Program 1: Place Revisited

Q&A with James Edmunds, Janie Geiser, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Nazli Dinçel, and Katherin McInnis on October 5

A Return by James Edmonds
Germany, 2018, 16mm, 6m
James Edmonds’s intricately constructed 16mm montage film brings two disparate settings—Berlin and a village in the South of England—into the same cinematic headspace. Locating likenesses between soft light and overcast coasts, the comfort of sun-dappled interiors and the warmth of a tree-lined field, Edmonds both summons natural juxtapositions and creates unexpected harmony through deft superimpositions.

Valeria Street by Janie Geiser
North American Premiere, USA, 2018, 11m
Initiated by an unearthed photograph of her father and his colleagues around a conference table in a generic mid-century office, Geiser’s evocative collage film charts a personal-political path through the recesses of America’s industrial ecosystem. Using animation and re-photography effects, Geiser presents an array of images (geometric diagrams, blueprints, live-action landscape shots) in a prismatic reflection on power structures in the workplace.

Mahogany Too by Akosua Adoma Owusu
USA/Ghana, 2018, 3m
This vibrant, Nollywood-inspired spin on the 1975 Motown-produced movie Mahogany, features actress Esosa E vogueing through the city streets under the sign of Diana Ross’s iconic fashionista Tracy Chambers. Shot on warm 16mm, Akosua Adoma Owusu’s contemporary gloss on a beloved character celebrates her ever-progressive sense of style and self-assurance.

Between Relating and Use by Nazli Dinçel
Argentina/USA, 2018, 16mm, 9m
In this ethical examination of ethnographic art, Dinçel dissects the thin line separating unconscious fantasy from cultural appropriation. Pairing the words of scholars Laura Marks and D.W. Winnicott with sensual 16mm images of the human body in direct contact with the natural environment, the film slowly turns the notion of fetishization into a tool for reflexive thought.

Trees Down Here by Ben Rivers
U.S. Premiere, UK, 2018, 35mm, 14m
Ben Rivers investigates the oak-paneled buildings and birch-lined grounds of Cowan’s Court at Churchill College in this serene architectural study. His rhythmic montage—comprising site plans and construction models, images of animals and architecture—sketches an expansive view of a solitary environment.

Eye of a Needle by Katherin McInnis
World Premiere, USA, 2018, 5m
Archival stills of the Great Depression come shuddering to life in Katherin McInnis’s work of photographic montage. Rapidly alternating, minutely offset images of young farm laborers in the American South create the illusion of movement around a cut-out focal point, matched by a scratch beat built on chasms of negative space.

Wishing Well by Sylvia Schedelbauer
Germany, 2018, 13m
Sylvia Schedelbauer’s previously monochrome world comes bursting forth in full color in this hypnotic trip through the landscape of memory and adolescence, which conjoins original HD imagery and 16mm found footage of an anonymous young boy in the throes of discovery. Through superimpositions and flicker effects, the film traces a simultaneously interior and exterior path across disparate temporalities that nonetheless retains a bracing immediacy.