how to make magic (2024) by Blanca García
Sunday, September 1, 2024, 1:00 pm
CROSSROADS 2024 – program 7
a neverending story
Grace, unnatural stillness, some tension. With a notable lyrical digression to England’s New Forest, the apparitional landscapes of southern California haunt this program exploring (largely) the west coast’s peculiar interlacing of garden and city. Films of restless searching, cryptic messages sent and received, familial support, acts of vanishing, uncertain transmutation and stories without end.
SCREENING:
to be with you (grotto) (2023) by Sarah Ballard (US); digital video, color, sound, 3 minutes. When We Encounter The World (2023) by Leonardo Pirondi (Portugal) & Zazie Ray-Trapido (US); digital video, color, sound, 11 minutes. Terminal Island (2024) by Sam Drake (US); digital video, color, sound, 13 minutes. Hey Sweet Pea (2023) by Alee Peoples (US); 16mm, color, sound, 11 minutes. how to make magic (2024) by Blanca García (Spain/UK); Super 8mm screened as digital video, color, silent, 6 minutes. Iris (2023) by Sheri Wills (US); digital video, color, sound, 9 minutes. Otherhood (2023) by Deborah Stratman (US); digital video, color, sound, 3 minutes. Cycladic Thermometer (2023) by Kate Dollenmayer (US); 16mm, color, sound, 8 minutes. TRT: 63 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: CounterPulse
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CROSSROADS 2024
to be with you (grotto) (2023) by Sarah Ballard
16mm hand-processed film and digital artifacts fused in an attempt to adapt a love song written and performed by the filmmaker’s mother in the 1980s. (Sarah Ballard) bay area premiere
When We Encounter The World (2023) by Leonardo Pirondi & Zazie Ray-Trapido
In 1934 an experiment by an amateur-scientist couple began. Named after a genus of moths, the Automeris Project placed a group of young children in an enclosed forest, leaving them to fend for themselves. On return visits, the couple presented self-made films, accompanied by live music, depicting the outside world. For them, these images were the perfect replica of reality seen in their expeditions. Nevertheless, the films were carefully framed, edited and manipulated to induce a transformation and provoke the development of a new society. This film revisits the remains of the Automeris Project and recreates one such film made using the few remaining assembly notes. (Leonardo Pirondi & Zazie Ray-Trapido) bay area premiere
Terminal Island (2024) by Sam Drake
The space between real and phantasmatic ecological dread. An ambivalent lament for LA’s vanishing palms and a sermon on Doomsday infrastructure delivered to no one. Destruction and desire muddled in surface abrasions. (Sam Drake) bay area premiere
Hey Sweet Pea (2023) by Alee Peoples
Parental aging and an existential wave collide together in funny ways. Hey Sweet Pea borrows scenes from the 1984 children’s sci-fi movie The Neverending Story to process our collective grief. (Alee Peoples) bay area premiere
how to make magic (2024) by Blanca García
How do you distinguish real magic from trickery? In film, as in nature, how much does illusion depend on the unexpected and how much does wonder depend on artifice? Filmed in the New Forest, the largest remaining unenclosed common land in England, where the entanglement of non-human and human activity hides a joyous spell. With fragments from a 1974 children’s book called How to make magic, discarded from the library I work at. (Blanca García) world premiere
Iris (2023) by Sheri Wills
Iris is a short experimental film that uses found 16mm footage, original tape loops and vintage recordings to explore attention, suspension and the slippage between language, music and aural phantoms, all focused outside of the boundaries of the recommended range. In early cinema the iris shot was used to gradually begin or end a scene and to focus audiences’ attention on something of importance in the shot; it mimics the opening and closing iris in the human eye. Many thanks to Lia Alexopoulos, Alex Papadopoulos, TWK. 16mm film scan by Nicki Coyle at The Negative Space. With special appreciation for the person who shot the original 16mm footage. B.F. Skinner Verbal Summator audio used with thanks to and permission from the B.F. Skinner Foundation. (Sheri Wills) bay area premiere
Otherhood (2023) by Deborah Stratman
Mother and child confront the other. Meanwhile, some ladies are thinking. (Deborah Stratman) bay area premiere
Cycladic Thermometer (2023) by Kate Dollenmayer
A found text from a darkroom thermometer package provides instructions for healing the wounds of this world, with help from a foosball player posing as a Cycladic figure. Spanning time and space from Bronze-Age Ano Syros to present-day Los Angeles. (Kate Dollenmayer) “…everything that we see in life is something of a shadow cast by that which we do not see. Plato was right.” (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Sarah Ballard (US) is a filmmaker and educator raised in Northeast Florida and currently based in Milwaukee. Her work has screened at venues and festivals including CROSSROADS, Antimatter [Media Art], Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Light Matter Experimental Film and Media Arts Festival, San Diego Underground Film Festival, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film Festival and the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, among others. She holds an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a BFA in Film Production from the University of Central Florida. Sarah is a recipient of the 2023 Princess Grace Award in Film and is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at UW-Milwaukee.
