Ties that Bind – Shorts 2021
Sunday, 10/17, 3:15 PM
Printed Circuit
Director: Dan Robert Lahiani, Experimental, France, 12 mins.
The video visually reveals the verbal gap created in the once-a-year encounter between the artist and his father, in which the attempt to bridge the gap between spoken communication and gestures is in constant imbalance. Through camera movements and a casual performance in which a blood test is performed, the artist seeks to examine the relationship between culture and genetic inheritance, while presenting a narrative driven by a sense of missing and longing.
Keeping Together in Time
Director: Alison Folland, Experimental, Greece, 9 mins.
This film is an attempt to define an imaginary word, ‘teleomeric.’ It is a word my husband used to use, before he had a stroke and lost his language. Now I am left with the memory of a word which I cannot find in the dictionary. The closest word I can find to ‘teleomeric’ is ‘telomeric,’ meaning belonging to the telomeres, or the ends of the chromosome, which protect their information, and prevent them from sticking together. In this sense, the film is actually about the search for those rare moments of consolidation, which keep us afloat.
Exit Strategy #5
Director: Kym McDaniel, Experimental, USA, 9 mins.
An origin story and the rebirth of an identity after trauma. Blood, desire, and fucking. The fifth in a series regarding my emotional and physical traumas.
Close as Brothers
Director: Jennifer Hardacker, Experimental, USA, 5 mins.
Two teenage boys, one neurotypical and one not, discuss what it’s like to be brothers, and why we shouldn’t treat anyone like normal human beings.
It’s Raining, It’s Pouring
Director: Ronan Mackenzie, Experimental, UK, 4 mins.
Distant memories of the past are recalled as fleeting fragments by a man in his eighties.
Something to Hold on To
Director: Bailey Plumley, OBS, Documentary, USA, 19 mins.
After a fall breaks his hip and displaces him from his home of three decades, an 80-year-old man in rural Ohio takes stock.
Psychic Meat
Director: Stephen Wardell, Experimental, USA, 9 mins.”This is a handmade diary film about surgery, my dad’s heart, and how a conflict between him and me is embedded in a network of industrial agriculture. Salt crystals dried on film, coupon dye transfers, and digital video try to approximate the psychically connected nature of violence.
A Family That Steals Dogs
Director: John C. Kelley, Animation, USA, 8 mins.
Strange experiences and realizations lead a grieving artist to reconsider his identity and beliefs in this meditation on grief, family and mental illness.
Grab My Hand: A Letter to My Dad
Director: Camrus Johnson & Piccinini, Animation, USA, 5 mins.
A personal story of grief, those we look up to, and how the interactions we may deem insignificant may play a huge part in how we live our lives.
Tiger and Ox
Director: Seunghee Kim, Animation, Korea, 8 mins.
What does divorce mean to women in Korean patriarchal society, ? Is a fatherless family a failure? In order to find the answer to these questions, a single mother and her daughter start a conversation.
The Island Man
Director: Alex Morelli, Documentary, Greece, USA, 20 mins.
Though he is long gone, buried on the Greek island he left behind as a teenager, John remains a painful mystery to his former wife, children, and grandson. Upon rediscovering his home movies, they begin to reconcile the troubled man they knew with the person he might have been. A film about memory, loss, and being caught between two homes.