The Night Visitors

Q&A with Michael Gitlin, Leonardo Pirondi, and Zazie Ray-Trapido on Oct. 1 & 3

Film and video artist Michael Gitlin (The Earth Is Young) magnifies the surreal beauty and ecological significance of moths in his eye-opening and richly philosophical experimental documentary/essay film that explores a crucial element of our planet’s biodiversity that many of us may never consider. Rather than taking a strictly entomological approach, Gitlin acknowledges the moth as marvel, both in terms of its aesthetic beauty—their velvety fur and bright colors captured in microscopic detail—and its placement within the firmament of organic life on earth. From there, Gitlin goes deeper into more ethereal matters of mortality, traversing the insects’ nocturnal terrain to ruminate on the limits of knowledge and the transitory nature of all things, prehistoric to modern.

Preceded by:
When We Encounter the World
Leonardo Pirondi and Zazie Ray-Trapido, 2023, Portugal/U.S., 11m
North American Premiere
A self-regulating society of children is installed in an enclosed forest as a sociological experiment. Their only visions of the outside world come in the form of strange films from their benefactors, one of which is recreated here: a profusion of American engineering, landscape design, and urbanity, intended to restructure their young minds.

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