EMERGENCY OTHER CINEMA SCREENING!!
To benefit our filmmaker friend
OLIVIA WYATT
WHO LOST HER ROCKAWAY NY STUDIO IN HURRICANE SANDY!
THE WEST COAST PREMIERE OF HER
THE PIERCED HEART
AND THE MACHETE
ON HAITIAN RITUAL MUSIC
(TO BE RELEASED ON THE SUBLIME FREQUENCIES LABEL)
PLUS TWO OF HER SHORT WORKS
REFRESHMENTS AVAILABLE
TUES. NOV. 27 8PM $6-10
Participating Artists: Maksaens Denis, Guy Regis Jr, Zaka, Romel Jean-Pierre, Alex Art Louis, Jean-Guerly Pétion, Louis Ebby Angel
In Person: Zaka and Jean-Guerly Pétion
Curator: Ilona Berger
Audio visual performance following screenings by Jean-Guerly Pétion
Fragmentation and Flux is a program of work by Haitian filmmakers responding to radical shifts in their physical, political, and social landscapes. These shifts can be characterized as both collisions and collusions, from the disaster capitalism merely accelerated by the earthquake, to the syncretism that has always made up Haitian culture.
Proceeds from the screening will benefit Jakmel Ekspresyons, a grassroots, volunteer run arts organization that works on a model of solidarity to provide opportunities for training and exhibition in the arts. Jakmel Ekspresyons is welcoming to all and is a vital safe space for local LGBTQ and disabled artists. They are raising funds to pay their rent, make their building disabled accessible, and build their digital arts lab.
An American volunteer doctor working in the sea side town Jacmel, experiences catharsis In “Zaka” Chery Claudel’s genre and gender crossing 9 hopes for Haiti . Romel Jean-Pierre’s Al fé Tet Ou is an experimental requiem created in Port au Prince after the earthquake.Maksaen Denis’s Deville/ Devil follows a young group of activists in Port au Prince armed with paint, rollers, and tape who take back their city from the relentless branding by the Digicel telecommunications corporation. In Maksaen Denis’s and Guy Regis Jr’s M Le President we see a presidential candidate slowly change from what he appears to be to who he really is. With a hair brush for a mic and a cut out painted bottle for a camera, the investigative Teleghetto journalists roam the streets, tent camps and and voting booths of Port au Prince. Zaka’s La Vie Dwol takes us into a day in the life of Sedjo, a load carrier facing challenges from every conceivable direction. In Ebby Angel Louis’s sly narrative short, Miss Body Plastic, Dezilia who has grand ambitions to win a beauty contest and use the winnings to enact an environmental clean up program much to the consternation of the rest of the town who think she is delusional. Somewhere in the diaspora, young Anton tries to divine our ecological trajectory with his Russian Tarot Cards In Jean Guerly Pétion’s, A Reading.
program:
9 Hopes for Haiti, Zaka, 9.22 min
Tele Ghetto Kokorat (Street Children) 3.43 min
Al Fé tét Ou, Romel Jean-Pierre, 10.21 min
Teleghetto 1 year After 9 min
M Le President, Maksaens Denis and Guy Regis Jr, 6.00 minutes
Miss Body Plastik Angel Ebby Louis 19.35 minutes
Deville/Devil, Maksaens Denis, 6.00 minutes
Lavie Dwol (A Strange Life), Zaka, 18.28
A Reading, Jean Guerly Pétion 9.40
Fresh, innovative, and thoughtful films about…wrestling? As his website states, “Charles Fairbanks is a wrestler and filmmaker. His recent work focuses on pro wrestling in Mexico, where the artist fights as the One-Eyed Cat with a camera built into his mask.” What else do we need to say? With only a few small films under his belt Fairbanks has managed to make a big impact at festivals around the world. Tonight we welcome the filmmaker for an evening of entertaining and heartfelt short films that are extremely easy to enjoy and very hard to forget.
THE MEN (2010, 3 minutes, video)
A document of the fighter’s perspective in submission wrestling: an immersive experience between intimacy and violence.
WRESTLING WITH MY FATHER (2010, 4.5 minutes, video)
My father was a wrestler before me. You never stop being a wrestler.
PIONEERS (2009, 33 minutes, video)
A portrait of industrial agriculture and new-age spirituality, focusing on the artist’s parents, PIONEERS is also an unwitting self-portrait of a director returning to the place of his upbringing (Lexington, Nebraska), where he feels both the comforts of home and the alienating weight of the past.
IRMA (2010, 12 minutes, video)
An intimate musical portrait of Irma Gonzalez, the former world champion of women’s professional wrestling. Featuring original music written and performed by Ms. Gonzalez, Irma’s story surges with love and deceit, masculine strength, feminine charms, and an extraordinary sense of humor.
FLEXING MUSCLES (2010, 21 minutes, video)
A wrestling movie about postmodern consumption: physical work and embodied culture for the digital age. Flexing Muscles is also an immersive, participatory, experimental ethnography on Mexico’s spectacular masked wrestling – Lucha Libre – for which the filmmaker resumed his career fighting as the One-Eyed Cat (el Gato Tuerto), this time with a camera built into his mask.
Total running time: ca. 75 minutes.
About the cinéaste: Charles Fairbanks is a wrestler and filmmaker. His recent work focuses on Lucha Libre in Mexico, where the artist fights as the One-Eyed Cat (El Gato Tuerto) with a camera built into his mask. Chuck grew up in rural Nebraska and wrestled at Stanford, where he studied Art and the History of Science. While in graduate school at the University of Michigan, he worked as the wrestling coach / choreographer for the University Productions staging of Claire Luckham’s Trafford Tanzi – a feminist play written for the pub, directed by Malcolm Tulip. In 2010 Fairbanks was chosen by Werner Herzog for the first Rogue Film School, and in 2011 Anthology Film Archives hosted the retrospective screening Tender Muscles: Five Films by Charles Fairbanks. He has worked as translator (Festival Filmer à Tout Prix), as programmer and producer (Courtisane Festival), and as visiting professor of VideoArte (at Tuxtla’s UNICACH). Presently a Guggenheim Fellow and Assistant Professor of Media Arts at Antioch College, his new work is emerging through collaboration with an indigenous Zoque community in rural Chiapas.