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ICDOCS 2021 AWARD WINNERS
WOW Awards
Maat Means Land by Fox Maxy because Indigenous people are everywhere
Happy Valley by Simon Liu gets the neon thrash of the everyday award
The___________World by Peixuan Ouyang because facial recognition also works on monuments
The jury would also like to recognize
Letter From Your Far-Off Country by Suneil Sanzgiri for being here and elsewhere and using Google maps and saffron
Zero Length Spring by Ross Meckfessel gets the lightbulb wipe award
Too Much Fun by Grace Mitchell because there is always darkness in the light
News from Nowhere by Ben Balcom because parks are for everyone
2021 FESTIVAL ITINERARY
*ALL PROGRAMS FOLLOWED BY Q & A SESSIONS*
Thursday, April 29 @ 6:30pm
Competitive Program 1: Somatic Reflections
Lightmare / Josh Drake
USA // 2020 // 6:56
Lightmare was inspired by a group of youths who used to race motorcycles by my house. Stories began to spread about who they were and what poor conditions their parents were raising them in. The film attempts to capture the anxiety of the neighborhood, using negative space to subvert the audience’s expectations of horizon and depth. In contrast, much of the content underscores the triviality of the perceived threat. High levels of film grain enhance the effects of pareidolia, paralleling the human impulse to create stories for the unknown riders.
Birdsaver Report Volume 1 / Heehyun Choi
South Korea, USA // 2020 // 7:40
The audience encounters a report in blue pages discussing the death of wild birds caused by collisions with transparent soundproof walls. Two hands appear to turn the pages, cut the paper, move the objects and paint, following the text from the report. While birds fly towards a transparent wall, what is the audience colliding with?
Background Material / Britany Gunderson
USA // 2020 // 8:57
A mother/daughter relationship is analyzed through textile materials.
Labor of Love / Sylvia Schedelbauer
Germany // 2020 // 11:30
An expanding feeling, unfolding new inflections — forever different, forever changing.
Happy Valley / Simon Liu
Hong Kong // 2020 // 12:30
British Colonial-era structures overlook scenes in the aftermath of civil unrest as Hong Kongers work to retain some semblance of normality. The sound of petty arguments from local TVB soap-operas of the 80s are put in concert with captive animals, political graffiti and desolate highways. Suspension cables and ship anchor lines reveal a fragile urban anatomy; the structures that keep the city moving along. As civic functions grind to a halt, the limits of our empathy and control come into question. As the days teeter toward an uncertain future, HAPPY VALLEY cinematically probes the role of the so-called “little things”. A rendering of the perseverance of spirit in Hong Kong – an attempt at irony that can’t help but be emotional.
Autopoiesis / Lana Z Caplan
USA // 2019 // 7:15
#aerialskiers #PyeongChangWinterOlympics #divers #LeniRiefenstal #Olympia #OpticalIllusions #SpeculativelyGeneratedOuterSpace #SelfHypnosis #SunRa #SpaceIsThePlace #4ECognition #AssaultByHashtags #MeToo #BlackLivesMatter #StillMarching #GiletJaune #Brexit #IdeasofUtopia #AfroFuturism #AryanRace #HashtagActivism #ConstantlyBuffeted #Maintain #LoveWins
Hear Me Sometimes / Sofia Theodore-Pierce
USA // 2020 // 14:22
Butterfly as verb. The monarch migration and an unearthed cassette tape correspondence form a storm speaking towards motherhood, loss, expectation, care and legacy. An elegy. An ode to uncertainty. A cry for radical optimism and a reordering of splendor.
Thursday April 29 @ 8:30pm – Outdoor in-person screening @IMU Amphitheater
Opening Night Feature: Crestone (out of competition).
PRESENTED BY BIJOU FILM BOARD
Crestone / Marnie Ellen Hertzler
USA // 2020 // 73:00
In the desert of Crestone, Colorado, a group of SoundCloud rappers live in solitude, growing weed and making music for the internet. When an old friend arrives to make a movie, reality and fiction begin to blur.