Leonardo Pirondi (Portugal) is a Brazilian filmmaker. His films explore the infinite abyss between the multiple derived versions of reality through non-conventional structures of documentary, experimental and narrative modes. Much of his work uses analog film techniques to create, inhabit and document worlds that explore sociopolitical unfoldings between history, imagination, myth and technology. His films have been exhibited worldwide, including in the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, Viennale and others. His films are in the collections of the UCLA Film & Television Archive collection and the Cinematheque of the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro. He holds a Film/Video degree from CalArts and is a Sundance Institute Fellow.
Zazie Ray-Trapido (US) is a filmmaker and producer from Philadelphia, based in Los Angeles. Her films expand on traditional formats of documentary and narrative, engaging with analog film techniques, archives and performance. Her practice investigates relationships between memory, ideology and the environment. Her work has been screened at festivals and venues worldwide such as the New York Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Viennale, Curtas Vila do Conde, Athens International Film and Video, Glasgow Short Film Festival, ICDOCS, Maysles Documentary Center and others. She holds a BFA from Bard College and a MFA in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts.
Sam Drake (US) is a filmmaker currently based in Milwaukee. Her work has been exhibited at film festivals and venues including the Museum of Modern Art, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Media City Film Festival, CROSSROADS, EXiS Experimental Film & Video Festival, Collectif Jeune Cinéma, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, Transient Visions Festival of the Moving Image and Antimatter. She is also a programmer and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Alee Peoples (US) maintains a varied artistic practice that involves screen-printing, sewing, sculpture and film. Currently living in Los Angeles, she has taught youth classes at Echo Park Film Center and shown her sculpture and film work at GAIT, 4th Wall and elephant. Peoples has shown her films at numerous festivals including Edinburgh, Images (Toronto) and the New York Film Festival and at museums and spaces including SFMOMA, Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Pompidou Center, Dirt Palace (Providence) and Nightingale Cinema (Chicago). Started in 2022, Arroyo Seco Cine Club is a thematically programmed film series she co-curates with Mike Stoltz. She is inspired by pedestrian histories, pop song lyrics and invested in the hand-made.
Blanca García (Spain/UK). Writer, filmmaker and researcher based in London (UK). I make super 8 films and am very interested in the history and endurance of reversal film stocks.
Sheri Wills (US) is an artist who works with film, video and sound to make single-channel videos, installations, sound works and live video performances. She explores the material, psychological and philosophical potentials of cinema to reveal small moments that often go unseen and pull forward the emotional content of abstract imagery.
Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman (US) makes work around issues of power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas and society are intertwined. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool and time to be supernatural. Her 40+ films and multiple artworks have addressed freedom, surveillance, public speech, sinkholes, levitation, orthoptera, raptors, comets, evolution, extinction, exodus, sisterhood and faith and have been exhibited and awarded internationally. She is a Fulbright, Guggenheim and United States Artist Fellow, the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Award and grants from Creative Capital, Graham Foundation, Harpo Foundation, Shifting Foundation and Wexner Center for the Arts. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.
Kate Dollenmayer (US) grew up in New England and currently lives on Lisjan land in Richmond, California. Kate’s films have screened at Light Field, Echo Park Film Center, REDCAT, Velaslavasay Panorama, Cambridge Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.