artist as well as a translator and voice-over artist. From 1988–2001, she was an active member of the Braunschweig-based artists‘ collective LABORATORIUM, where she began working with film. In 2007 she co-founded Kunstverein Neukölln, a gallery and art centre. DSP’s films have been screened in more than 40 countries at a number of festivals.
Azar Saiyar (Finland) is a Helsinki-based filmmaker and visual artist whose art has been shown at film and media art festivals (e.g. DOK Leipzig, Uppsala SFF, IFF Message to Man, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin), galleries, exhibitions, museums and on television. She often uses archival materials and plays with images and words of collective memory to look towards the ways of looking, speaking, remembering and telling stories. She also does collaborative works with other artists.
Marisa Hoicka (Canada) creates films, choreographs dancers, performs installations and paints. Her film Teen Girl Fantasy was honoured by inclusion in the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s 2024 Tiger Short Competition, the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Czechia), Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival (Portugal) and Guanajuato International Film Festival (Mexico). She has exhibited in major festivals and museums including Uppsala Short Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Antimatter (Canada), Ann Arbor Film Festival, SFMOMA, the Power Plant and more.
Yuula Benivolski (Canada) is an artist and filmmaker based in Toronto. She uses autofiction and personal archives to explore the territory between memory and official history. Most recently, her work has been shown at e-flux Screening Room in NYC; Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival; the Interbay Cinema Society, Seattle; DIFFUSION 2023, Toronto; Beijing International Short Film Festival and Images Festival, Toronto.
Maya Gurantz (US) is an artist in video/film and performance based in Los Angeles. Solo shows include: LA Artcore (Prospect Art PRESENT WORK award), MCA Denver, Grand Central Art Center, Pitzer Art Gallery and Catharine Clark Gallery. Group shows include HomeLA, MoCA Utah, LAND (Nomadic Division), Oakland Museum of California, High Desert Test Sites, Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall and Movement Research at Judson Church, among others. Maya’s films have been Official Selections in festivals including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Arthouse (Award), Athens International Film + Video Festival, Austin Dance on Film, San Francisco Dance Film Festival, InShadow and others.