Shorts Program 5: On the Move

Black Bus Stop
Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold, USA, 2019, 9m
U.S. Premiere
Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold resurrect an informal meeting ground for black students at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in the 1980s and ’90s in this ecstatic tribute. In a collaboration with members of the student body, the filmmakers stage a nocturnal celebration of this sacred and historic space through an exuberant display of choreographed song and dance.

Amusement Ride
Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2019, 16mm, 6m
U.S. Premiere
Tomonari Nishikawa’s latest visual sleight of hand, shot on 16mm with a telephoto lens, observes the inner workings of a Ferris wheel, locating intricate structural patterns and crosscurrents of movement from the inside of a swinging passenger car.

(tourism studies)
Joshua Gen Solondz, USA, 2019, 35mm, 7m
A selection of still and moving images captured in over a half-dozen locations around the globe have been transformed into a bracing, rapidly unfolding cinematic travelogue in Joshua Gen Solondz’s lyrical film, which finds unexpected parallels and echoes among its far-flung locales.

Signal 8
Simon Liu, Hong Kong/UK/USA, 2019, 14m
World Premiere
Simon Liu’s eerie, entrancing portrait of contemporary Hong Kong tracks a series of strange disruptions to the city’s urban infrastructure. Deceptively tranquil 16mm images of everyday life are accompanied by muffled music cues, ominous radio transmissions, and intimations of an impending hazardous event that may never arrive.

Pelourinho: They Don’t Really Care About Us
Akosua Adoma Owusu, Ghana, 2019, 9m
In 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote to the U.S. Embassy of Brazil concerning the country’s discriminatory attitude toward black immigrants. Akosua Adoma Owusu conveys this correspondence through montage, juxtaposing voiceover readings of the letters, sumptuous Super-8 footage shot on the streets of Pelourinho, and interpolated images from Spike Lee’s controversial music video for Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Really Care About Us,” resulting in a film that swiftly traces nearly a century of social unrest.

COLOR-BLIND
Ben Russell, France, 2019, 30m
U.S. Premiere
Ben Russell’s visually eclectic Super 16mm work of psychedelic ethnography surveys the history of colonialism in French Polynesia through present-day forms of ritualized dance, body art, and woodworking. Shot between Brittany and the Marquesas Islands, COLOR-BLIND is guided by the spirit of post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, whose words and art appear throughout.