Currents Program 7: New Sensations

May June July
North American Premiere
Kevin Jerome Everson, 2021, USA, 8m
Kinetic and fragmentary, May June July is a document of the summer of 2020, distilled through Kevin Jerome Everson’s distinctively contrapuntal audiovisual assemblage. It is also a dance film: the camera enacts balletic encounters, first with a roller-skater in the street against a sonic background of protest chants and drumming, then among flowers and fireflies against the inky black of night.

Grandma’s Scissors
U.S. Premiere
Erica Sheu, 2021, Taiwan/USA, 6m
Guided by the words of her grandmother, the filmmaker explores the synesthetic properties of memory. Images give way to haptic experience via a range of textures—of sea, celluloid, paper, and pencil traces, of raindrops drifting in and out of focus—linking the arts of textiles and montage into a shared artisanal tradition.

Blind Body
U.S. Premiere
Allison Chhorn, 2021, Australia, 15m
Khmer with English subtitles
As abstract shapes come into focus, dim memories surface. With Blind Body, Allison Chhorn offers an impressionistic portrait of her grandmother Kim Nay, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. Partially blind, Kim spends her days in a mostly sonic and textural world, in which the sound of rain, the voices of Khmer radio, and distant birdsong summon the sensations of a lost homeland.

If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever)
North American Premiere
Hope Strickland, 2021, UK, 8m
Wake and soil, skin and voice: Hope Strickland’s film locates a legacy of slavery and colonial exploitation beneath the archive’s official chronicle, in the deep historical memory of the body. If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever) sings an alternate history of resistance—familial, elemental, and sensuous.

What is it that you said?
World Premiere
Shun Ikezoe, 2021, Japan, 20m
Japanese with English subtitles
The sun’s path outside the window. The slow cycle of the seasons. A dead cat found behind a curtain. A neighbor yelling while dreaming. Images, sounds, spoken and written text try to correspond, gently interrupting each other. Shun Ikezoe’s What is it that you said? tracks the quiet movement of light and time, marking the progress of a year of small movements and intimate, imperfect exchanges.

In and Out a Window
U.S. Premiere
Richard Tuohy, 2021, Australia, 16mm, 13m

The literal frame of a window overlooking a small garden becomes the scene through which Richard Tuohy’s film exploits the myriad plastic potentialities of the cinematic frame. Immersive and stroboscopic, In and Out a Window offers its own variations on cinema’s mechanical segmentations of space and time, opening up a portal to undiscovered dimensions and new phenomenologies.

Night Colonies
North American Premiere
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021, Thailand, 14m
Thai with English subtitles
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Night Colonies is a microscopic rumination on the unobserved passage of time. Humming fluorescent lights illuminate a bedroom at night, drawing Chiang Mai’s subtropical nightlife into a tiny, intimate, and temporary cohabitation—a buzzing and bustling ecosystem of insects and lizards, nested within the human domestic space.