Opening Night Shorts Program

Q&A with João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata, Eduardo Williams, and Matt Porterfield

Followed by an Opening Night reception with food and drink open to all ticket holders! 

Premiering new works by João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata, Eduardo Williams, and Matt Porterfield. Rodrigues & Guerra da Mata’s Iec Long mixes archival footage, photographs, figurine-based reconstructions, and oral testimony in their eclectic depiction of a derelict Macao fireworks factory; Williams’s spellbinding and enigmatic I Forgot follows a group of Vietnamese teenagers as they stave off boredom by leaping from one building to the next; and Porterfield’s Take What You Can Carry is a delicate portrait of a young American woman in Berlin attempting to reconcile her need for a stable sense of identity with her itinerant lifestyle.

Iec Long
João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata, Portugal, 2014, DCP, 31m
Chinese with English subtitles
Simultaneously echoing and extending themes and techniques present in their prior collaborations (The Last Time I Saw Macao, Mahjong), João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata turn their attention toward a derelict fireworks factory in Macao and its environs. Interweaving archival footage, photographs, figurine-based reconstructions, oral testimony, slices of contemporary life, and the nearly omnipresent sound of fireworks exploding in the distance, the filmmakers have crafted another multivalent and eclectic exploration of memory, place, and the politics underlying both. 
U.S. Premiere

I Forgot / Tôi quên rồi
Eduardo Williams, France/Vietnam, 2014, DCP, 29m
Vietnamese with English subtitles
A group of Vietnamese teenagers stave off boredom by leaping from rooftop to rooftop, window to window, one building to the next. Eduardo Williams’s free, immersive way with street scenes recalls Tsai Ming-liang’s Rebels of the Neon God. But as the film narrows its focus onto the death-defying feats its youthful protagonists perform, he offers a vision as spellbinding as it is terrifying, juxtaposing all-too-familiar everydayness with the sublime beauty of the reckless act. U.S. Premiere

Take What You Can Carry
Matt Porterfield, USA/Germany, 2015, DCP, 30m
Matt Porterfield’s first work shot and set outside Baltimore is a delicate portrait of a young woman named Lilly (Hannah Gross, the star of his previous feature, I Used to Be Darker) living in Berlin, attempting to reconcile her need for a stable sense of self-identity with the fulfillment she derives from her itinerant lifestyle. Porterfield channels his gift for composition and subtle psychologizing into a distinctive take on French writer Georges Perec’s essay “Species of Spaces”—in particular, Perec’s assertion that, because places inevitably change, “space becomes a question, ceases to be self-evident… I have to conquer it.” North American Premiere