601 Revir Drive – Josh Weissbach – USA – 2017 – 9 min

A series of spatial limits are defined while a maker imbibes. Interdependence is inherited after a substance cannot be shook. An animal carefully guards an outlined space as a river runs backwards.

Josh Weissbach is an experimental filmmaker. He lives in a house next to an abandoned village with his wife, two daughters, and three cats. His films and videos have been shown worldwide in such venues as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, Mono No Aware, Chicago Underground Film Festival, 25 FPS Festival, and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. He has won jury prizes at Videoex, ICDOCS, $100 Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, and Haverhill Experimental Film Festival. He is the recipient of the 2008 Cary Grant Film Award from the Princess Grace Foundation-USA, a 2013 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Emerging Artists from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and a 2015 LEF Fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.

Even in paradise it is not good to be alone – Lorenzo Gattorna – Italy/USA – 2017 – 8 min

In memory of Nonno Pierino. Sound: David Menke, Coll Anderson, Yle, Felix Blume, klankbeeld, Emanuele Caro, Lucio Lepri, SFX Bible, Mario Conte, Pietro Bonanno, Alessandra Salvatori, Jillis Molenaar. Music: “Quel mazzolin di fiori”, Coro della Bassa Romagna, 2012

Lorenzo Gattorna is a filmmaker and programmer from New York. He holds a BFA in Film and Television Production from NYU and an MFA in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Recently, his cinematic work engages with extended temporality, eludes narrative causality and embodies the confluence of lived experiences and embellished counterparts. He also attempts to capture flawed, fleeting scenarios, and the bittersweet sentiments that accompany their passing. His short films have screened in association with ARKIPEL, Balagan, CCNY, Chicago Filmmakers, Concrete Dream, CUFF, Echo Park Film Center, EMP Collective, FOVEA, FRACTO, Galerie Myrtis, Howard County Center for the Arts, Image Forum, Les Rencontres Internationales, LMAKprojects, LOOP Festival, Maryland Film Festival, MICA, Microlights, Microscope Gallery, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Montreal Underground Film Festival, Moviate Underground Film Festival, NYFF, Onion City, Open City Cinema, PLUG Projects, Regional Support Network, Sonic Circuits, Tabor Film Festival, That One Film Festival, The Nightingale, Transient Visions, TULCA, UNEXPOSED and VIDEOMEDEJA. He has programmed screenings for American Medium, Anthology Film Archives, Antimatter, Maysles Cinema, Spectacle Theater, The Nightingale and UnionDocs. From 2012 to 2014, he was the co-director of Sight Unseen in Baltimore.

Distance – Sharon Whooley – Ireland – 2018 – 14 min

Distance is a story about time in a specific place, Glenbride in Co. Wicklow in Ireland told from three temporal perspectives: a woman, a house and a mountain. Inspired in part by the ideas of Scottish writer and poet Nan Sheperd “Thirty years in the life of a mountain is nothing, the flicker of an eyelid”, we also echo James Joyce’s words “Places Remember Events” (written in the margins of Ulysses).

Sharon Whooley is a Film Artist based in Baltimore in West Cork in Ireland. “I have worked in film for over 20 years, as co-director of Harvest Films (www.harvestfilms.ie.  As writer, I was co-writer with Pat Collins and Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde on the feature films Silence (2012) and Song of Granite (2017) (Dir: Pat Collins). We are currently writing a new film The Aran Islands based on John Millington Synge’s book of the same name. My own films include Fathom (2013) a meditation on thinking and isolation based on the Fastnet Lighthouse, Nettle Coat (2014) on Visual Artist Alice Maher’s work of the same name, Imogen Stuart: Dealbhóir (2016) on Irish/German sculptor, Imogen Stuart and Distance (2018); a story about time in a specific place, Glenbride in Co. Wicklow in Ireland.  All of these films were funded by the Arts Council of Ireland. My next film, Night Flight is an experimental film about yearning and the human condition seen from the real world, the dream world and the other-world.” – SW

Sunken Gardens – Domietta Torlasco – USA – 2016 – 20 min

An old roadside motel in Florida is revealed to be a prison for people in debt—the unemployed, the working poor, and the disenfranchised middle class. Part documentary, part fictional scenario, Sunken Gardens juxtaposes disparate materials—silent portraits, personal interviews, staged readings—to glimpse how lives are led in unseen quarters of our economic and justice systems.

Domietta Torlasco is a filmmaker, critical theorist, and associate professor at Northwestern University. Her pieces have screened at national and international venues, including the Galerie Campagne Première in Berlin, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Reader and Dancers