Get tickets to Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, running through Thursday!

Projections

Projections presents an international selection of film and video work that expands upon our notions of what the moving image can do and be. Drawing on a broad range of innovative modes and techniques, including experimental narratives, avant-garde poetics, crossovers into documentary and ethnographic realms, and contemporary art practices, Projections brings together a diverse offering of short, medium, and feature-length work by some of today’s most vital and groundbreaking filmmakers and artists.

Projections is curated by Dennis Lim (FSLC Director of Programming) and Aily Nash (independent curator). Shelby Shaw is Program Coordinator. Thomas Beard (FSLC Programmer at Large) and Rachael Rakes (FSLC Programmer at Large) serve as Program Advisors. Projections is sponsored by MUBI.

Purchase an All Access Pass for Projections for $99 here.

Caniba

  • Véréna Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor
  • 2017
  • USA/France/U.K.
  • 97 minutes

U.S. Premiere · Q&As with Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel

The latest by the makers of Leviathan is a harrowing engagement with the sheer presence of a man who did the unthinkable: Issei Sagawa, who became a tabloid magnet after killing and cannibalizing a woman in Paris in 1981.

Dragonfly Eyes

  • Xu Bing
  • 2017
  • China
  • 81 minutes

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Xu Bing and Zhai Yongming on 10/8 and 10/9 (at 5:15 screening only)

Chinese visual artist Xu Bing’s ambitious debut feature follows an ill-fated romance through a frightening and faceless urban environment, using only closed-circuit surveillance footage.

Electro-Pythagoras and Vivian’s Garden

  • Luke Fowler
  • 2017
  • U.K./Canada
  • 75 minutes

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Rosalind Nashashibi

A lovingly constructed biographical essay about the life and work of a highly influential, yet little-known, Canadian composer and microcomputer pioneer, paired with a portrait of Swiss-Austrian artists Vivian Suter and Elisabeth Wild, who live in a garden villa deep in the Guatemalan Highlands. Preceded by a new film by Rosalind Nashashibi.

Le fort des fous

  • Narimane Mari
  • 2017
  • France/Algeria/Greece/Germany/Qatar
  • 140 minutes

Q&A with Narimane Mari

In this shape-shifting hybrid feature, Algerian citizens’ memories of their country’s occupation are brought to life via resurrected military reports and re-enactments of France’s decades-long colonial project.

Good Luck

  • Ben Russell
  • 2017
  • France/Germany
  • 143 minutes

U.S. Premiere · Q&As with Ben Russell

Ben Russell takes us deep into the unforgiving copper mines of Serbia. When we emerge, we’re thousands of miles away, amongst an illegal band of gold miners in the Suriname jungle.

Occidental

  • Neïl Beloufa
  • 2017
  • France
  • 73 minutes

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Neïl Beloufa on 10/6

In a boho Parisian hotel, two sexually and politically ambiguous Italians romp through a succession of blatantly artificial set pieces, stoking the prejudices of staff members and fellow guests, while outside riots rage and protesters march.

Tonsler Park

  • Kevin Jerome Everson
  • 2017
  • USA
  • 80 minutes

North American Premiere · Q&A with Kevin Jerome Everson on 10/7

Election Day, 2016. Kevin Jerome Everson and his 16mm camera quietly observe a community of mostly African-American voters and volunteers at a local polling precinct in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Worldly Cave

  • Zhou Tao
  • 2017
  • China
  • 48 minutes

North American Premiere · Free and open to the public!

Monumental views of the Incheon Sea, the Balearic island of Menorca, and the Sonoran Desert serve to visualize the infinitesimal stature of the human race in Zhou Tao’s film. Showing on loop in the EBM Amphitheater.

Barbara Hammer Program

  • Barbara Hammer
  • 82 minutes

Q&A with Barbara Hammer

Experimental cinema pioneer Barbara Hammer has spent much of her five-decade career deconstructing gender and sexuality through material examinations of the celluloid image and representations of the female body onscreen. Features five films, all 16mm.

Mike Henderson Program

  • Mike Henderson
  • 75 minutes

Q&A with Mike Henderson

One of the first independent African-American artists to make inroads into experimental filmmaking in the 1960s, San Francisco's Mike Henderson makes work that thrums with a sociopolitical, humorous sensibility. Features eight films from the ’70s and ’80s, all 16mm.

Program 1: Speculative Spaces

  • 76 minutes

Q&A with Kevin Jerome Everson, Pia Borg, Jorge Jácome, Benjamin Crotty, and Jesse McLean on 10/6

Benjamin Crotty and Bertrand Dezoteux’s Division Movement to Vungtau, Jesse McLean’s Wherever You Go, There We Are, Kevin Jerome Everson’s IFO, Pia Borg’s Silica, and Jorge Jácome’s Flores.

Program 2: Present Tense

  • 73 minutes

Q&A with Peter Burr, G. Anthony Svatek, and Sky Hopinka on 10/6

Peter Burr’s Pattern Language, G. Anthony Svatek’s .TV, Belit Sağ’s disruption, Sky Hopinka’s Dislocation Blues, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Rubber Coated Steel

Program 3: The Shapes of Things

  • 78 minutes

Q&A with Alexandre Larose, Nazli Dincel, Jodie Mack, Takashi Makino, and Jonathan Schwartz on 10/7

Jonathan Schwartz’s The Crack-Up, Alexandre Larose’s Saint Bathans Repetitions, Nazli Dinçel’s Shape of a Surface, Jodie Mack’s Wasteland no. 1: Ardent, Verdant, and Takashi Makino’s On Generation and Corruption

Program 4: First Person

  • 77 minutes

Q&A with Steve Reinke on 10/7

Sara Magenheimer’s Art and Theft, Jaakko Pallasvuo’s Filter, Steve Reinke’s Semen Is the Piss of Dreams, Wojciech Bąkowski’s Year, and Charlotte Prodger’s BRIDGIT

Program 5: Urban Rhapsodies

  • 75 minutes

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

Ayo Akingbade’s Tower XYZ, Fern Silva’s Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder, Ephraim Asili’s Fluid Frontiers, Michael Robinson’s Onward Lossless Follows, and Luis López Carrasco’s Aliens

Program 6: The Forgotten

  • 79 minutes

Q&A with Marta Mateus and Zsuzsanna Kiràly following the 1pm screening on 10/9

Marta Mateus’s Barbs, Wastelands, Dane Komljen’s Fantasy Sentences, Olivia Ciummo’s Missing In-Between the Physical Proper, and Duncan Campbell’s The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy