Currents Program 1: Surface Tension

Q&A with Carolina Fusilier, Adam Piron, Aria Dean, and Narges Kalhor on Oct. 5 & 7

Abattoir U.S.A.!
Aria Dean, 2023, U.S., 11m
North American Premiere
The interior of an empty slaughterhouse—rendered using 3D computer graphics tools—becomes the set for artist Aria Dean’s investigation of death and industrialization. Blending historical and contemporary architectural programs with hyperrealistic and non-Euclidean spatial configurations, Abattoir, U.S.A.! explores this site as both material and metaphor, a locus for the intersection of the human, the animal, and the machine.

Mercurial Currents
Carolina Fusilier, 2023, Argentina/Mexico, 20m
Spanish with English Subtitles
World Premiere
A ghostly bubble haunts the empty trading floor and conference rooms of La Bolsa, the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange building, as filmmaker Carolina Fusilier tries to locate a missing photograph of her father when he worked there during Argentina’s 1990s financial crisis. This search melds autobiography and science fiction, as arcane computational mechanisms—humming, flashing, bleeping—track the liquid undulations of trade.

Sensitive Content
Narges Kalhor, 2023, Iran/Germany, 8m
Farsi with English and French subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Amid the ongoing struggle for “Women, Life, Freedom,” the Iranian people use their cell-phone cameras to capture scenes of urgent protest and brutal retaliation by the regime. In the act of bearing witness, they risk the loss of their vision, as authorities are known to target the eyes of their victims. Narges Kalhor aggregates these images, which have been flagged as “sensitive content” on various social media channels, a form of censorship that sanitizes and erases violent events from the record. 

Dau:añcut (Moving Along Image)
Adam Piron, 2023, U.S./Canada, 15m
The likeness of a relative of the filmmaker surfaces as a tattoo on the arm of a Ukrainian soldier. A U.S. Army post in Oklahoma, built to fight Kiowa and Apache, is rededicated to aid in the fight against Putin’s own Western expansion. In Dau:añcut (Moving Along Image), Adam Piron explores the contradictions of colonialism and anti-settler solidarity across time and geography and in the muddled spaces of TikTok, where representations of Indigenous peoples are caught up in the ongoing and increasingly rapid circulation of images.

Nameless Syndrome
Jeamin Cha, 2022, South Korea, 24m
Korean with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Young women are subjected to a series of medical procedures: diagnostic tests, rehabilitation exercises, and fittings for prosthetic devices, demonstrating the medical industrial complex’s dehumanizing reliancce on empirical evidence to validate people’s subjective bodily experiences of pain. Accompanied by key critical texts on the phenomenology of illness—from Anne Boyer to Carlo Ginzburg—Jeamin Cha’s deconstructed medical procedural problematizes the alienated choreography between patient, technician, and machine.