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Our second round of Poli-Sci–Cinema mirrors last week’s: A half-hour of political “briefs” sets up a long-form compilation-doc…in tonight’s case, Curtis’ recent, riveting “Bitter Lake”! Experimental collage-cum-critical essay, our fave avant-garde broadcaster takes on the tangled triangle of power relations between the US, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. Curtis manages to connect all the dots—and then some—in this spot-on demonstration of TV-archival research turned to anti-imperialist ends. Not shown outside the UK because of copyrights, this sneak peek affords a blinding light on the Endless War of our generation. OPENING are Mark Brecke’s (in person) “Lost Leader” (on Somalia), Laura Poitras’ “Death of a Prisoner” (on Guantanamo), Dana O’Keefe’s “Vladimir Putin in Deep Concentration”, and CGB’s 35mm live-mix “C.I.A.S.U.X.”

Screening will include films and videos spanning nearly a decade of other compositional musings and nostalgic speculations on points in space. See new cell phone camera generations of “XU Extract,” in celebration of it’s 11th birthday, a generationally updated and downgraded video that chases conversions of moving image formats, with each new generation containing a small part of the first.    

PROGRAM:

 

New works by Seamus Harahan, Mike Hoolboom, Helena Girón and Samuel Delgado, Gabriela Golder, Kevin J Everson, John Skoog, and Ralitsa Doncheva.

An incident on a Belfast street; the search for the last living witch on the island of Lanzarote; the extraction and movement of salt from the Atacama Desert of northern Chile to the streets of Boston; a hand-built fortified bunker in rural Sweden- this program of eight recent non-fiction films from N. Ireland, Canada, Spain, Argentina, Chile, Bulgaria, Sweden and the US take a specific location as their point of departure.

Introduction by guest programmer David Dinnell.

MR AND MRS COMPOST (2013, 1.5 min, N. Ireland)
Seamus Harahan
An incident is caught on camera on a residential street in Belfast. You might hear the shouts were it not for the song telling of a time when hands were tougher than the plough.

UNTITLED (2016, 8 min, Canada)
Mike Hoolboom
A visual haiku, bringing together two images in order to realize my oldest dream: giving birth to my father. – MH

NEITHER GOD NOR SANTA MARIA (2015, 12 min, Spain)
Helena Girón and Samuel Delgado,
A search for the last living witch in Yé, a small town on the island of Lanzarote, recuperating non-verbal histories on the verge of obsolescence and evoking an eerie, otherworldly atmosphere where oblivion looms.

TIERRA QUEMADA (2016, 8 min, Argentina/Chile)
Gabriela Golder
Tierra Quemada slowly reveals the aftermath of a recent disaster in Chile through an extraordinarily composed landscape. The fire that razed the overpopulated hills of Valparaíso, displacing more than 12,000 people and destroying nearly 3,000 homes was declared a natural disaster by the authorities, who blamed a variety of climatic factors such as dryness and the direction of the wind for fanning the flames. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the wretched living conditions of the city’s residents—living amongst piles of inflammable objects and having a poor water supply system, in addition to the difficulty for relief efforts posed by the very narrow streets—had a decisive impact on the scale of the disaster.

FUNDIR (2016, 22 min, US/Chile)
Allison Cekela
Fundir documents the processing and importation of Boston’s road salt from one of its main sources in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile to the ice-covered streets of Boston. This film, without text or voice-over, is a biography of a material––a record of extraction, migration, and physical transformation, initiated by a vast and intricate choreography of human labor and global trade.

EARS, NOSE AND THROAT (2016, 10 min, US)
Kevin Jerome Everson
An evocative, powerful documentary of a young African American woman made of two parts—a doctor’s visit which reveals she has a malformed vocal cord that will cause her to grow hoarser as time passes, and the woman’s oral history of witnessing a shooting on her block—interwoven together in image and sound.

REDUIT (REDOUBT) (2014, 14 min, Sweden)
John Skoog
Composed of a single tracking shot through a small house that was transformed into a fortified bunker over three decades in rural Sweden by Karl-Göran Persson who is portrayed through voice-over interviews with his former neighbors as a farm worker who lived alone and sought to build a refuge for his village in the event of a Soviet invasion.

BABA DANA TALKS TO THE WOLVES (2015, 10 min, Bulgaria/Canada)
Ralitsa Doncheva
An impressionistic portrait of Baba Dana, an 85 year-old Bulgarian woman who has chosen to spend her life in the mountains, away from people and cities.

Door 7pm, Screening 7:30pm