Author: Fara

JEANNE FINLEY’s BEYOND THE COSMODROME + STEFAN RUSU’s SOVIET ARCHITECTURE +
In the first of a co-bill on post-Soviet Central Asia, long-time San Fran cineaste Jeanne Finley interweaves a poignant group-portrait of some nine Kazakh orphans coming of age in the shadow of a nearby Cosmodrome. Herself a mother of a Kazakh adoptee, Finley conjures a complex yet lyrical sense of space and time from the majestic landscape of the Steppes, from the local traditional culture, from the imagination of rocket science, and from the teens’ own writings and performances. All followed by inspiring songs from the SF Threshold Choir! ALSO out of CCA, Moldavian-born Stefan Rusu takes up the theme of cosmonaut utopianism as well, in the North American debut of his 40 min. Return from the Future, in which we—like Stanislaw Lem’s cultured-shocked space-time voyager—re-visit the boldly Modernist “science fiction” buildings of Kyrgyzstan…to find the formerly ideologically charged edifices fallen into the shabby revisionism of the new free-market economy. Come early for the ’79 Ukranian anomaly, Teenage Cosmonauts.*$8 

Manos and Lacustre are two films that look at labor as a seed to think about ecological phenomenon, gender, labor, and liquidity.

Manos is a social surrealist film is about working class women in Uruguay and Argentina. In a dream-like language, woven by hands, ants, and liquidity, it traces manual labor and horizontal mutual aid among working class women. From the sequences of fisherwomen, manicurists, protestors, glove inspectors, clinicians, and mothers, rises a chorus of care, labor, resistance, struggle, trauma, and collective action. Manos presents time zones of labor as a seed to think about ecological phenomenon, gender, and liquidity(48 mins)

Lacustre is a documentary film that takes place at a lake known as Laguna de Zapotlán, in Jalisco, Mexico. It paints an observational portrait of landscape that is untethered from discernible chronologies and ornative arcs; instead bearing witness to the temporalities of land and labor while it directs our gaze and points towards an everyday life that faces the complexities of climate, ecological and industrial change within this lacustrine region, (2019, 48min.)  

MIKE PLANTE’s WYATT EARP: AND WITH HIM CAME THE WEST +
For our second Psycho-Geography, we turn our eyes and ears to the US Southwest, as understood by Mike Plante’s masterful feature. Wyatt Earp, one of the most famous lawmen and gamblers of the Old West, is the inspiration behind decades of Hollywood Westerns. Scripted by Plante, along with Sam Green and Tim Kirk, this detailed doc highlights the influence of Earp’s legacy on cinema and our perception of the wild, wild West. Up from LA, Plante is himself infamous as the feisty editor of the delicious and delirious Cinemad zine, that morphed into online and then podcast versions, even as Plante surfaced to serve as curator of Sundance’s experimental sidebar. The hoe-down opens with a posse of 16mm Country/Western musicians, including Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, Jim Reeves, Johnny Bond, Joe Maphis, and more.