Friday April 30 @ 2pm
Juror Program: Alee Peoples
Standing Forward Full
16mm // USA // 2020 // 5:38
A helter skelter is an amusement ride with a spiral slide built around a tower. Like this film, an exorcism attempt of an unrequited desire, it’s either moving too fast or at a complete standstill. Disorienting but exciting. –AP
Boys of Summer
Super 8 to video // USA // 2009 // 12:22
A pop music barrage that is both sweet and serious about juvenile male fun. Tongue-in-cheek objectifying is mixed with cryptic symbols of longing and desire, with a brief history of a fraternal order. –AP
Cheap Tricks: Music & Text / Aesthetics, Attitude & the 4th Wall
video // USA // 2021 // 13:02
An incomplete compilation of movie clips that have burned themselves into my brain and directly influenced what I put into my films. Broken into two categories: music and text; aesthetics, attitude and the 4th wall. -AP
Spotlight On A Brick Wall / collaboration with Mike Stoltz
16mm // USA // 2016 // 8:00
A performance film that navigates expectations of both the audience and the makers. A series of false starts. Dub treatment on the laugh track. –AP + MS
Them Oracles
16mm // 2012 // 7:26
A skeptic investigation of what an oracle can be and what it would sound like. Human desire and blind faith allow, maybe even will, these mystic soothsayers to exist. –AP
If You Stand With Your Back to the Slowing of the Speed of Light in Water /
Julie Murray // 16mm // 1999 // 18:00
The film aims to illuminate a vital sense innate to perception where inversion is counterbalance and focal myopia the articulation of space. –JM
Friday April 30 @ 4pm
Competitive Program 2: Reorienting Spaces
Blue, Red and Farmers / Jules Mathôt
Belgium, The Netherlands // 2018 // 16:15
During nights full of colour and fog, a filmmaker observes the daily lives of two brothers living on a farm. This short documentary sets out to find and change the conception we have of a typical farmer’s life. Via cinematographic interference (lighting, fog, sound editing, etc.), their reality is changed into a filmic cosmos. The boundaries between reality and fiction blur.
S p a c e l a n d / Caitlin Ryan
USA // 2020 // 7:15
Long hallways, an orchestrated auction, and acts of disappearance, Spaceland, travels through the mysterious American landscape of storage units. Space that captures the line between necessity and amenity; between an interim life event and the more permanent obscured.
Breaking An Image / Ava Threlkel
USA // 2020 // 9:48
Breaking An Image is a dusty, scratched record. The needle skips a groove, and the image of Tiffany, 80’s teen popstar, jumps thirty years into the future. The image lands in a largely vacant Southdale Center, the first indoor shopping center in the US.
News from Nowhere / Benjamin Balcom
USA // 2020 // 8:00
“Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not misery but refinement.” – William Morris
Another Horizon / Stephanie M. Barber
USA // 2020 // 9:00
the horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, is a promised place where these two elements come together. a metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. a place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart.
here, the space between narrative and documentary, fact and fiction, is literally scratched between two voices, also cleaved apart or brought beside.
National Bird 2 / Curtis Miller
USA // 2020 // 01:20
A collision of two predatory birds sends the viewer into a sudden, cosmic free fall. From an on-going series on the symbolic value of birds in the United States.
Animal Trials / Drew Durepos
USA // 2020 // 19:05
Sifting through blurred images, animal attacks, and survivalist fever dreams, two friends discover true-crime connections between the owl theory and the origin of evil on election night. Or: this is how I felt one night in November.
Friday April 30 @ 6:30pm
Competitive Program 3: Return and Reclaim
Giant Eagle, Four Stars / Emma Piper-Burket
USA // 2021 // 4:00
In an abandoned shopping center outside of Cleveland, the story of the last remaining grocery store is told through recent google reviews.
Cities I Haven’t Been To / Damar Cuci
Croatia // 2019 // 7:06
An abstract travelogue around the skylines of cities I have not been to. These are dystopian virtual travels from Sao Paulo and Dubai to Dhaka and beyond. The images of cities might be abstract, but I have recognized and picked them out of hundreds of thousands of photograms. Far from tourist postcards, these mental images stem from my knowledge and my prejudices, visualized in a flash of abstract figures.
Letter From Your Far-Off Country / Suneil Sanzgiri
USA, India // 2020 // 17:00
Drawing upon a rich repository of images – from digital renderings of Kashmir’s mountains to the textured materiality of 16mm hand-processing and direct animations techniques – ‘Letter From Your Far-off Country’ maps a hidden vein of shared political commitment and diasporic creative expression, linking a poem by the Kashmiri American writer Agha Shahid Ali with interviews with the filmmaker’s father and a letter addressed to Communist Party leader Prabhakar Sanzgiri, who is also the filmmaker’s distant relative.
