Projections Program 9: Event Horizons

Há Terra!
Ana Vaz, Brazil/France, 2016, DCP, 13m
U.S. Premiere
The camera jerks quickly across a field in the Brazilian Sertão, homing in on a young Maroon woman crouching in the tall grass. A hand feels around in the brush, caressing the earth. From these two images, Ana Vaz’s film proceeds on tracks that neither fully merge nor completely diverge, expressing the incommensurability of filmmaker and subject.

Kindah
Ephraim Asili, USA/Jamaica, 2016, DCP, 12m
World Premiere
Shot between the Maroon village of Accompong, Jamaica, and Hudson, New York, the alternately sparse and exultantly polyrhythmic Kindah is part of a series of films examining the filmmaker’s relationship to the African diaspora. The title alludes to the mango tree that symbolizes common kinship in the Jamaican Maroon culture.

In Titan’s Goblet
Peter Hutton, USA, 1991, 16mm, 9m
Titled after a painting by Thomas Cole, this work of Hudson River School landscape filmmaking by the late Peter Hutton is a study of ships and smoke on the water.

An Aviation Field / Um Campo de Aviação
Joana Pimenta, Portugal/USA/Brazil, 2016, DCP, 13m
U.S. Premiere
Using warm, darkly saturated 16mm images shot on the volcanic island of Fogo, Cape Verde, and in modernist Brasilia, and sounds that range between trebly crackle and aquatic gurgle, Pimenta constructs a surreal and mythical landscape from the remnants of Portuguese colonialism.

Electrical Gaza
Rosalind Nashashibi, UK, 2015, digital projection, 18m
Commissioned by London’s Imperial War Museum, Electrical Gaza combines vérité documentary scenes of public life in Gaza shot by Nashashibi in 2014, portraits of her crew, and uncanny, painterly computer animations modeled from the footage, rendering it unreal—as the Israeli government would claim and Palestinians would like to make it.

Event Horizon
Guillermo Moncayo, France, 2015, DCP, 16m
A story modeled on 19th-century ethnography and colonialist travel literature unfolds in titles written in a mythological register. Lush images and sounds accrue a level of detail that refuses knowledge and courts being.