Landscapes and Cityscapes,
and the Evolving Worlds In-Between
3:30 pm - 5:00 pm Mountainlair Gluck Theater
Resonance
Raquel Salvatella de Prada, Merrill Shatzman & Jonathan Henderson
Year: 2022
Run Time: 10:30
Country: USA
Inspired by the aridest landscapes in southern Utah, those of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and the many contrasts these landscapes present, this experimental film, looks at the sacred qualities and fragility of our environment. It depicts geologic space with a focus on how wind, water and human activity carve, hone and alter its surface.
Bio: Raquel Salvatella de Prada is a computer artist and educator. She practices graphic design, motion graphics, and video design. Her work often focuses on integrating computer animation and motion design with different traditional art forms by collaborating with artists of diverse backgrounds such as printmaking, painting, installation art, poetry, puppetry, theater, and musical performance. She finds that the combination of her digital medium with physical visual media can be a powerful way to communicate social issues.
Roger’s Eye
Daniele Grosso
Year: 2021
Run Time: 4:30
Country: Portugal
French writer Roger Caillois was surprised by the Second World War in Argentina and was forced to stay there. He visited Patagonia in 1942 where he began to develop a passion for the mineral world. In 1970 he wrote The Writing of Stones, a philosophical commentary on his own collection of stones. Throughout his life he maintained a correspondence with Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo. The film reimagines this story and portrays it evocatively through digital collages representing a fantastic Patagonia and a voiceover which is an imaginary letter from Caillois to Ocampo. At the same time the film conveys some of the thoughts and feelings of the filmmaker during his stay in the countryside of Portugal, when it was conceived.
Bio: Daniele Grosso is an Italian filmmaker based in Lisbon. He works mainly in documentary, focusing on social, historical and environmental themes but he also directed several experimental short films. He holds a Master Degree in Arts and Literature, with a thesis in History of Cinema Animation, and a Master Course in Video Post-Production.
Pushing through
Geneviève Bélanger Genest
Year: 2022
Run Time:
Country: Canada
In the stark Québec winter, ice floes cover the St. Lawrence River. Otherworldly, determined silhouettes appear, and we fall into the cadence of ice canoes rowing into an unfathomable landscape. Producing sensations as extreme as the surroundings, the voyage immerses us in the elements and confounds us with a close focus on astonishing, minute details. The film explores how our interior and exterior landscapes shape and define us, bringing humans together in inscrutable surroundings. A synesthetic journey that mirrors the trials our bodies push through.
Bio: Geneviève Bélanger Genest is a filmmaker based in Saguenay, Quebec, whose work creates immersive experiences that explore the relationship between humans and the territories they inhabit. She has directed two shorts, “Devenir abeille” (Becoming a Bee, 2011), and “Que nos corps traversent” (Pushing Through, 2022). Recent work combines film and digital imagery. Geneviève holds a diploma in Digital Art and works as an assistant director.
Reservoir (Seven fragments)
John Winn
Year: 2022
Run Time: 8:59
Country: USA
A study of an unnatural American environment: an artificial reservoir. The cinematic image and the landscape it captures: damaged things adrift in an ecology of discord. Two forms of picturing or envisioning nature interact: that of the pastoral, the romantic, the picturesque, and that of the industrial, the topographic, the arbitrary.
Bio: John Winn (1993, USA) is a filmmaker, writer, and occasional curator based in Durham, North Carolina. His films are meditations on everyday life, on the images that permeate it, and on the withering landscapes within which such life unfolds. John has screened his work at numerous festivals, galleries, and microcinemas, including Transient Visions Film Festival, San Diego Underground Film Festival, and Revelation Perth International Film Festival. John also writes on the environmental history of cinema in the American Southwest, and is currently pursuing a PhD in the Literature Program at Duke University. He has published in Film International, four by three magazine, and New Review for Film and Television Studies. As a curator, John works as the programming assistant for Screen/Society in Durham, NC. He also curates for the Duke Experimental Film Society, a graduate student-run cineclub, and has served on the screening committee for the Cosmic Rays Film Festival.
the Lost garden
Synopsis: This video focuses on the tension between the natural and built environments. The footage, while tethered to physical reality, is aestheticized through video effects. As a result, the familiar becomes strange. Flora and fauna are suspended in an altered state, one of non-existence. The architectural, distilled to form and pattern, is removed from function. Failed stewardship has transformed the planet that was once an Eden.
Jeremy Newman
Year:
Run Time: 8:00
Country: USA
Central park/new york
Nick Twardus
Year: 2022
Run Time: 3:20
Country: USA
This film explores the intersection between the natural and mechanical in Central Park, Manhattan and the surrounding New York City area. Progressing through these elements creates a meditation on the forms of a city in the vein of 20th century city symphonies and landscape films. HD digital.