Luminous Variations in the City Skies / Giuseppe Spina
Italy // 2020 // 6:20
A silent film composed of digital scans and blow-ups of Guido Horn D’Arturo’s photographic plates depicting Bologna’s skies.
Medusa and The Abyss / Felicity Palma
Italy // 2019 // 10:56
Notions of belonging and the ethics of travel are questioned through female rite and ritual, pointing at the pervasive and contradictory presence of history and myth in present-day Sicily.
The___________World / Peixuan Ouyang
China, USA // 2020 // 17:56
A personal essay about connection and disconnection, in and through different realities.
Untitled Part 9: This Time / Jayce Salloum
Afghanistan, Canada // 2020 // 6:13
Out of the mouths of rural boys, finding the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin in Afghanistan.
Friday April 30 @ 8:30pm
Competitive Program 4: I Can’t See
In Shallow Water / Marek Moučka
Slovakia // 2020 // 10:17
Finding connections between christmas traditional dish and sentenced prisoners leads to closer look on questions about the meaning of freedom and identity. Faces that cannot be recognized but their voice still remains. Is debt towards society redeemable with sorrow?
3 Logical Exits / Mahdi Fleifel
Denmark, United Kingdom // 2020 // 14:00
A sociological meditation on the different “exits” that young Palestinians choose, in order to cope with life in the refugee camps.
Alternative Facts / Marina Santana De la Torre
Mexico, USA // 2020 // 1:00
A reflection on the phrase “Alternative Facts” used during a press conference in January 22, 2017.
Maalbeek / Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis
France // 2020 // 15:51
Survivor but amnesiac of the attack at Maalbeek metro station on 22 March 2016 in Brussels, Sabine is looking for the missing image of an over-mediatised event of which she has no memory.
Maciré / Paige Taul
Germany, USA // 2020 // 3:30
Maciré, a young woman in Berlin, details her experience as an Afro-German in Germany. Filmed in Berlin, Germany as a resident of the Institut für Alles Mögliche.
Luces del Desierto (Desert Lights) / Félix Blume
France, Mexico // 2021 // 29:58
Strange lights appear at night in the Mexican desert – it seems to be full of life. This suspenseful film invites us to open our eyes wide in the twilight, and listen to the sounds hidden in the darkness.
Saturday May 1 @ 2:00pm
Almudena Escobar López Juror Program: “myth defies history”
Desdibujando las líneas entre lo cultural y lo natural, “myth defies history” considera la mitología en tiempo presente. Imágenes vivas que muestran cómo el cine es una geografía trascendental sin fronteras. Estas películas despliegan territorialidades imposibles en un futuro próximo más allá de la historia.
Blurring the lines between the cultural and the natural, “myth defies history” considers mythology in the present tense. Breathing images that show how cinema is a transcendental geography without borders. These films unfold impossible territorialities in a forthcoming future beyond history.
Amérika: Bahía de las Flechas / América: Bay of Arrows / Ana Vaz
digital // Brasil // 2016 // 9:29
Se dice que en 1492, el primer barco europeo en desembarcar en la costa de Samaná, actual República Dominicana, fue recibido por una lluvia de flechas de los Taínos caribeños. Hoy día, un lago salino llamado Enriquillo, como el jefe Taíno, es testigo de cambios eco-sistémicos profundos, que causan la migración de especies, evacuación forzada y un desierto en expansión que revela su pasado geológico. Usando la cámara como flecha, la cinta busca maneras de animar, de despertar, de hacer vibrar ese gesto otra vez – las flechas contra un “cielo que cae” perpetuamente.
It is said that in the year of 1492, the first European ship led by Christopher Columbus, disembarked on the coast of Samaná, present-day Dominican Republic, and was received by a rain of arrows carefully plotted by the Caribbean Taíno. Presently, a saline lake named after the Taíno chief Enriquillo witnesses profound eco-systemic changes leading to species migration, forced evacuation and an expanding coral desert revealing the lake’s geologic past. Taking the camera itself as an arrow, a foreign body, Amérika: Bay of Arrows looks for ways in which to animate, to awaken, to make vibrate again this gesture in the present – arrows against a perpetual “falling sky”.
