Give – David de Rozas – USA – 2018 – 17 min

Give explores Roland Gordon’s motivations to create a monumental visual archive displaying centuries of black agency and achievements in the United States and beyond. Comprised of thousands of photographic portraits, newspapers, and magazines cutouts, Roland’s collage ‘The Cloud of Witnesses’, presents an alternative visual history to empower the black community. The film explores collective representations of history, memory, and culture; where pasts, presents, and futures are molded by the blending of imagination, facts, and love.

Born in Southern Europe, David de Rozas is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice expands through filmmaking, education, and cultural production.  His interests relate to the politics of history and memory, and identity through a range of mediums and formats. David earned an MFA in Cinema at the San Francisco State University, and BA in Fine Arts from the Complutense University in Madrid. His projects have been recently screened at Visions du Reel, True/False, Sheffield Doc/Fest, AFI Docs, UCLA, FLEXfest, WUFF, or Artists’ Television Access among others. He is currently lecturer at SFSU School of Cinema.

An Ecstatic Experience – Ja’Tovia Gary – USA – 2015 – 7 min

A meditative invocation on transcendence as a means of restoration. An experimental manipulation of documentary footage illustrating African-American oppression and their resistance.

“Through film and video work, I aim to posit a future in which Blackness, the feminine, and non-traditional ontologies are centralized. The future I seek to create contests representative and narrative norms and perceptions, and explores the haunted spaces of life and relationships. My videos and films are political, psychoanalytic, and personalized moments of liberation from the anonymous, collective personage, and distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed.

A perspective intellectually grounded in a radical Black femme gaze and subjectivity rests at the foundation of my practice and serves to render a more fully formed subject, discourse, and creative space, while maintaining a purposeful specificity. I seek to broaden my artistic reach by narrowing my focus. Personal history and family lineage are fertile spaces, which I mine and investigate as part of the creative practice. Queerness, as a non-normative way of being and a framework through which to view the world, is crucial to my work as it shatters binaries to reveal the true spectrum which lies beneath. I am concerned with constructions of power as it relates to shaping identity and how these power relations are made manifest in popular media and art.

While the intellectual foundation of my storytelling is grounded in historical themes and contemporary experiences, it is my goal to create a new framework for radical formal experimentation as a practical manifestation of a new future space. My work engages ephemerality with an aim towards reclaiming iconic spaces, figures, and ideas, all while creating new meanings through a reworking of conventional formal considerations. Choices surrounding form are practical as much as aesthetic, born of the need to create work via non-traditional means, modalities, and materials, which depict subjects rarely produced in substantive form. The work conjures the aesthetics of Afro Surrealism, questions notions of space and permanence, narrative and the linearity of time, and is ultimately an evocative and disruptive invocation.” – JG

Violence Is to Charge 600 Euros – Public Land I – Elena Friedrich – Germany/Spain/Greece/Turkey – 2017 – 28 min

By the means of a collection of tags and slogans written on the walls in Athens, Madrid and Istanbul, the political struggles between 2011 and 2015 are reconstructed in the manner of a landscape film. The montage operates with the simultaneity and asynchronism of the events that happened there. Meanwhile a voice in off tries to generate a narration by reading and translating the writings on the walls. – The form is always, also, political. Every image is only as innocent as its context of reception. But which kind of public – and public sphere – which kind of images, language and narrations do we use and inhabit in order to want to change the world around us? – The film is the first part of a series, which works around these questions.

Violence Is to Charge 600 Euros – Public Land II – Elena Friedrich – Germany/Spain/Greece – 2017 – 28 min

A grumpy man fully loads his car with oranges and starts his journey from the city to the seaside. The car radio only seems to be playing an endless discussion about media activism and “the society of spectacle.”

Born 1983 in Germany, Elena Friedrich studied Cultural Studies, Political Science and Spanish Literature in Berlin, as well as in Granada, Spain. She completed her Masters Degree in Fine Arts in the Film Department of the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg (2017) with film maker and professor for experimental film Robert Bramkamp.

Currently she lives and works at the artist residency Vorwerkstift in Hamburg, where she, collectively with the other artists in residence, is responsible for the programming and organisation of exhibitions and screenings in the house’s own gallery space. Additionally she is developing her next film in Thessaloniki (2018/2019) with the support of a research grant for post-graduates.

Dance and Dancers

Lauren Beale is a performing artist, choreographer, improviser, contemplative teacher and yoga instructor. She holds an MFA in Dance from The University of Colorado Boulder with an emphasis in collaborative, interdisciplinary performance. Lauren has performed nationally and internationally with Colorado based companies Michelle Ellsworth Performance, Gesel Mason Performance Projects, Helander Dance Theater, 3rd Law Dance/Theatre, David Capps/Dances, Interweave Dance Theater, Kim Olson/Sweet Edge, New York City companies Curt Haworth and Dancers, Ellis Wood Dance and Peter Sciscioli, and Seattle based Wade Madsen. Lauren has co-created and collaborated on interdisciplinary performances with Brooke McNamara, Ondine Geary, Kate Speer, Mark McCoin, Jessica Hendricks, and Amanda Leise. Her creative work and facilitation has been presented in Colorado, New York City, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Hungary. She has been on faculty at the Boulder Jazz Dance Workshop for over fifteen years and facilitates dance and movement classes at Block 1750 and local Boulder Valley schools. Lauren is also on faculty in the dance department of CU-Boulder, having taught Performance Improvisation, Jazz Fusion technique, and Looking at Dance. She is co-director of Eunice Embodiment, with Brooke McNamara, an umbrella organization engaging performance, movement education, and mentorship to unlock creative capacity and source our fundamental human aliveness. Lauren lives in Boulder, Colorado with her partner Amanda, and her two children, Lila and Finlay.

Brooke McNamara is a poet, performing artist, mother, and monk. She holds a BA in Creative Writing (Poetry) and Dance, and an MFA in Dance, and is a lover of adventure, especially in the territories of creative process, collaborative performance, meditation and evolution of culture. Her life’s work centers around asking impossible questions and discovering alive answers through whatever magnifies beauty and catalyzes truth. Brooke has danced professionally for over a decade as a member of LEVYdance (San Francisco), Malashock and Dancers (San Diego), and Kim Olson/ Sweet Edge (Denver), as well as in the works of choreographers Dan Wagoner, David Dorfman, Eddie Taketa, Gail Gilbert, Heidi Latsky and Gesel Mason. She has written poems since a young age, and received the Charles B. Palmer Prize through the Academy of American Poets. Brooke teaches Yoga on faculty at Naropa University and is ordained as a monk and empowered as a Dharma Holder in the Zen Buddhist lineage of Diane Musho Hamilton, Sensei. She is the author of Feed Your Vow // poems for falling into fullness and co-director with Lauren Beale of Eunice Embodiment, an umbrella organization engaging performance, movement education, and mentorship to ignite creative intelligence and excavate our natural human vitality. Brooke lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband, Rob, and their sons, Lundin and Orion.