Program 7: Code Unknown

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

Humongous!
Aya Kawazoe, 2020, Japan, 11m
A playground, a swing set, a rush of water, a sensation of drowning: in Aya Kawazoe’s elliptical Humongous!, ethereal sounds and images from childhood intrude on a young woman’s daily life, enveloping her in an ambient, oceanic blue. When the past takes the shape of an immense force, how can we escape its pull?

The End of Suffering (a proposal)
Jacqueline Lentzou, 2020, Greece, 14m
A cosmic intervention into a young woman’s panic attack offers a striking proposal: to abandon the Earthly penchant for narrative and logic and embrace a more Martian perspective—of the planet of love, not war, where dreaming is the only reality. An emotional lifeline in the form of an absurdist interplanetary dialogue, The End of Suffering (a proposal) transforms fear and distress into a new explosion of color and song.

Point and Line to Plane
Sofia Bohdanowicz, 2020, Canada, 18m
Wandering through museums in foreign cities, a woman searches for a recently departed friend through art he might have enjoyed—including the vivid, otherworldly abstractions of painters Wassily Kandinsky, whose 1926 essay lends the film its title, and Hilma af Klint. Continuing her collaborations with actress Deragh Campbell as her alter ego, Sofia Bohdanowicz uses narrative cinema and crisp 16mm cinematography to reprocess autobiographical material through a semi-diaristic mode that locates the vast inner dimensions of the everyday.

The Unseen River
Phạm Ngọc Lân, 2020, Vietnam/Laos, 23m
A confluence of two love stories: one in which a woman reunites with her former lover after 30 years; the other, where a young couple visits a monastery seeking a cure for insomnia. Between streams of past and future, the river offers an oneiric site where timelines intersect.

August 22, This Year
Graham Foy, 2020, Canada, 15m
The discovery of a specific date for the end of time prompts humanity to adopt a new ethos of understanding and accepting the world in advance of the calamity: an embrace of routine, living in the moment, a deeper appreciation of the cycles of death and birth that had seemed invisible for so long.

Watch the Q&A below.