Join us on Thursday, September 26, 7:30pm, at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave., Denver) for night 7 of the Unseen Festival 2019!

Reading

Franklin Cruz is a queer latin poet born in Idaho, raised in Texas and polished in Denver. Born from an immigrant family he works at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science as an educator performer, is an MC and dances. A Tedx Mile High performer he has taught and performed throughout the southwest, Peru, Puerto Rico for universities and environmental leadership camps and had poetry in the Denver Art Museum. His work encompasses self love, immigration, culture, nature and more.  Franklin always aims to address intersectional liberation, confronting our complicity to privilege and oppression and the pressing lesson of specificity over simplicity. (Instagram @fcruz_unido)

Dance

Allison Blakeney has been dancing professionally for over 10 years in Colorado, Los Angeles, New York City, and are now again in Colorado. In this time, Allison has learned from and worked with artists, scholars, and choreographers from across the country such as Julia Ehrstrand, Nancy Cranbourne, Jenny Schiff, Wade Madsen, Sumi Clements, Malaya, Miguel Zarate, Karen Finley, Leslie Satin,  and André Lepecki. They hold an MA in Critical Dance Studies and Queer Theory (along with political theory, sociology, performance studies, and Critical Race Studies) from the Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, NYU, under the mentorship of Laurie Woodard, Leslie Satin, and André Lepecki. Currently they are the Co-Director of Excessive Realness, a queer dance intensive for LGBTQIA+ people and work at the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence as a Violence Prevention Educator.

Julie Rothschild. Dancer, Choreographer, Alexander Technique Teacher and Movement Educator. Currently dances and creates with Chicken Bank Collective, a performance collective of women from Mexico and the U.S., creates solo projects in collaboration with visual artists and composers, owns and operates FloorSpace Studio in Boulder, CO, and co-curates CLOSE LOOK, a solo performance series, with Meg Madorin. www.julierothschildmovement.com

Film

Double Negative – Themba Twala & Nicola Pilkington – South Africa – 2018 – 8 min

Double Negative presents a facsimile of the polar and palimpsestic Afropolis that is Johannesburg City. Inspired by the device of writing the city, Double Negative draws on apparatuses as seen in Ivan Vladislavic’s book Portrait with Keys, Dziga Vertov’s film Man with the Movie Camera or Walter Ruttmann’s film Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis. The product does not merely reflect the subject of the City, but the mode and medium of the film itself. Double Negative poetically captures the new layers and residues of the people and politics that puzzle the city together.

Themba Twala is a freelancing editor, videographer and musician based in Johannesburg. After graduating from the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg, Themba Twala was selected as one of the top 12 graduates from around the country for the M-net Magic in Motion academy, in which he shot an edited various work for urban television channels such as Trace, MTV Base, Kyknet, SABC, M-net and Mzansi Magic. He currently works as the in-house videographer and editor for C Saw Media.

Nicola Pilkington is a theatre-maker, filmmaker, installation artist and educator. Her original work includes short experimental documentary, Double Negative; the dance video and performance installation Rebirth of IQHAWE, and a one-woman show, Tracks. Her most notable participation in film projects include working with award-winning production companies, Urucu Media and Yellowbone Entertainment, on Inxeba (2017) and Sew the Winter to my Skin (2018) and Knuckle City (2019), respectively. And she directed NTC’s 2016 production of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus which toured to over 120 schools around South Africa (including Swaziland), reaching up to 9,500 learners.

The Open Window – Lynne Siefert – USA – 2017 – 7 min

Like restless waiting missiles, pillars of industrial machinery send us to desolate lunar surfaces. 

Lynne Siefert is a filmmaker originally from Seattle, WA. Shooting both on 16mm film and digitally Lynne creates experimental documentaries and short poetic world-scapes.  Lynne has exhibited nationally and internationally in festivals such as Edinburgh International Film Festival, EXiS Experimental Film and Video Festival, Antimatter Media Art, and Chicago Underground, among others. She is currently living nomadically in the United States. 

The Little Tools – Emmanuel Piton – France – 2018 – 11 min

A foundry, a morning where nothing starts. The film mixes the imaginary story of a woman, a coroness, crossing a rotting world.

Born in France in 1982, Emmanuel Piton works as a film director and professor. His personal creations are between experimental cinema and documentary. His films are made in super 8 and 16mm films. He teaches at Rennes University in cinema section. He founded Labo K, an experimental laboratory dedicated to the practice of film cinema.

Plaza Rakyat – Ong Sau Kai – Malaysia – 2018 – 3 min

Plaza Rakyat (English: People’s Plaza) is a mixed-use skyscraper complex in Kuala Lumpur, the development was put on hold in 1998 due to financial difficulties. The building remains an unfinished state since then.The short film using 12 photos to destructed and reconstructed the time and space of the view of Plaza Rakyat.

Ong Sau Kai, video editor, freelancer,  Malaysia.

