T H E  U N S E E N  F E S T I V A L  2018

Camera Lessons

Join us on Tuesday, September 4, 7:30pm for night 4 of the Unseen Festival. We will screen work by Karen Akerman and Miguel Seabra Lopes, and Bernd Lützeler. Preceding the screening will be a reading, curated by Diana Nguyen, featuring Emelia Kamaldulski and Lara E. Wilber.

Outubro Acabou (October is Over) –  Karen Akerman & Miguel Seabra Lopes – Brazil/Portugal – 2015 – 24 min

Beside the savage desire to realize the enormities which he brooded on, nothing was sacred. http://cargocollective.com/migka/outubro-acabou

Karen Akerman and Miguel Seabra Lopes have worked together since 2010 with fiction, documentary, experimental, and expanded cinema.

Camera Threat – Bernd Lützeler – Germany/India – 2017 – 30 min

Somewhere in the rather dreary spheres of Mumbai’s film industry, stuck between star-cult, superstition and the daily gridlock, Camera Threat explores the ambivalent, and sometimes paranoid relationship that this film city has with the moving image as such. Seated on a casting couch, two actors are getting trapped in their impromptu conversations on the unwanted side effects of a world that no longer bothers to tell facts from fiction. An expanded multi-genre film within the constraints of the so-called Masala Formula popularly known from Indian cinema.

Bernd Lützeler: “In my films, installations and expanded cinema works I often explore the techniques of moving image production and presentation in interrelation with their form and perception. Therefore, loops, found footage and the disclosure of DIY- and analogue technologies have become an integral part of my work. I am an active member of the artist-run filmlab LaborBerlin e.V., a space where filmmakers can process, edit and copy their own films on 8 and 16mm celluloid film. Another strong influence in my work are the aesthetics of popular Indian culture. Over the last sixteen years I have spent a significant amount of time in Mumbai where some of my projects were produced. What fascinates me, is seeing universal global themes like urban angst, mass media or migration gaining an emphasis against the backdrop of inequality and overpopulation in contemporary urban India.” – BL

Reading Curator and Readers

Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn, 2018), was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest. She is a poet and multimedia artist whose work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and PEN America, among others. In addition to winning the 92Y “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Contest, she has received awards and scholarships from the Academy of American Poets, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Currently, she lives in Denver where she is pursuing a PhD in creative writing and teaches in the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver. www.dianakhoinguyen.com

Emelia Kamadulski is a second-year student pursuing a BA in English at the University of Denver. As a newly emerging poet and fiction writer, she is eager to push and pluck at genre boundaries, to unravel the familiar, and weave anew with its thread. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Emelia divided most of her childhood and adolescence between Seattle, Washington and Denver, Colorado. Emelia is thrilled to debut at the Unseen Festival and further explore Denver’s vibrant creative community.