This week, we are thrilled to present a screening of Furusato, the latest feature documentary by Chicago-based filmmaker and School of the Art Institute of Chicago faculty, Thorsten Trimpop. Furusato, which translates to home or hometown, is human-scale portrait of Minamisōma, a small town in Japan’s nuclear exclusion zone. The film explores how the town’s inhabitants and surrounding […]
Our Thursday March 29 screening is now SOLD OUT. We’ve added a second screening, with Thorsten Trimpop in person, on Sunday April 8 at 12:00 p.m. Thorsten Trimpop’s films explore the many ways cultural, political, and ecological histories are borne by individuals in their daily lives. His most recent feature, Furusato, exposes the devastating effects of the […]
This week, we are thrilled to present a screening of rare films by the late Chicago-based artist and School of the Art Institute of Chicago alum, Edward Owens (SAIC 1966-67). Owens, who was a native of South Side Chicago, made headway the 1960s New York City underground artistic scene with his beautifully crafted films that […]
In the mid 1960s, Edward Owens (SAIC 1966–67), a young African American artist from the South Side of Chicago, burst onto New York’s artistic underground scene with a series of strikingly beautiful films of heartbreak, queer desire, and his own family. With their layered images and flickering edits, the films show the influence of Owens’ […]
We look forward to this week’s Conversations at the Edge screening of Sol Negro (2016) and La Libertad (2017) by French-Colombian filmmaker, Laura Huertas Millán. By combining an exploration of political history with personal narrative, Huertas Millán’s films culminate into what she calls “ethnographic fictions”. For additional context and insight into Huertas Millán’s work, below is an […]
Investigating the terrain between fiction and ethnography, French-Colombian filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán has created a multifaceted body of work where political history and personal narrative meet. Her 2016 film Sol Negro is a portrait of Antonia, a Colombian opera singer, her sister, and her niece. Empathy and anger are exchanged between the women as they each reckon […]
Read More… from March 8 – Laura Huertas Millán: Ethnographic Fictions
This week, we are excited to welcome Los Angeles-based filmmaker Lee Anne Schmitt for a screening of her latest film Purge This Land (2017), made in collaboration with her partner, experimental jazz and rock musician, Jeff Parker. Through the life and legacy of the radical abolitionist John Brown, Purge This Land reflects on how the shadows of […]
Just before his execution, abolitionist John Brown wrote, “I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” Brown was hung on December 2, 1859, less than two months after he led a raid on a federal armory in an attempt to incite an armed […]
We are delighted to welcome Zach Vanes of the Video Data Bank to write for us. In this essay, Vanes discusses The Diaspora Suite, a series of films on the African diaspora by Video Data Bank artist Ephraim Asili. Screening this week at Conversations at the Edge, these films bring together archival research and Asili’s travels to chart […]
In 2011, New York-based filmmaker, DJ, and traveler Ephraim Asili began an extraordinary series of films on the African diaspora. These films—Forged Ways (2011), American Hunger (2013), Many Thousands Gone (2015), Kindah (2016), and Fluid Frontiers (2017)—bring together archival research and Asili’s travels through Brazil, Canada, Ethiopia, Ghana, Jamaica, and the United States to chart cultural connections across time and space. Fluid Frontiers, for example, explores […]
Read More… from February 22 – Ephraim Asili: The Diaspora Suite