Roger Beebe - http://www.rogerbeebe.com/ Historia Calamitatum (the story of my misfortunes), Part II: The Crying Game (2014) Video, 21:04 minutes It’s all right to cry. Sometimes it’s better than all right. A video about the forbidden pleasures of male tears.
Federico Cuatlacuatl - https://www.cuatlacuatl.com/about Coapan Sin Tiempo (2017) Video, 6:58 minutes Almost 30 years since people first started migrating to the U.S, this rural community in Puebla, Mexico continues to wait for their return.
Alicia Little - https://alicialittle.info/About Touchless Threshold (2018) Video, 2:50 minutes (edited and condensed for single channel) I seek out mass produced objects and materials for their aesthetic value, removing the intended function and context. Repetitive actions, like stacking rocks or pulling a tube of fabric from a pile, are performed in a manner that is reminiscent of domestic and factory labor. Objects overflow, are depleted or arranged and rearranged, always having a cause and effect relationship with my hand.
Calista Lyon - http://www.calistalyon.com/ Localized Gestures (2019) Video, 7:21 minutes Localized Gestures looks to the community of Green River, Utah, to explore how we use our hands as a form of relation, affection and solidarity in the context of place. A wave has been offered to you by a veteran melon farmer, a council worker about to celebrate thirty years of service, a woman who missed the fireflies of Missouri, a senior citizen sporting a hat that read “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN”, a girl in those awkward years of becoming a woman, a pheasant farmer readying for a delivery of twelve thousand chicks, the local mayor, a mechanic, a Vietnam vet poisoned by agent orange, an artist, a back-country mule aficionado, a man who wore a high-visibility vest in solidarity with the French protestors, the high school principal followed by her graduating seniors, a young woman who makes sandwiches, a nurse, a couple who recently started a snow-cone business, a man embodying a deep-seeded anger, a gardener and upon meeting her a generous young girl, among many others.
The wave could be interpreted as reaching towards someone, a gesture shared between bodies where we “reach beyond ourselves to form connections.” For those of us living outside this community, how might we learn and build from these gestures? How do we grow and extend our roots beyond the idea of the individual into a larger social world? Localized Gestures was screened at the annual Green River City Picnic and projected around the town. This work was made possible through the generosity of Epicenter and the larger Green River community.
A collaborative film that delves into the pleasures, architecture, and labour of an archetypal theme park. Guided by an unnamed narrator the film flits between fantasy, documentation and reconstructed events.
Dani Restack - https://danirestack.com/ Platonic (2013) Video, 20:29 minutes In Dani Leventhal’s Platonic, geometric spectors twirl in space; pet cats foam at the mouth; a little boy mistakes his junkie father for a superhero; and a confused adolescent worries he has sired a centaur. Platonic references both the ancient philosopher’s metaphysics of ideal Forms, which simultaneously exist outside our perceptions and yet give rise to them, and the related meaning in common parlance of non-romantic love. Leventhal trains her searching lens on the distance separating bodies, moments, and perspectives. The result is a study in the awkward gaps between appearance and reality, seeing and understanding, desire and its object. – Anneka Herre
Benedict Scheuer - https://www.benedictscheuer.com/ filming assistance from Zachary Greene I Have Seen Something Else Under the Sun (2020) Video, 14:26 minutes
Two men are in love and grow a garden together in rural Appalachia. One watches the other become a sunflower.
