Encore – 2023
Monday, April 10, 5:00 PM
Margie Soudek’s Salt and Pepper Shakers
Director: Meredith Moore, Documentary, USA, 13 min
Margie has been collecting salt and pepper shakers for 73 years — at 94, her days are spent repeating the same, simple routine. When her granddaughter pays her a visit, the collection, now in the thousands, takes on a new life. Part love letter, part documentary, part experiment — the film merges the real, the fantastical, and the world of a computer desktop.
The Sky’s In There
Director: Dani Leventhal ReStack, Sheilah Wilson ReStack, Experimental, USA, 12 min
This latest work from the ReStack’s pulls the experience of becoming mother (both through fostering and bio) through the lens of personal lives that are always, also, steeped in a world where systemic racism, classism and heteronormativity influence and shape. Using documentary footage, a journey into a cave, a dream recounted and formal strategies of color, sound and movement the ReStack’s push experiences and ideas together to see what it can yield or reveal. The Sky’s In There proposes a fragmented meditation on the capacity of relation to bring about transformation.
Open is Opening
Directors: Amber Bay Bemak, Nadia Michele Granados, Liz Rosenfeld, Experimental, Colombia, Germany, USA, 20 min
An experimental narrative work tracking the distance between three artists working remotely between three different continents. What was supposed to be their first in person collaboration became a work about the complicated nature of queer kinship through the transference of moving images and performative utterances, using dirt as the connecting material. Dirt, a substance that inadvertently crosses borders, became a vessel for deep intimacy between the makers. This film was made over three years as the artists collaborated between Germany, Colombia, and the USA during shifting political landscapes, personal and physical transitions, and the Covid 19 pandemic.
Phase II
Director: Kelly L Sears, Experimental, USA, 7 min
In the near future, real estate developers deploy sonic weapons used at protests to clear neighborhoods for high-end high rises. On the front lines are sound medics that tend to those injured by the assaults. As they respond, one member of the team documents the incidents to create a future archive for other sonic activists.
De-composition
Director: Laura Kraning, Experimental, USA, 3 min
A textural macro collage of a rust belt landscape- scratched, splattered, dripping, cracking, and bursting to the surface. Photographed and meticulously edited over one year in Buffalo, NY, the reverberant tones of the New York Central rail line provide the rhythmic pulse to a rapid cascade of multi-hued material decay and metallic de-composition.
Paying Tribute to the History of Steel?
Director: Tony Buba, Documentary, USA, 4 min
Twenty-four years ago, the Carrie Funace site was dedicated to honor steel workers who lost their jobs and their legacy as workers.
Kinhin
Director: Lydia Moyer, Experimental, USA, 8 min
Agnes Martin was a well-known abstract painter who spent much of her later life in northern New Mexico where she built her own home and lived austerely. Her painting process involved waiting for images to appear in her mind as small squares and then making long-hand calculations to upscale them exactly to the size of her 6×6 foot canvases. Critics often suggested her work was about landscape but she insisted it was not. This impressionistic psycho-biography colludes landscape and mindscape, playing with the materiality of analog and digital video to evoke a felt-sense of Martin’s life and work.
Winter 1984
Director: Tony Buba, Documentary, USA, 14 min
In the winter of 1984, Amedeo “Pee Wee” Vieri gives a tour of the Carrie Furnace site. A steel mill that he worked at for 34 years before losing his job when the mill closed in 1982.
The Limits of Vision
Director: Laura Ann Harrison, Animation, USA, 34 min
Amidst shifting gender norms in South London circa 1975 a woman trapped in a deadly domestic universe is sprung free when she comes into contact with the king of dust, Mucor. A film about painting, feminism, slippage and purity.