Currents Program 3: Signal to Noise
Featuring Zuza Banasińska’s Grandmamauntsistercat, Maiko Endo’s Jizai, Sebastián Schjaer’s Like an Outburst, and Danielle Dean’s Hemel.
Q&A with Zuza Banasińska, Danielle Dean, Sebastián Schjaer, and Melanie Schapiro on Oct. 5 & 6
Grandmamauntsistercat
Zuza Banasińska, 2024, Netherlands/Poland, 23m
Polish with English subtitles
Assembling communist-era propaganda from the Educational Film Studio in Łódź, Poland, the playful and sinister Grandmamauntsistercat recasts Baba Jaga, the fabled witch of Slavic folklore, as a prehistoric, matriarchal goddess and anti-anthropocentric icon. Collecting, collaging, and warping a vivid bounty of archival images, filmmaker Zuza Banasińska exposes their patriarchal ideologies and representational strictures and detonates them in the name of liberation.
Jizai
Maiko Endo, 2024, Japan, 15m
Japanese and French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
The imaginative powers of the child are augmented by Maiko Endo’s near-future fabulations. Reverberations of Chris Marker’s La Jetée can be felt as technologists test ocular and robotic instruments real or imagined, in the lab and in the field. They whisper about “the third eye” as their young subjects grope toward a livable future for humanity among terrestrial elements or the stars.
Like an Outburst
Sebastián Schjaer, 2024, Argentina, 11m
English subtitles
World Premiere
Microorganisms float against a desert landscape, the lights from cellphone towers blink like fireflies, and a mysterious dialogue between two minds adjusting to a new beginning. In Sebastián Schjaer’s Like an Outburst, animals, humans, and machines seek a tenuous coexistence and different ways of seeing and living in the world.
Hemel
Danielle Dean, 2024, U.K./U.S., 30m
World Premiere
Returning to her hometown—the eponymous planned community, oriented around a factory—Danielle Dean alloys fiction and documentary, collective memory and autobiography, amid a hail of meteorites. Borrowing from Quatermass II, a midcentury science-fiction thriller shot in Hemel Hempstead as it was still being built, her film renders small-town xenophobia and corporate drudgery in the heightened tenor of an alien invasion plot.
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