Program 5: Urban Rhapsodies

Q&A with Ayo Akingbade, Fern Silva, Ephraim Asili, and Michael Robinson following the screening on 10/8

Tower XYZ
Ayo Akingbade, U.K., 2016, 3m
U.S. Premiere
A visual guide to the under-acknowledged multiethnicity of the London borough Hackney, Tower XYZ skips to the beat of the city’s vibrant youth culture and communal spirit, offering up a rebel cry for a new generation: “Let’s get rid of the ghetto!”

Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder
Fern Silva, USA, 2017, 16mm, 9m
North American Premiere
Through softly textured 16mm photography and regional iconography, Silva offers a modernist reflection on two of upstate New York’s most storied 19th century touchstones—the landscape painters of the Hudson River School and the legend of Rip Van Winkle—nodding to a few musical heroes along the way.

Fluid Frontiers
Ephraim Asili, USA, 2017, 23m
Visually tracing the 19th-century Windsor-Detroit slave pass, with on-site readings of notable texts by many of Motor City’s most storied African-American poets, Asili deftly captures the city not simply as a repository of memory but as a landscape of living history.

Onward Lossless Follows
Michael Robinson, USA, 2017, 17m
U.S. Premiere
Robinson’s latest work of cinematic excavation uncovers the darkness inherent even in life’s most banal images and encounters. It’s an unsettling study in duality—between the earthbound and the cosmic, the found and forgotten, the rural and domestic, the verbal and written.

Aliens
Luis López Carrasco, Spain, 2017, 23m
U.S. Premiere
In this short nonfiction portrait, Tesa Arranz, one-time leader of pioneering Spanish new wave band Zombies, reminisces about a lifetime of sexual and political conquests, while dozens of her recent paintings are examined by Carrasco’s inquisitive camera.