Chanyeol Lee, Hanna Cho, Samgar Rakym, and John Smith in person on Oct. 4 & 5

Track_ing
Chanyeol Lee, Hanna Cho, Samgar Rakym, Ali Tynybekov, 2024, South Korea/Kazakhstan, 23m
No Dialogue with English, Korean, Kazakh, and Russian subtitles
North American Premiere
The emerging field of computer vision turns its powers toward one of cinema’s earliest subjects: the train journey. With surprising insights and occasional poetry, software follows the human along old routes of imperial expansion, across borders of landscape and language. Blinking awake in a sleeper car, it is another passenger slowly discerning its surroundings—and another machine with which we remake our world.

I Remember (depth of flatten cruelty)
James Richards, Tolia Astakhishvili, 2024, Germany, 10m
North American Premiere
Artists Tolia Astakhishvili and James Richards’s collaboration cultivates a sense of ruin and renovation, an architectural ouroboros in which previously created work yields new use. In this digitally composed space, volume is collapsed, vertiginously upending our visual perception. The camera-eye floats unsteadily within it, as the soundtrack weaves together heterogeneous materials, further propelling and disorienting us through their world. 

Efforts of Nature
Morgan Quaintance, 2024, U.K., 19m
In Efforts of Nature, a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa, a skewed Bach aria, and throbbing electronics are set against the oceanic oozing pixels of digitized video images, monochromatic aurorae seen from space, and a disjointed inner monologue haunted by the language of wellness. This seemingly disparate corpus of material is composited into an affecting whole. What emerges, through the craft of director Morgan Quaintance’s trademark tense harmony between sound and image, is a paranoid meditation on chronic pain, recovery, and physical, mental, and planetary states of dissolution.

Being John Smith
John Smith, 2024, U.K., 27m
U.S. Premiere
An autobiographical reflection on his unassuming name leads the filmmaker down a wayward path through family photographs, personal archives, and internet searches. Alternately wry and wistful, peppered with Smith’s characteristically droll commentary, Being John Smith flits between self-deprecation and cris de coeur, offering quietly hilarious observations on Smith’s lower-middle-class origins and career as an avant-garde cinema luminary as well as unexpectedly melancholic impressions on age and extinction.