Currents Program 3: Inside Out
61st New York Film Festival
September 29 - October 15, 2023
Featuring Takeshi Murata and Christopher Rutledge’s Larry, Whammy Alcazaren’s Bold Eagle, the world premiere of Jordan Strafer’s LOOPHOLE, the North American premiere of Jamie Crewe’s False Wife, and the U.S. premiere of Steve Reinke’s Sundown.
Q&A with Whammy Alcazaren, Jordan Strafer, Jamie Crewe, and Steve Reinke on Oct. 7 & 8
Larry
Takeshi Murata and Christopher Rutledge, 2023, U.S., 4m
Takeshi Murata and Christopher Rutledge continue their playful investigation of both the sharp-edged hyperrealism of commercial CGI and its oozing, anarchic breakdown in Larry, which propels its titular character—a droopy-eyed canine baller—through a series of increasingly bizarre and messy loops. Set to a soundtrack of maxed-out electronic rhythms, these vignettes form a ludic study in morphology and motion, as its pooch protagonist continually vaults, multiplies, gets buckets, and dissolves into digital goo.
Bold Eagle
Whammy Alcazaren, 2022, Philippines, 16m
Filipino with English subtitles
Whammy Alcazaren’s ribald Bold Eagle composites personal and national histories with the onanistic imaginariness of the internet. In a dark Navotas City apartment cluttered with encyclopedias, family albums, and wrestling posters, a man and his feline friend look at gay porn and cat videos, ignore the doorbell, and embark on a fantastical Hawaiian vacation via an acid tab in the butthole.
LOOPHOLE
Jordan Strafer, 2023, U.S., 25m
World Premiere
Appropriating the aesthetics of 1990s legal thrillers and NC-17 potboilers, Jordan Strafer’s film serves up a dark, parafictional take on the courtroom drama, in which semi-fictionalized proceedings surrounding an actual sexual assault case mutate into a Grand Guignol of Americanness and white privilege. With its mise-en-scène of beige interiors and desaturated fashions, LOOPHOLE braids the theatrical with the procedural amid a hazy atmosphere of systemic corruption, media voyeurism, and entrenched power.
False Wife
Jamie Crewe, 2022, U.K., 16m
North American Premiere
Automated speech and pulsing electronic music adjoin stroboscopic text and a swirling visual collage in Jamie Crewe’s vertiginous take on the poppers training video. Typically pornographic, intended to complement recreational drug use and masturbation, the vernacular form is here tasked with delivering a mélange of intrusive thoughts derived from folk tales. The video breathlessly urges the viewer/user out of anxiety, through transformation, and finally, into annihilation.
Sundown
Steve Reinke, 2023, Austria/Canada/U.S., 8m
U.S. Premiere
In a stream-of-consciousness narration that is by turns wry, spiraling, and aphoristic, Steve Reinke meditates on grief, rocks, Gordon Lightfoot, a new tattoo, and the reason he left Canada. Amid this vortex of associations and ideas, a tentative ethos surfaces about art’s functions, the collecting and assemblage of images, and the kind of mutation from which grace emerges.
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