T H E  U N S E E N  F E S T I V A L

Opening Night

Join us on Thursday, September 21, 7:30pm for Program 1 and opening night of the Unseen Festival. We will screen work by João Vieira Torres, Carolina Charry Quintero, and Blair McClendon (in attendance), with a reading curated by Joan Dickinson, featuring Sarah Boyer and Clark Davis. Music by DJ Musa Starseed.

Ghost Children, by João Vieira Torres. 2016. 16min.

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.

João Vieira Torres is a filmmaker, artist, and actor born in Recife, Brazil. He studied Visual Arts at Miami Dade Community College and photography at the University of Paris 8. He attended Le Fresnoy in 2010. His work has been shown at film festivals in New York, Edinburgh, and Marseille, and in museums such as Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and Anthology Film Archives in New York. He currently lives and works in both Brazil and France.

BLUA, by Carolina Charry Quintero. 2016. 16 mm. 22 min.

BLUA, by Carolina Charry Quintero, combines rich high-contrast 16mm images with crisp digital color scenes. The film creates a distinctive entry point into the relationship between human and animal existence. Unfolding like a tapestry, its montage complicates the relationship between observation and fiction. Reaching equally for beauty and strangeness, BLUA is an assertion of the uncanny, a cine-poetic philosophical speculation.

Carolina Charry Quintero is an experimental filmmaker from Cali, Colombia. She holds an MFA in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts, and a BA in Philosophy from Universidad del Valle in Cali. Her work is concerned with the experience of the unmeasurable, and the idea of the limit of comprehension. She is interested in the human-animal border as a place of thought, and as a place from which to revise the grand definitions of what is human, as well as the ethical, political and epistemological issues that are born at this border. Her work has screened at Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Slamdance, Chicago Underground, and REDCAT in Los Angeles. She was awarded the Michelle Lund Calarts/Earthfire Institute Residency. She been the recipient of the Jack Oakie Foundation Grant, and the Emerging Artists Creative Grant from Colombia’s Ministry of Culture. She lives in Cali, Colombia.

America for Americans, by Blair McClendon. 2017. 35 min.

America for Americans, by Blair McClendon, 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.

Blair Seab McClendon is an artist and editor who is from San Diego, but is currently living in New York City. His most recent work, America for Americans, is a found footage essay film on black joy and besiegement. The film won a Jury Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. His work as an editor has screened at Sundance, SXSW, DOC NYC, and Cannes.

Readers and Reading Curator

Clark Davis is a Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English and Literary Arts and the University of Denver. He is the author of three books on American authors, the most recent of which is a biography of novelist and short story writer WilliamGoyen.

Sarah Boyer is a poet. She attended UMASS Poets and Writers for her MFA and the University of Denver for her PhD in poetry. Her first book is called howard and it is available from sunnyoutside press in upstate New York.

Joan Dickinson is an artist, writer, and priestess working in small and big forms:visual and performance art, writing and photography, farming and environmental restoration, astrology and ritual, and teaching. Her work has been presented widely in America, the UK, and in Europe. Under the HEX imprint, Dickinson has published thirteen books on such topics as herbal lore and psychedelia, European witch burnings; tuning the human pulse; lake ringing; and, in collaboration with 18 other artists and writers, the interconnection of the world’s waterways. She holds a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing and has taught for 25+ years.

Music

Musa Starseed is an award winning filmmaker, artist, musician, dancer, youth mentor, and community leader living in Boulder, Colorado. Musa has dedicated the trajectory of his artistic gifts and talents to uplift, inspire, and motivate his community towards values such as, empowerment, health, expression, cultural competency, and integrity. He is a world traveler and his claim to fame is being the first to make a documentary about the history of Hiphop in Cuba called “Soulz Of Azucar” Musa Starseed has currently been accepted to a graduate program at the University of Colorado at Boulder and he intends to write a book of empowering stories, poems, and principles for young black youth.