Farmacopea / Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
16mm silent transferred to digital // Puerto Rico // 2013 // 5:38
Las farmacopeas son catálogos de plantas y sus usos. Farmacopea es una película sobre la relación entre los procesos históricos y el paisaje natural de Puerto Rico. Hippomane mancinella, la pequeña manzana de la muerte, es una de las plantas más tóxicas del mundo. Simplemente al sentarse debajo de ella durante una tarde puede enfermar a uno durante días. Si el árbol se quema, su humo puede ser peligroso y causar ceguera permanente. Aunque fue una parte importante de la farmacopea nativa, la mayoría de los árboles de Manchineel fueron talados. El paisaje Caribeño se ha transformado totalmente: físicamente, a través de especies nuevas que han sido introducidas, agricultura y desarrollo, pero también a través de su representación visual como un lugar tropical indiferenciado para el turismo, el servicio y el folclore.
Farmacopeas are catalogs of plants and their uses. Farmacopea is a film on the relationship between historical processes and the natural landscape of Puerto Rico. Hippomane mancinella, the little apple of death, is one of the most toxic plants in the world. Just sitting beneath it for an afternoon can make you sick for days. If the tree is burned, its smoke can be dangerous and cause permanent blindness. Though it was an important part of the native farmacopea, most Manchineel trees were eradicated. The landscape of the Caribbean has been thoroughly transformed: physically, through introduced species, agriculture and development but also through its visual representation as an undifferentiated tropical place for tourism, service and folklore.
Batalla / Colectivo los Ingrávidos
Digital // México // 2017 // 04:35
Desde el siniestro ataque que las corporaciones paramilitares y policiales llevaron a cabo el 26 de septiembre de 2014 en Iguala, Guerrero, el estudiante Aldo Gutiérrez Solano permanece en coma. Batalla es un pequeño homenaje a la resistencia del cuerpo que lucha contra el poder.
After the ominous attack that the paramilitary and police corporations carried out on September 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, the student Aldo Gutiérrez Solano remains in a coma until today. A brief homage to the resistance of the body fighting against power.
Deep Sleep / Basma Alsharif
Digital // Greece, Malta, Palestine // 2014 // 12:37
Deep Sleep nos lleva de viaje por las ondas sonoras de Gaza, a diferentes yacimientos de ruinas modernas. Con la entrada a Palestina restringida, aprendí auto hipnosis con el fin de bi-localizarme. El resultado es una aventura a las ruinas de antiguas civilizaciones incrustadas en ruinosas civilizaciones modernas, hacia un lugar en ruinas más allá de toda evidencia de civilización. Deep Sleep es una invitación a pasar del yo corpóreo al espacio cinematográfico en un acto colectivo de bi-localización que trasciende los límites de las fronteras geográficas y juega con la falibilidad de la memoria.
Deep Sleep takes us on a journey through the sound waves of Gaza to travel between different sights of modern ruin. Restricted from travel to Palestine, I learned auto-hypnosis for the purpose of bi-locating. What results is a journey, recorded on Super 8mm film, to the ruins of ancient civilizations embedded in modern civilization in ruins, to a site ruined beyond evidence of civilization. Deep Sleep is an invitation to move from the corporeal self to the cinema space in a collective act of bi-location that transcends the limits of geographical borders and plays with the fallibility of memory.
Teresa / Tania Dinis
Moçambique – São Tomé e Príncipe –
Super 8 film transferred to digital // Portugal // 2017 // 04:37 //
Teresa evoca un recuerdo. Un recuerdo como lugar de resistencia del no querer olvidar, donde está el espacio y el tiempo, donde se puede volver. La imagen fragmentada de un disco íntimo. La impresión de momentos olvidados en el tiempo pero listos para emerger del olvido que nos permiten construir una historia posible: la historia que queremos ver.
Teresa evokes a memory. A memory as a place of resistance of not wanting to forget, where it is space and time, where one can return. The fragmented image of an intimate record. The impression of moments forgotten in time but ready to emerge from oblivion that allow us to build a possible story: the story we want to see.
