3 Peonies – Stephanie Barber – USA – 2017 – 4 min

A brief, poetic 16mm film on a simple sculptural action. What becomes apparent is the humor possible in material interactions and the tender and sometimes melodramatic symbolism of cut flowers. What begins as a reverence for natural beauty ends up pointing towards the abstract expressionism and color field work of high modernism which, in many cases eschewed the banality of such ‘natural’ beauty. The collaged soundtrack suggests weightier concerns, gently insistent behind the flatness of the utilitarian sounds of ripping tape.

Stephanie Barber is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been focused on an expanded poetics that results in the creation of movies, books, installations and songs. This work sits between essay and story, cinema and literature, science and spirituality. It moves beyond allegiance to media and works hard at defying classification. Barber’s work considers the most basic existential questions of human existence; its morbidity, profundity and banality, with the unexpected tools of play and humor. She approaches these questions rigorously while sidestepping the oppressive, class-bound implications of academic form and language. Major museums and festivals in the US and abroad have hosted solo exhibitions of these films and videos and books, essays and poetry have been widely published. The past five years have seen the release of two feature films which focus on an imaginative approach to poetic essay represented in dialog, radio play and song (in DAREDEVILS) and lecture, song and monologue (in In The Jungle.) as well as other projects.

Ambrosia – Janelle VanderKelen – USA – 2017 – 4 min

Inspired by the transformations in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that linger as explanations for why and how the world is, this piece transposes the notion of transition and transmutation across imagery of hybrid statues and a cleansing of hands with honey- the rejuvenative food of the gods that purportedly grants eternal life.

Janelle VanderKelen’s videos and sculptural installations situate the telling and marking of time within the body as mutable monument. Her work has been included in exhibitions at various institutions including San Diego Underground Film Festival, IC DOCS, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], and Anthology Film Archives. She currently co-curates a non-profit screening series called aCinema and teaches film and video at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee where she received both her MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres and her MA in Intermedia Art.

Reasonable Watchfulness – Talena Sanders – USA/Spain/Portugal – 2018 – 8 min

Transitions while longing for other places and people, like a fox on the run.

Talena Sanders makes moving image works that explore the development of individual and collective senses of identity in affinity groups. Her films and videos are informed by an interest in presenting the many ways that social institutions can shape individuals’ lives on both the broader geopolitical level and the most intimate, personal scales. A common starting point for developing new projects begins with an interest in interrogating narratives from histories and how historical records can influence senses of identity, especially as it relates to ideas of national and regional character. She believes there are endless means to present and interrogate materials from the real on the spectrum from nonfiction to narrative production approaches. Her work often places historical found/archival footage and audio in dialogue with contemporary media captured on location to question constructs of privilege and power in who gets authorized to tell the story of a shared experience. She holds an MFA from Duke University’s Experimental and Documentary Arts program and a BFA from the University of Kentucky. Her work has been screened, exhibited, and collected internationally, including at the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde, FID Marseille, Montreal International Documentary Festival, Fronteira Festival, Viennale, DokuFest Kosovo, Edinburgh International Film Festival, and Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. Her first feature documentary, Liahona, is distributed by Documentary Educational Resources and Doc Alliance.  She has previously taught film and video production and film studies at Duke University and the University of Montana. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Sonoma State University.

Regenmusik – Auden Lincoln-Vogel & Annelyse Gelman – Germany – 2018 – 5 min

A reorganized rainstorm.

Auden Lincoln-Vogel and Annelyse Gelman met at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where they studied studio art and cognitive psychology, respectively, and were both awarded 2013 Kaspar T. Locher scholarships. They have worked together on several collaborative videos, including the music videos “Rio” and “Bottomfeeder” and the poetry-films “Giraffe” and “Trein.”  More of their work can be found at audenlincolnvogel.com and annelysegelman.com

Positive – Hadi Moussally – Lebanon – 2018 – 2 min

Positive is a film and photo series starring three people with special skin conditions. Putting a spotlight on albinism and vitiligo through negative editing , the project aims to raise awareness of these skin conditions and the multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination those with albinism and vitiligo face. By allowing the negative to empower the positive, Hadi Moussally highlights our similarities, rather than our differences.

Hadi Moussally is a filmmaker and photographer born in 1987 in Lebanon, a post-war time where art didn’t have enough space on the popular scene but he always had an artistic sensibility. He chose to study in Paris to learn filmmaking and especially to improve his artistic culture. He first had a master degree in feature films at the Université Paris-Est Marne La Vallée. Then he decided to explore another side of cinema, reality film, where he had another master degree in anthropological documentary in the Université Paris 10 Nanterre, founded by Jean Rouch. With those two degrees, he has been able to develop and give a meaning to his own aesthetic vision of an image. From one hand, the feature films studies helped him build his imaginary by creating his own world, to direct films and managing a team, and especially a sense of aesthetic. On the other hand, the anthropological documentary studies helped him developing his ability to observe the subject and catch the right moment. Since 2012, he decided to also work in the fashion industry by making fashion and experimental films. His aim is to show fashion with a meaning and combine it with his own artistic vision. Today he directed and scripted more than 30 movies (Documentaries, Short films, Experimentals and music videos). He founded h7o7Films, production company with Olivier Pagny in Paris and The12Project, the First Alternative Fashion Network.

Rhythm of Being – Giada Ghiringhelli – Switzerland – 2017 – 7 min

For an instant, I am.

The light touches me gently and I live, burst and shine. This constant, irreversible, rhythmic drift from being to not. Only the memories left.

Escaping desires.

The love and the pain.

I only have an instant of life.

So please.

This film is an ode to the rhythm of being.

Giada Ghiringhelli is a London based filmmaker and video editor who has spent the last decade developing her passion in the visual arts, working across a number of industries including film, art, music and fashion. Her experimental works have been exhibited internationally in both gallery and festival circuit, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Locarno International Film Festival, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, London Short Film Festival and Uppsala International Short Film Festival. Her latest experimental film won Best Experimental Film at E?CU European Independent Film Festival in Paris and Best Sound Design at Underwire Festival in London.

Hijacked – Shambhavi Kaul – USA – 2017 – 15 min

Airplane space is inhabited by characters for whom ‘escape’, one of the promises of airplane technology proves elusive.

Shambhavi Kaul has exhibited her work worldwide at such venues as the Toronto International Film Festival, the Berlinale, The New York Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Edinburgh International Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, and Experimenta Bangalore. Her work was featured in the 10th Shanghai Biennale, and she has presented two solo shows at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. She was born in Jodhpur,  India, and lives in the United States where she teaches at Duke University.

Junkanoo Talk – Rhea Storr – UK – 2017 – 12 min

Who has the right to speak about a given culture? An examination of the colourful world of Junkanoo, a carnival of the Bahamas. Abstraction is used to explore cultural identity.

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.

Performers

Laura Ann Samuelson is a choreographer, dancer and teacher of contemporary performance. She produces original work under the name Hoarded Stuff Performance and has collaborated with groups such as Joanna and the Agitators, square product theatre, Buntport Theater Company, and Screw Tooth Theater Company. Laura Ann was named one of Colorado’s most creative minds in Susan Froyd’s 100 Colorado Creatives Series in Denver’s Westword (2014), and has been an artist- in-residence at the Denver Art Museum, Dance Initiative (Carbondale, CO), Colorado Conservatory of Dance, and at SKOGEN arts (Gothenburg, SWEDEN). Currently, she is pursuing an MFA in Dance at CU Boulder. She is also a Feldenkrais Method practitioner-in-training.

Ondine Gearey