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

Opening Night!

Join us on Saturday, September 1, 7:30pm for opening night of the Unseen Festival. We will screen work by Alexei Dmitriev, Simon Welch, Eric Ko, Ivenlina Ivanova, Rhea Storr, Harold Charre, and Roger Deutsch, with a performances by Serena Chopra and Michelle Ellsworth.

In Between Takes – Alexei Dmitriev – Russia – 2017 – 8 min

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Give a man a video camera, and you will have a film in twenty years. “Inspired by my dad’s amazing camera skills, I applied found footage mechanics to family archive and (finally!) made a personal film.” – AD

A complicated birth in a French maternity hospital is the subject of a video presented as though it were a time capsule and a future birthday gift for the newborn. Through this real event, the film explores the notion of cinematic realism and the aesthetics of suffering, while delving into family and cinema history. At the same time the durability of the video medium itself and possible changes in screening technology rendering existing means redundant is also evoked. The implicit question of the film being how will our present be seen by our offspring in the future? The film contrasts current and past film technology through the combination of contemporary HD video and old Super 8 film from the 1960s.

Simon Welch is a British artist and filmmaker based in France since 1994. Studied Fine Art (painting) at WSCAD and then at Liverpool John Moores University in the 1980s. Subsequently studied Visual Arts at Strasbourg University to PhD level. Regularly shows films in international film and video festivals and exhibitions.

Clearing – Eric Ko – USA – 2018 – 3 min

Clearing is a rearrangement of pigmented dust, water, paper, and magnetized iron oxide into a spectral image and sound as a process of an emptying to create passage for renewal. “I wanted to approach the work as directly as possible. I began painting on leftover pages I tore out from old sketchbooks. I painted until I ran out of paper. I began to find order and structure from the paintings themselves. The sound was created with broken microcassette tape recorders. I recorded and deconstructed the sounds of music I wrote, as well as the sound of boiling water in a kettle, raindrops on an umbrella.” – EK

Eric Ko is an independent animator, filmmaker, and artist from New York. He is engaged with emotional distillation through textural and visceral atmosphere. He is interested in visual poetry by way of both abstraction and objective imagery.

Microdistrict – Ivelina Ivanova – Bulgaria – 2017 – 4 min

Snaps of everyday human interactions assembled in a rhythmic montage that explores the relationship between men, architecture and nature in the context of Bulgarian post-socialist residential neighbourhoods.

Ivelina Ivanova was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria to a Russian-Bulgarian family. She grew up in Sofia where she first started developing her interest in art, starting with drawing, painting and illustrating until she moved to London in 2014 to study animation. After graduating from the University of Westminster, she moves back to Sofia. Coming from a mixed family and living in several countries at once has influenced Ivelina’s films, which are often inspired by urban spaces and their sociological and psychological impact. Her works are mixed-media, combining a variety of techniques including stop motion, digital collage and watercolour rotoscoping. Her aim for artistic development is to build up on the skill of melting the border between digital and analogue aesthetics to achieve alternative modes of representation.

Henry – Rhea Storr – United Kingdom – 2017 – 5 min

Henry is an interrogation of an image, an intimate examination of the filmmaker’s grandfather. The film examines a portrait, which was painted from a photograph after the man himself had died. Henry was made to look a little older. The film describes the portrait to the man, asking how we might approach reanimated images when they are passed again through the film body and projected digitally on the screen.

Rhea Storr is an artist filmmaker born in Leeds, UK. She lives and works in London. Storr uses abstraction to examine and confront the cultural in-between and her own British-Bahamian heritage. Storr questions the slippages that occur when a language performs across cultures, questioning where images fail us and where they resist us. Previous screenings include: Hamburg International Short Film Festival,  Black British Shorts, ICA, London, Crossroads Film Festival, San Francisco,Affinities, Or, The Weight of Cinema, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC, European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück and Saatchi New Sensations, London.

Requiem – Harold Charre – France – 2017 – 10 min

In the 1960’s, a barrel organ player walks in Madrid with his son. In an effort to pass on part of his knowledge to him, he awakens the heavy past of the Spanish land which has lived through the horror of the Civil War.

Harold Charre was born in 1980 and lives in Paris. His work, which combines video, painting and music, questions beliefs and relationships with the marvelous. His films have been selected at numerous international festivals (Digitopia, Videonomad, Linoleum Festival, Codec Video, Vaft, Videoforms, Filmideo …) and have been screened at the Maxxi Museum in Rome, the Cinémathèque de Toulouse and the gallery Sawtooth Ari of Launceston. He won the best film award at the Swedenborg Festival in London and was recently the winner of the Madatac Residency and Production Prize at the Casa de Velasquez in Madrid.

