Ramon's attraction to his Mexican hometown has resulted in his building a massive new residence for his family. However, his wife, Rufina and their grown children have no interest in leaving the U.S. The building has now been transformed into a hotel. The completed construction, in the middle of cornfields, while finished for 5 years, is been frustrated by the local government’s refusal to turn on the electricity.
Do Not Circulate, an experimental short film, attempts a structuralist and materialist approach to unraveling the entrails of a collective media memory. Paced by an essay as a relentless voiceover, the film rips footage that challenges the materiality, ownership and legal boundaries of documentation.
Habit is an autobiographical documentary that follows the current history of the AIDS epidemic along dual trajectories: the efforts of South Africa’s leading AIDS activist group, the Treatment Action Campaign, struggling to gain access to AIDS drugs and the daily routine of the videomaker, a veteran AIDS activist in the U.S. who has been living with AIDS for more than ten years.
Nang has lived outside the box. Born in a Trinidadian village in 1934, she grew up poor, illegitimate, mixed-race and female, but she survived by defying convention. She left the first of five husbands when he cheated on her. With no formal training, she danced with choreographer Geoffrey Holder, who later won Tony Awards for The Wiz.
In the words of activist Dhoruba Bin Wahad, “Historical and social events are subject to almost instant censorship by those who have better access and control over the medium of communication. It is important that there exist people skilled in the use of the technological instruments of communication who will seek out the real truth behind the headlines and tell it for all to see, know, and hear.”
A wistful film on the love of homeland.
Video artist Nurit Sharett recounts her childhood memories and converses with her Palestine-born parents who grew up in the British Mandate years. They both took part in realizing the Zionist dream of establishing the State of Israel, a dream now shattered before their eyes.
Tell Me About Your Mother investigates matrilineal lineage, domesticity and creativity. Intimate and conversational, seven female artist friends and colleagues of mine—mostly boomers—recount their mother’s creative influence upon them. Additionally, each woman discusses the unique way(s) she distinguished herself from her mother.
Founded in 1997, the Arab Image Foundation preserves the legacy and collection of photographer Hashem el Madani and the Sheherazade photo studio.
Chief Waiwai recounts for his village the story of a trip he and a small entourage made to meet the Zo’é, a recently contacted group whom the Waiãpi “know” through video. Both groups speak Tupi dialects and share many cultural traditions, but the Zo’é are currently experiencing the phenomena of contact that the Waiãpi underwent 20 years ago. Waiãpi cameraman Kasiripinã illustrates the Waiwai’s account of the trip with video. The Zo’é afford their visitors the chance to re-encounter the way of life and wisdom of their ancestors.
A four-part documentary, Yãkwá shows the most important ritual of the Enauênê-Nauê Indians (Brazil). For seven months every year, the spirits are venerated with offerings of food, song, and dance so that they will protect the community. In The World Outside the Rock, the Yaõkwá festivities open with the Enauênê-Nauê preparing for the big fish-catch by making salt, canoes, and fish traps. In Dataware’s Revenge, groups of men leave the villages for two months and build dams on forest waterways to catch fish as they return from spawning.
Focusing on the mentorship of Eiko and Koma with the young artists who study and work at the Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Cambodian Stories evokes questions of tradition, innovation, and the role of the artist in fostering social change and discoveries of new ways to leap from the canvas to the stage. Eiko & Koma's collaboration hones in on these young painters' collective energy and explores the challenges they face pursuing artistic careers in a country with little opportunity.
Operation Atropos is a documentary about interrogation and POW resistance training. Director Coco Fusco worked with retired U.S. Army interrogators who subjected her group of women students to immersive simulations of POW experiences in order to show them what hostile interrogations can be like and how members of the U.S. military are taught to resist them. The group of interrogators is called Team Delta, and they regularly offer intensive courses that they call "Authentic Military Experiences" to civilians.
An incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock. Cleo Keahna recounts his experiences entering, being at, and leaving the camp and the difficulties and the reluctance in looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like, and what he hopes it will become.
