Program 3: Trips to the Interior

Q&A with Sky Hopinka, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, and Laura Huertas Millán on October 7

Fainting Spells by Sky Hopinka
U.S. Premiere, USA, 2018, 11m
Sky Hopinka looks to native lore to take up the legend of the Xąwįska, or Indian Pipe Plant, a root used by the Ho-Chunk tribe to revive people who have fainted. Framed as an epistolary correspondence between imagined subjects, the film braids apocalyptic imagery and elegantly scrolling text into a hypnotic consideration of myth and memory.

Chooka by Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko
U.S. Premiere, Iran/Canada, 2018, 21m
Shot in the Gilan Province of northern Iran, a region that saw the influx of hundreds of North American engineers commissioned to build a paper factory in 1973, Chooka meditates on the lingering effects of the era’s industrial expansion. Guided by the recollections of those whose roots stretch back to before the Revolution, the film creates illuminating connections between archival footage, new images of the factory ruins, and excerpts from a pair of contemporaneous films shot in the same area by Bahram Beyzaie.

Ada Kaleh by Helena Wittmann
U.S. Premiere, Germany, 2018, 14m
This precisely calibrated domestic diorama alights upon the imagined futures of a group of anonymous young adults. In Helena Wittmann’s warmly rendered feat of formalist filmmaking, questions of time and the realities of space convene in languid interior pans, incremental shifts in light, and the private reflections of her subjects.

The Labyrinth / El Laberinto by Laura Huertas Millán
U.S. Premiere, Colombia/France, 2018, 21m
A notorious drug lord leads the viewer on a tour of the bloodstained Colombian jungle and a most curious architectural landmark: an exact replica of the villa from ’80s soap opera Dynasty. Seamlessly intercutting enigmatic clips from the show with original 16mm landscape imagery, this revealing ethnographic study bridges an uncanny pop-historical divide.