Fathers and Sons – Roger Deutsch – USA/Hungary – 2018 – 30 min

Fathers and Sons relates the history of the paternal line of the Deutsch family from 1745 until 2017, from their origins in Moravia, through their time in Hungary, emigration to the United States and in the case of the filmmaker, his return to Hungary. The story focuses on and revolves around the mysterious death of the filmmakers grandfather in 1926.

Roger Deutsch was born in 1952 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. In 1979, he co-wrote, and produced the feature film Blank Generation. Directed by Ulli Lommel and starring Richard Hell, Carol Bouquet and Andy Warhol, Blank Generation has had a cult following to this day. In the early 1980s Deutsch worked as a freelance line producer for low budget horror films while pursuing an MFA at Bard College. In 1983 Deutsch completed the short film Dead People. Dead People has been invited to festivals worldwide winning prizes at the San Francisco Art Institute Film and Video Festival, the Black Maria Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, and Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival. In 1984 Deutsch completed Jews, which he compiled from the 10 hours of 16mm film his maternal grandfather had shot in Chicago from 1927 to 1943. Jews won prizes at the Black Maria Film Festival and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. After receiving his MFA in 1985 Deutsch worked as a teacher of developmentally disabled adults in Brooklyn. He moved to Italy in 1993, where he worked as a script writer, script doctor and production consultant for various European production companies. In 2002 he completed the feature film Suor Sorriso (Sister Smile) which he directed from a screenplay he co-wrote with the Italian poet Francesca Terrenato. Sister Smile, starring Ginevra Colonna and Antonio Salines, had its world premiere in competition at the Sao Paolo International Film Festival and has been invited to over 20 festivals worldwide. In 2004 Deutsch’s short story Mario Makes a Movie, based on his work teaching developmentally disabled adults, was published in Raindance Film Magazine, London. His film adaptation of Mario Makes a Movie, has been invited to many festivals worldwide, winning prizes at the San Francisco Art Institute and Black Maria Film Festival. From 2009 to 2015 Deutsch worked on Repetition a cycle of five films with musical titles. Created from ‘found’ material along with his own, the films, Prelude, Suite Ancienne, Intermezzo, Scherzo and Ricercare were released individually and screened at numerous festivals worldwide. Taking off from a character who appears in Ricercare, Deutsch wrote the screenplay The Boy on the Train which he produced and directed in 2016. Starring James Eckhouse and Barnabas Toth, The Boy on the Train was awarded Best Narrative Feature at the Dallas Video Festival in 2016 and was released theatrically in Hungary in 2017. Also in 2016 Deutsch completed the short narrative The Disappearance as part of an omnibus production In the Same Garden which premiered at the Sarajevo Film Festival. Deutsch currently lives in Budapest.

Performers

Michelle Ellsworth is an American performance artist and an associate professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder as the co-director of the dance department. Ellsworth’s work spans video, performable websites, drawing and live performances and employs absurdist humor, new technologies, monologue, and dance. She has exhibited or performed at Fusebox (Austin), On the Boards (Seattle), Counterpath (Denver), Chocolate Factory (Long Island City, NY), DiverseWorks (Houston, TX), Dance Theatre Workshop (New York City), and the Abrons Arts Center (New York City). She has been called a “jittery performer who expertly folds nervousness into her character” and “an excellent comedian, impersonating a slightly scatterbrained TED talk lecturer.” Her major works include TIFPRABAP.ORG, The Objectification of Things, Preparation for the Obsolescence of the Y Chromosome and Clytigation: State of Exception. She has received the Doris Duke Impact Award, is a Creative Capitalgrantee, and is a United States Artists Knight Fellow. ArtForum has said she is “doing some of the most engrossing explorations of how the body and technology coexist and collide.”

Serena Chopra has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver and an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of two full-length books of poems, This Human (Coconut 2013) and Ic (Horse Less Press 2017), as well as two chapbooks, Penumbra (Flying Guillotine Press 2012) and Livid Season (Free Poetry 2012). She is a Kundiman Fellow and  a 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar, for which she is composing hybrid writing informed by her research with queer women in Bangalore, India. She is a multidisciplinary artist, working as a writer, professional dancer, theater/performance artist and visual artist. She is a co-founder and actor in the poet’s theater group, GASP and worked with Denver’s Splintered Light Theater on a full-length production of Ic, for which she composed the soundscore. Serena currently teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop and in the MFA program at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.