Currents Program 1: The Will to Change

Q&A with Adam Piron, Miranda Pennell, and Jordan Lord on Oct. 4

Black Glass
Adam Piron, 2024, U.S., 9m
World Premiere
Before his legendary proto-cinematic studies in motion, photographer Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned to document the United States Army’s war against the Modoc tribe in Northern California in a series of stereographs, many of them staged. Alternately unnerving, meditative, and explosive, Adam Piron’s Black Glass examines the entangled histories of visual technology and the genocide and expropriation of Indigenous populations by white settlers through a violent collision of image and sound. 

Man number 4
Miranda Pennell, 2024, U.K., 10m
North American Premiere
A photograph taken in Gaza in late 2023 and found on social media initiates a process of forensic and associative analysis as a dense sea of pixels gradually reveals shapes (human figures, geographical features, buildings, a mysterious box) that prompt a series of questions about the regimes of representation and the structures of violence beyond the frame.

An All-Around Feel Good
Jordan Lord, 2024, U.S., 25m
World Premiere
Investigating the contradictions of being disabled and American, Jordan Lord’s essay film braids themes of representation, access, nationalism, and labor, interrogating cinema’s status as, at once, an ambient phenomenon and an inherently ableist medium. Assembling audio description and commentary along with found and original media, An All-Around Feel Good troubles assumptions about what it means to pay attention and to belong—to a nation, an audience, a unified collective.
An All-Around Feel Good is open captioned and audio described in English; CART and ASL-interpretation will be provided for the Q&As. 

The Deep West Assembly
Cauleen Smith, 2024, U.S., 35m
World Premiere
America’s violent history of settler colonial extraction and enslavement is posited against the expansive lens of geologic time in The Deep West Assembly. Commingling theater and computer animation, textiles and dance, Black and Indigenous cultural traditions, Cauleen Smith locates an anti-racist methodology for the end of the world in the spaces underground, where the interior of the Earth becomes a place of possibility and new ways of relating.