The Unseen Festival, Opening Night, Thursday, September 21, 2017, 7:30pm

Join us for opening night of the The Unseen Festival, curated by OFF Cinema. This evening’s screenings include João Vieira Torres’s Ghost Children, Carolina Charry Quintero’s BLUA, and Blaire McClendon’s America for Americans. Door open at 7pm and screening starts at 7:30.

João Vieira Torres, Ghost Children. Video. Color/Sound. 2016. 16 min

Ghost Children presents seven reminiscences of early childhood, read in seven different voices, as the camera presses close against the faded dye and exaggerated grain of family photographs from the early 1980s. Whose faces and memories are those? The film encourages the audience to interrogate assumptions about gender, memory, performance, and death.

Carolina Charry Quintero, BLUA. Video. Color/Sound. 2016. 22 min

Humanity and animality are enigmatically confronted and entwined. Combining rich high-contrast 16mm images with crisp digital color scenes, BLUA composes an uncanny entry into the relationship between human and animal existence. Unfolding like a tapestry, its montage complicates the relationship between observation and fiction. Reaching for equal beauty and strangeness, BLUA is an assertion of the uncanny, a cine-poetic philosophical speculation.

Blair McClendon, America for Americans. Video. Color/Sound. 2017. 35 min

America for Americans has a simple premise: you have heard this before, you have seen this before, you already know. There are found images you may have seen or assiduously avoided. There is dancing, dying, rioting. It is a collage of quotes drawing upon various histories of suffering and resistance. The speakers are writers, musicians, the aggrieved, the grief-worn, bystanders all at a moment of engagement with the precipice upon which black life is perched. It is the presentation of a siege.