Dystopian Patterns – Isabelle Nouzha – Belgium/Lebanon – 2019 – 7 min

Something happened to that city. Could be Beirut.

Isabelle Nouzha graduated from LUCA School of Arts Brussels, Belgium. She directs films where a world of childhood and horror coexist.

Violent elements often dictate her scenarios like breaking points, traces of historical violence, and marginalized social groups

Pivot – Maki Satake – Japan – 2017 – 6 min

The history of this city Tomakomai has been led by the development of factories. The chimney is the pivot around which the city revolves.

Born in Hokkaido, Japan in 1980. Lives in Sapporo, Japan. Graduated from The Hokkaido University of Education, Sapporo. Chiefly, making animation that uses the photograph. I’m searching for the world in the interstice of the record and the memories. In 2011, Invited screening in Paris by French distribution group CINEDOC PARIS FILMS COOP. In 2016, a workshop lecturer for photography animation at the Dresden International Short Film Festival. In 2018, a Jury member of The 2 Minutes Short Film Award at 31.Stuttgarter Filmwinter.

Taking-Away – Eginhartz Kanter – Austria/Japan – 2018 – 7 min

Taking-Away shows surprisingly quiet streets in Tokyo at night. The nocturnal peace is interrupted by an unauthorized intervention. A strange object shifts the appearance of the uncanny and seemingly apocalyptic nightly streets. It disturbs the peaceful order of the well-kept neighbourhood. 

Eginhartz Kanter (AT/DE) works with film, video and photography, mainly in the context of public space. In his artistic approach he questions the boundaries and conventions of everyday life and living environments. His (sub)urban interventions negotiate aspects of the public and often have a direct relation to architecture. He participates in international exhibitions and showed his artworks in Gallery 5020 Salzburg, Peresvetov Pereulok Gallery Moscow, S.Y.P. Artspace Tokyo and the 18^thWroclaw Media Art Biennale. 

Being and Becoming – Maite Abella – Netherlands – 2019 – 9 min

“When I hear “There is no failure”, there are only lessons! I feel uneasy. When I was seventeen, a fortune teller told me: “ You will enter the world of art through the main door”. 

She was right, I work in one of the most admired museums in the world. Just that my job is not exactly what I expected.” – MA

Maite Abella, born in Lleida (Spain) is an artist based in Amsterdam. She got her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at The Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. 

Before, she had obtained her Bachelor of Urban Geography at the Universitat de Barcelona. In her work she dedicates herself to drawing, painting and experimental short films.

Her short films have been at several festivals, to highlight Forum Expanded at Berlinale, Rotterdam Film Festival, Strange Beauty Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin.

Initiation – Iwona Pasinska – Poland – 18 min

Initiation is the musical and cinematic experiment directed by Iwona Pasi?ska, with the hypnotizing music composed by Jacek Sienkiewicz and Andrzej Grabowski’s ascetic scenography, in which each prop has its own significance. The sophisticated visual form, supersaturated with the subtle play of the artificial light and the evening darkness, entwines with the widely understood physical expression of dance artists from the Polish Dance Theatre. Each of the black and white frames creating this short – feature film is the separate, pictorial composition which could exist as an independent picture or artistic photography. They pan out into the dreamlike story, in which the viewer’s perception is strongly influenced – apart from the movement of the dancers – by the motion of the movie camera, cyclically returning to the same places. Looking into the human habitats, toxic relationships and untamed fears we can see that demons, with whom the characters struggle often exemplify social problems described on the front pages of newspapers. One of the figures comes to know human trauma, experiencing subsequent life scenes in the space of imagination. How does his ‘initiation’ – his cover attempt to enter into reality – end?

Iwona Pasinska is a choreographer, movement dramatist, theatre theorist, artistic director of Movements Factory and co-founder of the Movements Factory Foundation. She graduated from the F. Parnell Ballet School in ?ód?. In 1997 Pasi?ska became the principal dancer of the Polish Dance Theatre (PTT) – Pozna? Ballet. Since 2010 she has been collaborating as choreographer or movement dramaturge with dramatic theatres, operas and alternative theatres. She holds a degree in theatre theory from the A.Mickiewicz University in Pozna?, where she also did her PhD, focusing on the experience of the body in contemporary theatre from the perspective of dance theatre. In 2016 she has become the Director of the Polish Dance Theatre.

The Divine Way – Ilaria Di Carlo – Germany – 2018 – 15 min

Loosely based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, The Divine Way takes viewers along on the protagonist’s epic descent through an endless labyrinth of staircases. As the woman journeys deeper, the staircases mutate and she is trapped and pulled into their dangerous landscape, conducting us through more than fifty magnificent locations.

Ilaria Di Carlo is a visual artist working in the fields of experimental film, video art and performance. She graduated from the Fine Arts Academy in Rome and from the prestigious Central Saint Martin’s in London. She subsequently studied Film at the SAE Institute of Berlin. Her films have been screened and awarded internationally. She lives and works in Berlin.