Jacqueline Goss and Jenny Perlin retrace the journey of two 18th-century astronomers tasked with determining the true length of the meter. From the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel, The Measures explores the metric system’s origins during the violence and upheavals of the French Revolution. Along the way, Goss and Perlin consider the intertwining of political and personal turmoil, the failures of standardization, and the subtleties of collaboration.
"This film is closely related to my last feature-length project, Counting. I take the temperature of a neighborhood. In this case, the place is my New York. I think about street life and its threatened demise – a death ushered in as Big Money relentlessly re-makes cities in ever more categorical ways. I think with the camera, on the move, in fragments.
The daily life of the Panará village during the peanut harvest, presented by a young teacher, a woman shaman and the village chief.
Direction and photography: Paturi and Komoi Panará
Editing: Leonardo Sette and Vincent Carelli
Production: Video in the Villages
This tape documents a cultural exchange between the Parakatêjê (Gavião) of Pará and their “relatives,” the Krahô of Tocantins. Kokrenum, the charismatic chief of the Parakatêjê, organizes a visit to the Krahô, who speak the same language and maintain their traditions. The 50 young Parakatêjê he brings along participate in a ceremony consisting of singing, body painting, and preparations for the long, strenuous relay race through the savannah. The following year, the Parakatêjê return the invitation and the Krahô travel to Kokrenum’s village.
In this 2001 interview, filmmaker Jem Cohen discusses the origins of his film philosophy, and the circuitous route he has taken in his pursuit of an anti-narrative film practice outside the mainstream. Cohen sheds light on the many influences that have impacted his sentiments towards conventional film, and his desire to eschew both classical avant-garde and theatrical filmmaking in favor of a model rooted in the tradition of the 1940s New York School of street photography. Cohen also locates his aesthetic as being impacted by the 1970s hardcore and DIY scenes he was exposed to as a youth in Washington, DC.
Fifeville is a film about a neighborhood in Charlottesville, Virginia. It focuses on the details, gestures, and material life of the citizens of Fifeville as they communicate their understandings of the neighborhood’s changing landscape. Although Fifeville is set in Charlottesville, it could be Any Black Community Experiencing Gentrification, USA, 21st Century.
Co-director: Corey D.B. Walker. Crew: bh103a.
I Was There is a trilogy of experimental documentary films that explores the problem of radiation, our society's fading collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the unresolved debate between ethics and science. These series concern the immediate effects of weaponized nuclear technology, as invisible poison, on the human body.
Turn It On, Tune It In, Take It Over! is a portrait of freedom of expression at the dawn of the Electronic Age. The video was distilled from hundreds of hours of footage shot mostly in the early 1970s, using the first portable video format—the 1/2" open-reel, black-and-white, battery-operated, video Portapak. The piece recovers an almost lost and forgotten era of television history, when participation set out to conquer passivity, and when process was more important than product.
Matt Wolf returns to Joe Brainard's iconic poem I Remember (1970) in this videowork. His archival montage combines audio recordings of Brainard reading from the poem, as well as an interview with his lifelong friend and collaborator, the poet Ron Padgett. The result is an inventive biography of Joe Brainard, and an elliptical dialog about friendship, nostalgia, and the strange wonders of memory.
Public Discourse is an in-depth study of illegal installation art. The primary focus is on the painting of street signs, advertising manipulation, metal welding, postering and guerrilla art, all performed illegally. Public Discourse is about passionate artists who want their work to be seen by a wide range of people rather than be confined to the systemic structures of galleries and museums.
This piece investigates the possibilities and limits of writing a history of the Lebanese civil wars (1975-1991). The videos offer accounts of the fantastic situations that beset a number of individuals, though they do not document what happened. Rather, they explore what can be imagined, what can be said, what can be taken for granted, what can appear as rational, sayable, and thinkable about the wars.
China Town traces copper mining and production from an open pit mine in Nevada to a smelter in China, where the semi-processed ore is sent to be smelted and refined. Considering what it actually means to "be wired" and in turn, to be connected, in today's global economic system, the video follows the detailed production process that transforms raw ore into copper wire--in this case, the literal digging of a hole to China--and the generation of waste and of power that grows in both countries as byproduct.