Bio: My films, which have shown internationally at festivals, are focused on the natural landscape. Currently, I write, direct, produce, shoot and edit experimental films that incorporate analog and digital imagery. I teach film production and film studies courses at the Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
UnNamed road
Songkai Zhou
Year: 2022
The film Unnamed Road takes the road and fate as its theme, and divides the chapters with earth, water, fire and wind. The road is the road under each person's feet. The road is always in the process of becoming, changing and unfolding. The road has not yet reached the end, so it is called unnamed. In the film, the four elements of earth, water, fire and wind express the various encounters of individual life in the world. At the same time, these four things are also in the context of the contemporary digital age, forcing human beings to search for the connection between themselves and nature.
Bio: Songkai Zhou was born in Henan, China in 1992. He studied filmmaking, literature and philosophy of art at China Academy of Art and Royal College of Art. His works are about personal existence or public life, and relationships between natural elements and human beings or historical memory in the contemporary technology era. His works span a diverse range of artistic media such as poetry, painting, film, photography and other artistic mediums. In his film works, he utilises non-logical implicit narrative to explore the visual poetics of cinematography in the flow of time.
Run Time: 7:59
Country: United Kingdom
Milwaukee Night and Day
Dick Blau
Year: 2020
Run Time: 18:21
Country: USA
Synopsis: A City Symphony. The distillation of ten years of looking at one square block in the the very heart Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A film made from stills that challenges them to move. Beauty, pathos, and turmoil, all in the course of a Joycean day.
Bio: Name and Surname : Serkan AKTAŞ, Birth Date : 04.12.1989, Place of Birth : Istanbul/ Turkey. FILMOGRAPHY: Mirrorty (2017) (Short Film), Resurrection under the Ocean (2021) (Short Film), The Librarian (2022) (Short Film), The Death Ox (2022) (Short Film), Lucky Coin ! (2022) (Short Film).
Moonlight, Milorganite,
and You
Natasha Woods
Year: 2022
Run Time: 9:45
Country: USA
SThis film meditates on Milwaukee’s socialist history, specifically the city’s “Sewer Socialists,” who led efforts to improve public health in the early nineteenth-century. Offering a close look inside the facilities and innerworkings of invisible infrastructure systems, the film outlines the journey of wastewater through sewer pipes, water reclamation facilities, and the Milorganite plant.
Milorganite, a portmanteau for Milwaukee Organic Nitrogen, is a fertilizer created from the by-product of the sewage sludge produced by the citizens of the city of Milwaukee,Wisconsin. Located on Jones Island, Milwaukee Municipal Sewerage District (MMSD) has been at the forefront of sewage sludge recycling since the 1910s because of the legacy of the city’s “Sewer Socialists.” The production of Milorganite diverts billions of pounds of waste from landfills to a nitrogen-rich fertilizer that is still used in gardens and golf courses across the country today.
Swalesong
Nick Jordan, Jacob Cartwright
Year: 2021
Run Time: 11:05
Country: United Kingdom
A sonic and visual exploration of a remote river valley in England’s North Yorkshire Dales. The documentary layers together place, people, history and nature, with the River Swale as a leitmotif. The film’s score was created by musician Sam McLoughlin (samandtheplants), who recorded his river harp in the current of the river. Swalesong combines location shots with archival material, including photographs by pioneering wildlife photographers the Kearton Brothers, along with historic audio interviews with local people who remember Neddy Dick, who was infamous for his musical instruments made from nature. Commissioned by Chrysalis Arts Development for 'Unfolding Origins' artist residency programme 2020-2022
Bio: Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan's collaborative practice is cross-disciplinary, encompassing film, drawing, painting, photography, objects, publications and events. The artists’ documentary films present oblique, layered narratives that explore social, cultural and natural histories.
Cartwright and Jordan's award-winning films have been screened and exhibited internationally, including Innsbruck International Biennale (Austria); BFI London Film Festival (UK); Whitstable Biennale (UK); Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival (France); Sheffield Doc/Fest (UK); São Paulo International Short Film Festival (Brazil); Kassel Dokfest (Germany); Kurtzfilmtage Winterthur (Switzerland); Documenta Madrid (Spain). They are based in Manchester, UK
pressure and relief
Kent Tate
Year: 2021
Run Time: 8:00
Country: Canada
Pressure & Release is a multi-layered story drawn from memories of my paradoxical sleep, a sub-conscious response to the recognition that we are in the midst of the "Anthropocene period" and the "Holocene extinction." Certain ideologies combined with well ingrained cultural practices are driving this rapid transformation into something we may, or may not yet imagine as this era’s lasting presence unfolds.
Bio: Kent Tate is an award winning Canadian artist/filmmaker whose work explores the dichotomy between tranquility and activity in our natural and manufactured worlds. Time, motion and stillness are intertwined through Tate's work to act like a fulcrum upon which the environmental, social and philosophical aspects of his projects are held in dynamic balance. Tate has been exhibited/screened internationally at film/new media festivals, symposiums, juried screenings/exhibitions, and solo gallery exhibitions/tours.
