Memory

Jake Wells, a professional tattooist, DIY drone builder, FPV (First Person View) flight hobbyist, and possibly the world’s first RC (Remote Control) Christian Minister, shares some of his stories and ideas regarding the connection between religion, drone technology and his personal struggles.

A young boy caught in an emotional web spun by adults must untangle the relationships that are deep as the sea surrounding him.

This title comprises State of Mind (2007) and Zoology (2006) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

The Cyan Garden considers the limits of giving form to the past which cannot cohere into memory. In part filmed on ‘Lucky', a discontinued b&w 16mm film reel stock intended for military aerial detection, the film revolves around a radio station that was not supposed to be detected and an Airbnb apartment ‘The Lover’, run by the artist’s friend in their hometown. Between 1969 and 1981, a Malaysian communist underground radio in exile Voice of the Malayan Revolution resided in what is now soon to be a resort.

NOMADS at the 25 DOOR is presented in three chapters and based around a series of interviews between Finley and Mickey Yates, a 22-year-old woman serving a double life sentence in the Nevada Women’s Correctional Institution for the murder of her mother. Interweaving interview excerpts with footage of the upheaval in Eastern Europe, the tape explores the memory’s construction of an ephemeral homeland when a concrete one is lost, stolen or left behind.

An animation developed from the collective experiences of a diverse group of LGBTQIA+ people to create a narrative. The result is a queer valentine having a fever dream.

The police phoned. They left a message on the machine. They said he was dead. The video unwinds through stories of sex for rent, unclaimed bodies, cigarette burns, and other monuments of life’s long run from wall to wall. Cut the Parrot is three grotesque comedies in one: the stories of Gerry, Susan, and Albert. Songs of hope and heartbreak spill from the mouths of the performers. The order of impersonation rules.

A woman raises her voice and gives a painful and endless speech that with time becomes even more overwhelming, because her words are heartbreaking and permanent impressions in the collective memory, stabbing with words an old Mexican film, a celluloid that tears apart until its disappearance.

This title is also available on the compilation What Was Always Yours and Never Lost.

After 500 years of African presence in Portugal, Black people find refuge in the utopian creation of The Island (A Ilha). A place founded in African history, a place to rest and to create futures. A place residing in the space in between fiction and reality, where the potentialities to re-write histories and think futures are brought together through the characters and their journeys. 

The sonic fabric of 2nd Person, [originally] a multi-channel video installation, is formed through an array of women’s voices orchestrated as parallel tracks in a musical composition. The speakers, all women I have intimately known at different points in my life -- my child, my mother, my best friends, students, mentors -- talk with me about aging, growing up, death, motherhood, love and loss.

In this experimental travelogue, efforts to sound human and look natural instead become artifical. The scenery is provided through photo-chromed vintage postcards, displaying not only scenic North American landscapes but also the rise of infrastructure and industry. Aspiring to look more realistic by adding color to a black and white image, the postcards are instead documents of the fantastic.

Paternal Rites is a first-person essay film that examines the secret underbelly of a contemporary Jewish American family as they grapple with the aftereffects of physical and sexual abuse on their present-day lives. It is also a groundbreaking film about the nature of trauma and memory itself: the ways in which trauma encrypts in uncanny ways; the function of speech and narrative in the process of decryption; and the role of film and filmmaking in the practice of healing.

a woman washes her hair in the kitchen sink while telling her friend about a memory of sitting in a bathtub and watching her aunt get ready to go out. 

a narrative fragment, 
a very short story,
a performance and exercise in the prosaic as mythologized through memory.
concision and the infinite that is always entwined with remembering and forgetting.

Wittnerchrome, Exacto Knife, 1.5mm Letter Punches, Hammer, Leather Puncher

This is a feminist critique of the Oedipal complex. The filmmaker recounts an abortion she had in 2009. The aborted child survives and becomes her lover. Her subject is filmed in a private act, complicating what could be an act of the solitary.

Under the spell of the alphabet, the silent figures of a past that has not been forgotten persist, a pedagogical reconstruction of a contradictory nation in transit as well as the emergence of a background color that delimits the contour and the persistence of ancient figures that have not been forgotten. This is part of the educational film cycle.

Kent Merritt waxing poetically about being one of the first four Black scholarship athletes at the University of Virginia.

This title is only available on Can You Move Like This: Black Fire.

Jennifer, an intelligent but insecure 14-year-old student at a boarding school, seduces her married dormitory counselor, a photographer who has offered to teach her about his art and winds up shooting her in the nude. She is naive, and he manipulates her into an affair that eventually is discovered. Years later, as the photographer is being investigated by the FBI, the adult woman remembers her first love as a case of herself watching the artist who watched her.

Vera is an assisted self-portrait of consumption. The subject is a woman whose passions and compulsions are of spending and loss, taste and subjectivity.

A portrait of the Bosphorous Sea.

I Dream of the Bosphorous, originally presented as a four-channel video installation, is distributed by VDB as a single-channel video.

The Diaspora Suite

A mirror reflects voiceless eyes with stories to tell, ‘stories’ about feet attempting to climb steps to "perfection"....."stories" about canvasses that are traps for a caged artist who’s paint brush needs colors that will be at peace with itself.

This title comprises Angels We (2015), Feathered Hearts (2015), and Flesh and the Stars (2018) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

...after the war.

... it's not what it used to be.

a personal album and homage, in my own way, to an influential film ... a closet-cleaning scrapbook of beloved photos and oddities ‐ and the gift of fire.

–– Ken Kobland

The passage from Germany to the United States influenced by moments lived during WWII era Germany.

To better understand what he has, filmmaker Cam Archer revisits former subjects, rephotographs them, and seeks new inspiration.