Currents Program 3: Free Form
59th New York Film Festival
September 24 - October 10, 2021
Featuring Justin Jinsoo Kim’s Personality Test, Aykan Safoğlu’s Dog Star Descending, Pablo Martín Weber’s Homage to the Work of Philip Henry Gosse, and Guillermo Moncayo’s (No Subject).
Personality Test
Justin Jinsoo Kim, 2021, South Korea/USA, 8m
Korean with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A walk in the woods, an encounter with an animal, a body of water. On the soundtrack, a woman’s voice responds to an internet personality quiz, while grainy, inkjet printouts—animated and collaged by the filmmaker—approximate the imagined scenes. Distortions in the reproduction of word and picture accompany the blur of memory and fantasy, past experience and desire.
Dog Star Descending
Aykan Safoğlu, 2020, Germany/Turkey, 12m
German with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Images and objects warp under the scrolling gaze of a scanner bed. Photographs, shredded and reassembled, spark reminiscences in the artist’s voiceover, which relates the intertwined stories of a family trip to the island of Imbros and of his education at a bilingual German-Turkish public school. The coiling timeline of present experience overlaps with other stories detailing the complex intersection of these two cultures, and of personal and intergenerational memories.
Homage to the Work of Philip Henry Gosse
Pablo Martín Weber, 2020, Argentina, 22m
Spanish with English subtitles
Pablo Martín Weber’s video essay forges a link between the creative abundance of computer imaging and artificial intelligence and the speculative cosmologies of Philip Henry Gosse, a 19th-century naturalist and advocate for science. Just as Gosse became obsessed with reconciling the geological record with the Biblical account of the Earth’s creation, Weber attempts to understand the digital image’s new world of infinitely malleable data.
(No Subject)
North American Premiere
Guillermo Moncayo, 2021, France/Colombia, 29m
Spanish with English subtitles
A film about a zookeeper and his renewed relationship with his estranged daughter is fragmented and interrupted by the filmmaker’s own voice, reading an email to his sister about the roots of this story in their own shared history with an absent father. Through memory, dreams, and fiction, (No Subject) probes the various ways of representing the past in order to process and break free of it.
Closed Captions available with our capti-view devices.
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