Program 5: The Medium Is the Message

Please note: This program’s limited rental window at NYFF58 has ended. Explore the latest new releases and restorations in our Virtual Cinema.

An Arrow Pointing to a Hole
Steve Reinke, 2020, USA/Canada, 28m
In this wry confessional video, Steve Reinke appears—shirtless and lavishly tattooed—in a basement, playing archival clips and delivering arch disquisitions on his filmmaking and the ways in which images represent his engagement with the world. Mortality, desire, empathy, and horror all feature as subjects of Reinke’s idiosyncratic erudition, which mutates from sincerity to irony to provocation.

Single Copy
Hsu Che-Yu, 2019, Taiwan, 22m
When three-year-old conjoined twins were separated in Taiwan in 1979, the surgery was broadcast live on television, in just one of a series of mediations through which their bodies were represented and mythologized. Blending real and fictive iterations, filmmaker Hsu Che-Yu collaborates with the lone surviving twin, now 43, digitally scanning his body, recreating moments from his life, and revisiting his small role in a 1997 film.

Once Removed
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2019, Lebanon, 29m
An exploration of personal and historical trauma, collective memory, and supernatural transference, Once Removed guides us through a slideshow of archival images belonging to 31-year-old historian Bassel Abi Chahine as he relays the history of the Lebanese Civil War and memories from his past life as a fighter in the People’s Liberation Army and the Progressive Socialist Party militia.

Watch the Q&A below.