SFCINEMATHEQUE

Time Crystals (2021) by Abinadi Meza

Time Crystals is a short experimental film in which a synthetic narrator tells an enigmatic and shifting story about materiality and time. “She” describes patterns in time, which she relates to the formation of crystals. It is not clear if her narrative is a memory, signal, or dream. (Abinadi Meza) 

Light Signal (2022) by Emily Chao

A keeper’s log, a score for light, a script for sound. A reconstruction, a slow reclamation. To begin where there is light. (Emily Chao) 

The Day Lives Briefly Unscented (2021) by Brandon Wilson

A rumination on ancestry, transformation and loss, elemental forces and the universal web of interconnection. Dedicated to the memory of the filmmaker’s grandmother Marilyn. (Brandon Wilson)

Lácrimas (2021) by Jeremy Moss

A melodrama of nature gazing—wavering moths, sparrows, cicadas, shadows, streams and towering trees. A dizzying and displacing garden in a lower lighting key. The plants, they shine at night. (Jeremy Moss)

First Hypnotic Suggestion (2020) by Brittany Gravely & Ken Linehan

First Hypnotic Suggestion conjures telepathic transference, hypnosis and collective dream space. Through its spectral tele-cinematic waves, the analogue horror-film protagonists participate in paranormal and fringe scientific experiments, attempting to comprehend the immaterial and incomprehensible expanses of their perception—simultaneously aided and obstructed by the temporal interventions and technological mediations of their transitory parallel dimension. This double-projected film—including distinctive left and right soundtracks—will undergo subtle, unpredictable shifts and alignments which naturally fluctuate from screening to screening. (Brittany Gravely)

Up Close (2021) by Sam Gurry

Hold me like an amphitheater, I need space to stretch my longing. Touch starved and hell-bent, an animated exhale of earthly hungers. (Sam Gurry)

Dans les cieux et sur la terre (2022) by Erin Weisgerber

Vertiginous masses of carved limestone give way to an ecstasy of light and living colour through an alchemical spell of elemental transformation. Hierarchies dissolve as the transient quotidian inspires the monumental. Imprinting successive layers of time in a ritual of repeated gestures, active attention, walked paths, shifting seasons and cycling years. Filmed over seven years in the neighbourhood around the filmmaker’s Montreal home, a foundational local monument meets fleeting traces of urban flora. Golden autumn leafmeal meets the cool of a late-spring iris within the frame’s architectural ground. The film was shot and hand-processed entirely on reversal films, with all of the composite images created in camera. (Erin Weisgerber)

Artist Bios

Abinadi Meza (Wixárika) is an experimental filmmaker and artist based in Austin TX. His work has been shown in festivals, galleries and institutions in Austria, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Taiwan, Uruguay, the UK and the US.

Emily Chao (US) is a filmmaker and independent curator based in the Bay Area. She is a co-programmer of Light Field, an international exhibition of recent and historical moving image art on celluloid, held in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a member of Black Hole Collective Film Lab in Oakland CA. She is from San Jose CA and earned her MFA in Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts.

Brandon Wilson (US) lives in the woods of northwest Oregon. He uses moving images and sound to explore new ways of seeing and to celebrate what he can’t fully understand or know. Much of his work places the human in a de-centered position. He’s been making films since 2014. (Brandon Wilson)

Jeremy Moss (US) is a Pennsylvania-based filmmaker and curator from the American Southwest. His films and videos often overlap and blend a number of genres, modes and gestures including speculative nonfiction, expressionism, surrealism, diary film, dance film and emulsion-based abstraction. His work insist on fluidity, betweenness and seismic shifts in experience and perception. With a constant attention to movement—wavering bodies, moving landscapes, glimmering frames—his films sustain a sensory resistance to fixedness. Moss is the Director of the Film/Media program at Franklin & Marshall College (Lancaster PA), a programmer for the Moviate Underground Film Festival (Harrisburg PA) and a co-director of new Gleaners Film Festival.

Brittany Gravely (US) has focused on 16mm film for the past several years, but also creates works in many other media. Currently, she creates expanded and non-expanded cinema projects of a more mystical nature in Magical Approach with Ken Linehan. Recently, their films screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Artifact, Fracto, CROSSROADS, Chicago Underground and Antimatter, among other venues. She also works as the publicist and designer for the Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge MA and is a founding member of the artist-run film lab AgX.

With a focus on sound and audio media, Ken Linehan’s (US) creative work explores intermedia space through works including field recordings, 16mm motion picture films, silkscreened images, works of cut paper as well as a variety of music projects. Most recently, Ken has been engaged in a series of psychic/cinematic collaborations in Magical Approach with Brittany Gravely. Having graduated in 2001 with an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Kenneth has taught courses on sound art and film sound at MassArt and RISD. Over the past decade his work has been exhibited at arts spaces, live music and cinematic venues such as the RISD Museum, the Boston Center for the Arts, Apex Art, AS220 and the Brattle Theatre, including events programed by Mono No Aware, Magic Lantern Cinema,  Millennium Film Workshop and Balagan Films. (Ken Linehan)

Sam Gurry (US) is an interdisciplinary filmmaker living in Los Angeles. They view animation as a seductive series of images. By utilizing domestic objects and heightened ephemera, their work showcases tactility at its core, both of the matter and of the spirit. Their films untether the liminal restrictions between documentary, animation and imagined realities. Their films have been in the official selection at the Toronto International Film Festival, SXSW, Slamdance, Ann Arbor and the Ottawa International Animation Festival amongst others. Sam holds an MFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts. They are currently adjunct faculty at California State University, Los Angeles, New York University and the University of Southern California. They perform as one half of expanded cinema duo Saint Victoria’s Incorruptible Body providing guitar and vocals. (Sam Gurry)

Erin Weisgerber (Canada) is a Tiohtia:ke/Montreal-based artist working with photochemical film to produce installations, performances and short films. She manipulates the photographic, chemical and material properties of film to transform the world framed through her camera, rendering moving images that exist between figuration and abstraction, external vision and internal landscape. Weisgerber is a member of the Double Negative Collective, a group of moving-image artists dedicated to the creation and exhibition of experimental and avant-garde cinema and who maintain an artist-run film lab. Since 2019 she is a member of Jerusalem in My Heart, a live audio-visual performance project, with Lebanese producer and musician Radwan Ghazi Moumneh.