Projections Program 11

The Occidental Hotel
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2014, HDCAM, 26m
“The Occidental Hotel is a “city” film—I was inspired to emulate the Surrealists’ sense of wandering, of flaneury, of the way a hotel and its rooms is a temporary resting place inhabited by many many people, a shared public/private space. I am interested in a creative geography of the city I’ve constructed. For instance, the front of the hotel is from Berlin, its interior was photographed in Copenhagen. The film offers the elliptical “scent” of espionage films (largely because of its Berlin locations) and offers that genre’s lubricating sense of voyeurism, danger, and sexuality. My source materials are Mexican comic-book figures, and these urban photos I snapped on my honeymoon with my wife Janie Geiser in the summer of 1996.” —Lewis Klahr

El Futuro
Luis Lopez Carrasco, Spain, 2013, DCP, 67m
“El Futuro tries to critically look at the values and customs that Spanish society acquired stunningly fast at the beginning of the ’80s. These were values, behaviors, and new ways of living that I have also shared and lived. One of the people I interviewed while researching this period told me: “With the socialist victory of 1982, we thought that everything had been achieved when in reality, everything was still left to be done.” It was as if the Spanish middle class had mixed up democracy and consumerism. The main idea of the film is to reflect how young people in the ’80s, ’90s, and XXI Century share the same social codes about leisure, sexual relationships, political commitment, and labor issues. As well as how in 1982 we can find the seed of the economic crisis we are currently living 30 years later.” —Luis Lopez Carrasco