Program

Program 1: Past/Present/Future

Past/Present/Future presents two works dealing with frustration, loss, insecurities, and the complicated nature of friendship. In Ten Four, Allison Anne Ramirez shares a story of two cousins as they navigate their young adult lives, running into obstacles concerning love, art, and race. The lead character, an actress, confronts her desire to pursue her passion while caught in the ...

Opening Night Reception

Opening night reception - FVNMAS Film Festival 2019

Program 2: Absence is a Presence

Absence, the shape; absence, the feeling; absence in all its persistent present. While the eye’s blink or the film’s cut can obliterate a whole life, other processes can linger endlessly: a series of pans reveals just how large a space there can be between strangers, a pixel interior unfolds without ever folding back up. Sometimes cinema takes seriously ...

Program 3: Fading Histories

Fading Histories pairs two works based in mystical and political histories, strained through subjective realities. Opening with Kindness, a meditative sound work by Eduardo F. Rosario, the mood is set to let the viewer’s (or here, listener’s) mind wander, drifting to nostalgic mental planes, an experience of making the known unknown. Two Tigers, a video work by Wang, ...

Program 4: Rohrschach

Borrowing from Hermann Rorschach’s psychological test (and probing approach to abstraction) in which patients’ descriptive and interpretive looks at seemingly arbitrary ink blots are meant to unlock unconscious feelings, urges and desires, Ramsey Miller’s ambitious feature focuses on a domestic drama that evades easy answers.

Program 5: Sweven Though

Inflating, deflating, artificially inducing the feeling of falling but barely, organized gas takes form and pushes back.  i, as in compells us to imagine weightlessness (or something approximating that) through an approach that breathes the air back into oneiricism. Intergrade Hole, Linger On Your Pale Blue Eyes, Syncrisis is an atmospheric triptych filled with new languages and luminousnesses, stories and ...

Program 6: Monologues, Madness and Messy Materialisms

We open to Neeti Kerjriwal’s borrowed Mad King finding his ways to icy shores, as we contemplate displacement, performance and the soft science of time travel. A pair of entomologists discover unusual behavior as they enact their own versions of the same in Jackie Hernandez’s animation. Wanderer shares an itinerant bird wandering through a psychotropic miasma of mixed ...

Program 7: Another Planet

The three works that make up Another Planet are all—in their own sense—interstellar explorations. In Kevin McGrath’s abstract film Occulations 1, new worlds of celluloid and sound are created, destroyed, and rebuilt—at times simultaneously. Emily Okin takes us to a very literal other world in her animation, introducing an astronaut explorer who takes the viewer on a ...

Program 8: EXPO

The BFA EXPO in Film, Video, New Media, Animation, and Sound by this year’s graduating seniors explores the breadth, ingenuity, and potential of time-based media studies at SAIC. The works in this program demonstrate not only technical ability and prowess, but more importantly creativity, experimentation, and innovation within the medium. Bouncing between heartfelt, mystical, and hilarious, this program includes ...

Program 9: The Ground Loop

Opening with Katie Wood’s intricate and mesmerizing exploration of noise and place, The Ground Loop describes the ever-present hum of human experience, acknowledging emotions felt throughout time and space. In IMMINENT DOMAIN / EXHIBIT A, Katie Wood searches for commonality in place, and reminds us that after all, everything is made of dirt and electricity. In the role of ghost-hunter/...

Program 10: Yearn to Fly

This program bounces around a series of uncertainties: strangers come to town, the flighty faux-fictions of animals mythical and domestic, the intergenerational space of the imaginary, diffuse intimacies and sexualities. A fanciful longing fills Stella Yoon’s delightful look at a stingray yearning to fly. Another yearning altogether finds its way to paper and screen in Madolyn Rusen’s hilariously ...

Program 11: A Dance to End the Anthropocene

The three works presented in A Dance to End the Anthropocene have a lot to say about bodies, sound, and collective experience. Victoria Vanderpool sets the dance off with Offering, a strange and flickering beach ritual; a document of analog self-surveillance. In Leah Solomon and Jesus Hilario Reyes’ work In Hot Time, this dance gets its beat, and a death ...

Program 12: Imbodies

Weaving an intricate and embodied magical realist tale, Xitlalli Sixta Tarin moves through centuries and continents, using the experiences of sex work as a transgender Latina woman to consider exchange, colonialism, desire and interiority. Working in a poetic mode of address, Henry Cook’s associative practice centers on the intersections of biography, gender and language, while bringing deeply personal and ...

Program 13: Whose New Wave?

From the sweeping, romantic cinematography of Vanishing Days by Ke Liu, to confrontations of death and shock in Victoria Vanderpool’s There’s No Graceful Way to Move a Body, and experimentations in form and style in Yue Huang’s Wency’s New Wave, the final program of the festival, Whose New Wave? stands as a tribute to the history ...