Through Our Lens – 2024
Monday, April 8, 3:00 PM
Heideh: A Return
Director: Sara Kazemimanesh, Experimental, USA, 5 min
A short experimental video essay that consists of a series of rotoscoped animation sequences intercut with home video footage excerpts. The film offers glimpses of Hayedeh (1942-1990), the exiled diva of post-revolution Iran, and her constant desire for an impossible return to her homeland. The visual narrative is intercepted by my recorded voice-over as I recall my personal musings on the concepts of belonging and memory.
Sundown
Director: Steve Reinke, Experimental, USA, 8 min
A video diary from March 2020 to May 2023: years that cover the diarist’s museum show in Vienna, Covid, the death of Gordon Lightfoot and his mother, what it means to be a queer Nietzschean and why tattoos are always untimely.
Ashes of Roses
Director: Sasha Waters, Experimental, USA, 12 min
This movie is about loving things that are embarrassing and people who are inappropriate. It’s an essay film reflection on popular trash; football parties; older men; adolescent desire and the outrageous yet mundane humiliations of being a teenage girl in the 1980s.
Mast-del
Director: Maryam Tafakory, Experimental, UK, 17 min
Two women lie in bed together. One tells the other the colorful memory of a date with a man in Tehran, which became a nightmare following the intervention of the morality police. Her story is inscribed on the screen, via superimpositions of images of embraces and flashes of Iranian films produced after the Islamic revolution.
Headshot
Director: Dominic Yarabe, Documentary, USA, 7 min
An unsettling image leads a filmmaker towards a path of grappling with some of the dark and rarely discussed origins of film.
A Home on Every Floor
Director: Signe Rosenlund-Hauglid, Documentary, Norway, 11 min
Poet Hanna Asefaw grew up in a municipal flat in Oslo with her Eritrean family in the late 90s. Through an electrifying spoken word performance, she visits her childhood universe reimagined in miniature, and reflects on community, diversity and belonging – and the political indifference that broke it apart.
1976: Search for Life
Director: Tess Martin, Animation, Netherlands, UK, 11 min
A new father visits the hometown of his mother in 1976, accompanied by his wife and baby. At the same time, the NASA Viking lander is sending the first images back to Earth from the surface of another planet.
Hey Sweet Pea
Director: Alee Peoples, Experimental, USA, 11 min
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.
Electra
Director: Daria Kashcheeva, Animation, Czech Republic, 26 min
Electra rethinks her 10th birthday, mixing memories with imagination and hidden dreams.
Longing for light
Director: Alba Cros Pellisé, Documentary, Spain, 11 min
Through a radically personal look, the director explores Barcelona and its light. The sun as a brush that naturally highlights the intimacy of the rooms, friends, lovers and the people around her: her chosen family.