Currents Program 2: Stranger Than Paradise

Q&A with Justin Jinsoo Kim, Mackie Mallison, Jorge Jácome, Shambhavi Kaul, and Kim Torres on Oct. 7 & 8

Live From the Clouds
Mackie Mallison, 2023, U.S., 16m
World Premiere
In his affectionate diasporic family narrative, Mackie Mallison immerses the viewer in the intimate memories and imagination of four women in his Japanese-American family. Collage-like CG meshes with oral history, and poetry accents 16mm footage of the local bingo hall and staged sequences in an Asian grocery store, where everyday anxieties of shopping, paying the bills, and flying are ruptured by dreams of financial freedom and homecoming.

Shrooms
Jorge Jácome, 2023, Portugal, 18m
Portuguese with English subtitles 
Gently nodding to Bruce Conner’s cinematic fungi hunt, Jorge Jácome’s leisurely portrait film follows an amateur forager and breeder of carrier pigeons in his quotidian routines, searching the woodlands on Lisbon’s outskirts for psilocybin mushrooms and rhapsodizing about their therapeutic properties. With its soundtrack of insect chatter, birdsong, cat purrs, and whirly tubes, Shrooms traces circuits of habit, attention, and care between the animal, fungal, and human worlds.

The Far and Near
Justin Jinsoo Kim, 2023, South Korea, U.S., 10m
No dialogue with Korean and English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Exploring both the abstractions of astrophotography and the documentary possibilities of classical Korean landscape painting, The Far and Near is a cosmic voyage into seemingly empty space, in which Kim collages and distorts inkjet prints of images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope into chimeric spacescapes that evoke the oneiric spaces of Ahn Gyeon’s “Dream Journey to Peach Blossom Land,” a painting commissioned to document the dreams of 15th-century ruler Prince Anpyeong.

Slow Shift
Shambhavi Kaul, 2023, India/U.S., 9m
U.S. Premiere
Amid the ruins of the 14th-century city of Hampi in southwestern India—fabled site of the ancient Monkey Kingdom—troops of langurs observe a world in flux. Intercutting observational footage with constructed sequences, filmmaker Shambhavi Kaul juxtaposes human, simian, and geologic timescales, marking a place where history, mythology, and nature conspire and collide.

Solo la Luna comprenderá (The Moon Will Contain Us)
Kim Torres, 2023, Costa Rica/U.S., 18m
Spanish and English Creole with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
In the small coastal town of Manzanillo, Costa Rica, filmmaker Kim Torres enlists the local teens and adolescents to share their stories, lies, and fantasies on the cusp of a cataclysmic event. Playing amid ruins and wreckages, and voicing their boredom at the lack of change, Manzanillo’s children engage in a collective fabulation, finding strategies for building a new world from the old.