Shorts Program 1: News from Home

Q&As with Peggy Ahwesh and Dani & Sheilah ReStack Oct. 3 & 4

Distancing
Miko Revereza, USA, 2019, 10m
North American Premiere
After deciding to leave the U.S. and return to the Philippines, Miko Revereza charted his journey on film, creating superimpositions of intimate 16mm images shot in his home, at the airport, and with his family. A coda of sorts to Miko Revereza’s recent feature No Data Plan, Distancing uses personal experience to reflect on the lives of displaced persons throughout the western world.

Come Coyote
Dani and Sheilah ReStack, USA, 2019, 8m
U.S. Premiere
The second in a planned trilogy of films about desire and domesticity that began with Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (2017), Come Coyote examines issues around queer reproduction, intimacy, and motherhood. Collaborators and partners Dani and Sheilah ReStack capture in fleeting, diaristic images the tender and terrifying feelings they have around ushering new life into the world, conveyed with both humor and a powerful immediacy.

Kansas Atlas
Peggy Ahwesh, USA, 2019, 17m
World Premiere
Lebanon, Kansas, is perhaps best known as the geographic center of the U.S. Constructed of aerial footage of small towns and vistas, this transfixing, split-screen essay film pairs Peggy Ahwesh’s images of the region with text by Marianne Shaneen, which borrows from Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, and other social theorists. An unassuming landscape thus becomes an emblem of America and its unnerving blend of beauty and barely suppressed bigotry.

SaF05
Charlotte Prodger, UK, 2019, 40m
U.S. Premiere
Charlotte Prodger skips across continents, charting a course through the artist’s past via the landscapes of Scotland, Botswana, and the American West, in this third entry in the artist’s autobiographical video trilogy. Via voiceover, Prodger meditates on death and desire, intimacy and identity, and, in the figure of an unusually maned lioness, finds a personal symbol for queer desire. Prodger is the winner of the 2018 Turner Prize.