Currents Program 4: Space Is the Place

Q&A with Johann Lurf, Christina Jauernik, Laura Kraning, Lei Lei, Rhayne Vermette, and Malena Szlam on Oct. 5 & 6

Revolving Rounds
Christina Jauernik, Johann Lurf, 2024, Austria, 3-D, 11m
U.S. Premiere
Synchronized cameras trace a stereoscopic crawl through fields and greenhouses in early morning sunlight. An early-century 3-D device projects footage of a pea plant that shatters into a throbbing mass of particles to reveal the vibrant materiality of the film strip. In Revolving Rounds, Christina Jauernik and Johann Lurf lead the eye on a journey beyond dimensions of Cartesian space and familiar states of matter, an odyssey to the limits of perception and back.

ESP
Laura Kraning, 2024, U.S., 3m
Streaks of iridescence and dull clatter disintegrate the brutalist architecture of Albany’s Empire State Plaza in Laura Kraning’s ESP as modernist structures glitch, smear, and flicker through the intervention of a faulty inkjet printer, rendering the capital city into a pulsing monochrome tesseract, a sinister grid of light and noise.

re-engraved
Lei Lei, 2024, U.S., 25m
Chinese with English subtitles
World Premiere
The fragile materialities of Yangzhou wood engraving and analog film converge in Lei Lei’s fractal portrait of labor and craft. Exploring techniques of light and poetry, wood and celluloid, re-engraved montages demonstrations of expertise with a cacophonous electronic soundtrack and the personal histories of the women whose labor sustains these traditions.

A Black Screen Too
Rhayne Vermette, 2024, Canada, 16mm, 2m
U.S. Premiere
A single, sketchy line, etched directly into the emulsion, is soon the axis of a dense grid. Its cells slip between positive and negative space, then shatter into a riot of colored panes. Like a mosaicist letting slip her tray of tiles, Rhayne Vermette shifts her sights from the human-scale impressionism of her previous feature Ste. Anne (NYFF59), and attends to a primordial drama of form in miniature.

The Land at Night
Richard Tuohy, Dianna Barrie, 2024, Australia, 16mm, 14m
Against a dense, sinister soundtrack of drones, bells, night creatures, and electric hum, flashes of illumination reveal a trembling crepuscular landscape in Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie’s The Land at Night. It’s a nocturnal ramble through dry grasslands, empty roads, and the skeletal remains of deserted dwellings.

Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya
Malena Szlam, 2024, Australia/Canada, 20m
U.S. Premiere
The luminous flora, volcanic geographies, and plunging horizons of the Gondwana Rainforest in the eastern ranges of Australia metamorphose into an imaginary landscape in Malena Szlam’s Archipelago of Earthen Bones, in which 16mm in-camera editing and superimpositions suggest a lithic temporal scale, deconstructing and reforming desert, mountain, and sky in a dazzling palette of orange, black, and viridescence.