Program 6: Here and Elsewhere

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

Extractions
Thirza Cuthand, 2019, Canada, 15m
The parallels between Canada’s industries of resource extraction and the metaphorical “mining” of indigenous women’s bodies for children in the contemporary adoption industry form the basis of Thirza Cuthand’s personal essay film. Drawing on memories of her own life and her family history, Cuthand interrogates—both incisively and compassionately—our widespread complicity in capitalism’s inescapable forces and colonialism’s insidious legacy.

Aquí y allá
Melisa Liebenthal, 2019, Argentina/France, 21m
Through digital interfaces, maps, and archival materials, Melisa Liebenthal jumps between past and present, here and there, to trace the complicated path of her family’s migration from 1930s Berlin to pre-revolutionary China to Buenos Aires, where the filmmaker was born. The material world, scanned and converted into data, becomes material again, scrambling the concepts of location, national origin, and home.

Sanfield
Kevin Jerome Everson, 2020, USA, 20m
Shot at Columbus Air Force Base in Columbus, Mississippi, Sanfield continues Kevin Jerome Everson’s extensive project of portraying the labor and expertise of Black Americans. Here, through the arcane exercises and activities of the trainees and technicians of the 14th Flying Training Wing, Everson weaves together miniature portraits of resilience and nuance within a hierarchical order that is always just offscreen.

Apiyemiyekî?
Ana Vaz, 2019, Brazil/France/Portugal/Netherlands, 27m
Through dynamic superimpositions and collisions of sound and image, Ana Vaz reanimates an archive of hundreds of drawings made by the Waimiri-Atroari people of the Brazilian Amazon. Now in the care of literacy educator and indigenous rights activist Egydio Schwade, these materials provide vital firsthand collective documentation of the violent oppression, land expropriation, and genocide of native Amazonian peoples under Brazil’s military dictatorship.

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