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HOME.
I FOR INDIA.
India Sandhya Suri 70 mins
In 1965 Yash Pal Suri left India for the U.K. The first thing he does on his arrival in England is to buy 2 Super 8 cameras, 2 projectors and 2 reel to reel recorders. One set of equipment he sends to his family in India, the other he keeps for himself. For forty years he uses it to share his new life abroad with those back home - images of snow, mini skirted ladies dancing bare-legged, the first trip to an English supermarket - his taped thoughts and observations providing a unique chronicle of the eccentricities of his new English hosts. Back in India, his relatives in turn, respond with their own ‘cine-letters’ telling tales of weddings, festivals and village life.
BARE.
India Santana Issar 2006, 11 mins
Piecing together nostalgic home videos shot by her family two decades ago, coupled with current telephone conversations with various family members, Bare follows the filmmaker’s attempt to define her relationship – past, current and future – with her alcoholic father. Should she stand by him, drawing only on her memories of what a wonderful father he was? Or should she move on, as some of her relatives are urging, and build a life which excludes him?
THESE OLD FRAMES.
India Tahireh Lal 15 mins, 2008
These Old Frames explores the structure and creation of a narrative using found footage. The footage used is from Tahireh’s grandfather’s archive, films shot by him fifty years ago, home movies on 8mm film. Fragments of family history, situations, events and characters unfold on an intimate canvas but echo universal themes. Mining personal stories, common ground and interrelationships helped understand her grandfather and how he created his own identity in a free India in her infancy. The process revolved around getting to know the man that he was.
PHANTOM LIMB.
USA Jay Rosenblatt 2005, 28 mins
Phantom Limb uses the director’s personal loss as a point of departure. Whether it is a loss through death or divorce, the stages of grieving are the same. Individuals often go through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, ultimately, some kind of acceptance, in order to heal. The film is loosely structured according to these stages. Interspersed throughout this poetic documentary are interviews with a cemetery owner, a phantom limb patient and an author of a book about evidence for life after death. Phantom Limb reminds viewers that while grief is painful and isolating, it is a reminder to each of us that life is impermanent.
NEIGHBOURHOOD
BLOOD EARTH.
India, Australia Kush Bhadwar 36 mins
Word Sound Power’s second project, Blood Earth, commenced in August 2011 in the Khonda tribal village of Kucheipadar in South Orissa. In the mid-1990s, large deposits of Bauxite, the mineral from which aluminum is made, were discovered in the area. Soon after, the district became a conflict zone where a vibrant people’s movement blossomed with songs serving as a uniting force. With a mobile music studio, Word Sound Power joined local singers and musicians in Kucheipadar for a new type of collaboration. The result is a cross genre mash up, combining revolutionary songs in Oriya and Kui tribal lan-guage with dub poetry by Delhi Sultanate and electronic music composed by Chris McGuinness.
BETWEEN REGULARITY & IRREGULARITY.
Japan Masahiro Tsutani 2012, 7 mins
The filmmaker improvises and through a conversation with himself, he has a chaotic worldview evocative of the firing of nerve cells, clustering sounds of convulsiveness. Finely detailed images filled with light are synced to sound. Nature creates the glow of light and the beauty of a shape lying between regularity and irregularity. Sounds and images with a granular texture. These things grasp the depths of the brain.
BUFFALO JUGGALOS.
USA Scott Cummings 30 mins, 2014
An experimental exploration and celebration of the Juggalo subculture in Buffalo, New York. Surreal scenes shot in long and static takes of Juggalos engaged in their favorite activities, first and foremost of which - causing mayhem. Among these seemingly random acts of the everyday, preening, backyard wrestling, explosions and destruction, a tentative narrative begins to emerge.
SUN SONG.
USA Joel Wanek 2014, 15 mins
A poetic journey from the darkness of early dawn into the brightness of the midday sun in the American South. Filmed entirely on the number 16 bus route in Durham, North Carolina over the course of six months, Sun Song is a celebration of light and a meditation on leaving.
DEEP SLEEP.
MALTA/GREECE/FRANCE/PALESTINE Basma Alsharif 13 mins, 2014
A transfixing performance film in which artist Basma Alsharif shoots footage in Athens, Malta and the “post-civilization” of the Gaza Strip while under self-hypnosis. Echoing Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, Deep Sleep transcends both physical locales and states of being as Basma Alsharif shoots while under self-hypnosis, making a pan-geographic leap from the ruins of an ancient civilization embedded in a modern civilization in ruins (Athens) to the derelict buildings of anonymous sites in Malta and a site that is, in the artist’s words, “post-civilization” (the Gaza Strip).
IN DAMASCUS.
Syria Wareb Abu Quba 2014, 4 mins
This film is about Damascus, an 11,000 years old city, the most ancient & precious of cities, set to the poetry of the world famous Palestinian poet / author Mahmoud Darwish.