SFCINEMATHEQUE

Prelude (2022) by Eginhartz Kanter

Ode to Demolition. Resounding thunder accompanies the sparks of exploding fireworks. Faint points of light grow into glittering fountains and cascades and illuminate what initially resembles a completely foggy night sky. (Melanie Letschnig) bay area premiere

A Picture for Parco (2022) by Ayanna Dozier

Dozier recreates a 1980s commercial made for the Japanese department store chain Parco by Kazumi Kurigami taking on the role previously played by an elegantly dressed Faye Dunaway sitting at a table, set against a black background, slowly and seductively eating a hardboiled egg. Filmed on the one-year anniversary of Dozier’s last colposcopy, the piece evokes a range of intense feelings not present in the original. bay area premiere

E'aux d'Artifice (1953) by Kenneth Anger

Of all [Anger’s] works, this is perhaps the most abstract; the rushing, flowing, trickling waters become interesting as shapes and rhythms. (Marilyn Singer, The American Federation of Arts)

encaustic/earth/prayer/poem (2023) by Nik Liguori

Visionary impressions of a long overdue vernal equinox. A vertiginous and textural tone poem describing the semiotics of spring through lucent, hand-crafted frames. Out of winter’s harsh grasp, some kind of promise grows. (Nik Liguori) Still, the profound change / has come upon then: rooted they / grip down and begin to awaken… (William Carlos Williams, Spring and All) north american premiere

Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung) (2021) by TT Takemoto

Soaring through the complicated life of San Francisco’s first Chinese American female physician, this film envisions the euphoria and despair of Margaret Chung (1889-1959) and her insatiable desire for women and belonging within a sea of white military heroes, nurses and celebrities as it delves into drugs, sapphic surgeries and queer flights of fancy. (TT Takemoto)

moonshine/St. Paul (2023) by Nik Liguori

From a chance encounter with a video piece in a museum, an auto-fictional narrative is prompted about loss and missed connections, appropriating footage from works by Rineke Dijkstra and exploitation filmmaker turned Southern-evangelist propagandist, Ron Ormond, as well as recordings from the filmmaker’s personal archive. (Nik Liguori) world premiere

untitled, skin film (2022) by Sailor DiNucci-Radley

A transmeditation on the screen and tape as a splicer of bodies and limbs. Collected materials from personal archives, online forums & porn websites are obscured and abstracted through composition & re-imaging, imagining the gendered body as a collective and multiple dream; in some way flickering, like a lamp or light, whose bulb is dead or dying. (Sailor DiNucci-Radley) bay area premiere

Hevn (2022) by P. STAFF

Combining digital and analogue filmmaking techniques with poetry, hand painted animation and industrial sound, Hevn explores pleasure and pain in the sick or debilitated body with Staff’s ongoing interest in the volatility of queer and trans bodies. Glimpses of footage—a shower scene, traffic, friends gathering—are obscured and revealed by layers of hand painted film and lettering, eventually giving way to a titular poem that asks what happens to us in states of dreaming, volatility, inebriation and exhaustion. (LUX) bay area premiere

Bigger on the Inside (2022) by Angelo Madsen Minax

From an isolated wooded cabin a trans man stargazes, scruff chats with guys, watches youtube tutorials, takes drugs and lies about taking drugs, feeling his way through a cosmology of embodiment. Bigger on the Inside probes the boundaries between interior and exterior, the micro and macro, to consider bodily insides as passageway and portal, relative to the immensity of longing. Nudes and landscapes are equally erotic. Eros as an issue of boundaries: When I desire you, a part of me is gone. Land is surreal. Memory is porous. (Angelo Madsen Minax)