Blog

  • With One Voice

    This screening is in conjunction with two weekends of events taking place in the ATA window by the San Francisco Buddhist Center.

    Only in recent times has it been possible to make the world’s vast spiritual teachings available to a global audience, and to create a dialogue between its most revered teachers. Now, for the first time, they appear together in one film; their comments woven together in a provocative tapestry of wisdom and promise. Call it The Absolute, God, Divine Reality, or any of the other identifiers human language has attached to it, mystics speak of one unifying thread that links and transcends all peoples and all religions.

    Created by Buddhist teacher Matthew Flickstein, this 78-minute documentary features awakened teachers address profound questions about life and love, the existence of God, the path to spiritual awakening and the way to true peace in the world. Through their words and compelling presence, they ask us to look within our own hearts and listen deeply, so we too can join the conversation and speak With One Voice.

    For more information, please visit: http://www.sfbuddhistcenter.org/program/softening.shtml#voice

  • Zeitgeist: Moving Forward

    , by director Peter Joseph, is a feature length documentary work which will present a case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society. This subject matter will transcend the issues of cultural relativism and traditional ideology and move to relate the core, empirical “life ground” attributes of human and social survival, extrapolating those immutable natural laws into a new sustainable social paradigm called a “Resource-Based Economy”.
    This film will feature experts in the fields of public health, anthropology, neurobiology, economics, energy, technology, social science and other relevant subjects which relate to social operation and culture.  The three central themes of the work are Human Behavior, Monetary Economics, and Applied Science.  Put together the work creates a model of understanding the current social paradigm; why it is critical to move out of it – coupled with a new, radical, yet practical social approach based on advanced understandings which would resolve the current social woes facing the world today.
    One of the unique attributes of this work, which separates it in style from most documentaries, is that it has a parallel dramatic/cinematic theme, with notable actors, which abstractly plays out various gestures related to the overall message of the film. The work also vigorously employs numerous 2d and 3d visual abstracts/animations, while returning to the standard, traditional documentary orientation as the foundation.

  • Rema Ghuloum: In Remembrance Of…

    “Nothing is more abstract than reality”
    (Giorgio Morandi)

    In Remembrance Of… is a meditation that shows a system based on observation, time, memory, mimesis, shared experience, and how these ideas relate to the tradition of painting.

    During a period of complete political turmoil, Italian painter Giorgio Morandi became inspired by Meta-Physical painting — a style that expressed illogical realities. Morandi studied banal objects and painted them as still life. His observation of the nuances of light on form and the treatment of his subject transformed modest still lives of bottles and pots into quirky monuments that were subjected to different times of day. The transformative attributes that he gave his subject matter and his ability to recreate his intimate experience for the viewer is what I have reflected upon in his work and has become the departure point for this installation.

    Shared experience:
    Gabriel Remon, Tiffany Canter, and I walked and observed the block that ATA resides in-between 20th and 21st st. at Valencia. That day we recorded our recollections of this experience in a painting.

    The three paintings have allowed me to represent their collective formal attributes as provisional painted constructions, which will be arranged as three dimensional still life and become new subject matter.

    Rema Ghuloum is an artist who lives and works in San Francisco. For more information, please visit: http://www.remaghuloum.com.