The Many Colors of the Sky Radiate Forgetfulness / Basim Magdy
Super 16mm film transferred to Full HD video // Egypt // 2015 // 11:09
Los narradores incorpóreos se lamentan por la fragilidad de la memoria. En la tranquila vida del bosque, los monumentos de piedra nos miran como para hacernos saber que nos sobrevivirán a todos. A medida que el exuberante paisaje sonoro crepita y las imágenes se desvanecen, nos atrae a las profundidades del tiempo ecológico y aceptamos la inevitabilidad de ser olvidados.
Disembodied narrators lament over the fragility of memory. In the quiet life of the forest, stone monuments stare back at us as if to let us know they’ll outlive us all. As the lush soundscape crackles and the images fade, we’re lured into the depths of ecological time and come to terms with the inevitability of being forgotten.
Corteza de neon/ Neon Cortex / Bruno Varela
Super8, 16mm transferred to digital // México // 2019 // 14:06
Un ejercicio de cine materialista aleatorio, rollos habitados por estructuras y temporalidades diversas colapsan en el revelado y escaneo, se incrustan en una memoria común y terminan por tejer una pieza engarzada de luz y vapores. Ficción especulativa, narración vegetal, sueño de semillas. Corteza Neón es toda una curva de aprendizaje, una película potencial. Esperamos miradas y pantallas y muchos más escurrimientos. S8 y 16mm pandeados digitalmente.
An exercise in random materialistic cinema, scrolls inhabited by diverse structures and temporalities collapse in the development and scanning, become embedded in a common memory and end up weaving a set piece of light and vapors. Speculative fiction, vegetable narration, dream of seeds. Neon Bark is a whole learning curve, a potential movie. We expect looks and screens and many more runoffs. S8 and 16mm digitally buckled.
Saturday May 1 @ 4:00pm
Competitive Program 5: Games, Illusions, Systems, Play
The Imaginary Kaleidoscope / Masha Vlasova
USA // 2020 // 11:32
The film is composed of a series of close-ups of animal sculptures, small and large. The close-ups, which excise context from the frame, suggests portraiture. Even without context, lawn sculptures are recognizably mass-produced and made of inexpensive, yet robust material intended to endure outside. The male voiceover reads a monologue quilted with quotations from the western canon in which the author ventriloquizes an animal voice (i.e. Kafka, Rilke, Bishop, Tolstoy). The video offers a meditation on voyeurism and the performative quality of public-facing private displays, and on the desire to reintegrate animals into our life. The yard art animal sculptures are dinky monuments to that desire for reintegration. I gathered the footage in towns across the Northeast, Midwest, and the South suggesting a collective place-less portrait of Americana.
I’ve Been Afraid / Cecelia Condit
Mexico, USA // 2020 // 7:01
I’ve Been Afraid is a musical encyclopedia about how women get abused, and why it is they stay. It uses emojis that are as ubiquitous as abuse is in our culture.
Drills / Sarah Friedland
USA // 2020 // 16:45
Drills is a film about the choreography of preparing for the future. A hybrid documentary and experimental dance film reimagining the form of the Cold War-era, US government-produced social guidance film, Drills asks what futures we are preparing for through the exercises embodying present anxieties. Weaving in between multiple forms of choreography, fiction, and documentation, Drills restages lockdown and active shooter drills, frames corporate and tech start-up office meditation, and reperforms Boy Scout drills from the 1917 Boy Scout manual.
– force – / Simon Liu, Jennie Marytai Liu
Hong Kong, USA // 2020 // 8:47
Placid views of Hong Kong merge with dizzying, semi-abstract digital animations; avatars in a parable about control. A mesmerizing, menacing voice over – part body politic regulator, part cyberpunk travel guide – promises order, accountability, and satisfaction, and threatens trouble, polarization, and tears. A fire has been started, movement has gone on to reach multiple points of no return.
Partial Differential Equation / Kevin Jerome Everson
USA // 2020 // 8:30
Partial Differential Equation is illustrated by mathematician Tariah Gatlin.
Zero Length Spring / Ross Meckfessel
USA // 2021 // 16:00
A walk through corridors and rooms culminates in a familial Reiki session – what’s underneath and within. Zero Length Spring is an apotropaic film, imprinted by rituals and symbols, basking in ruptures of the body and the earth. Through ASMR brush tracks and the language of self-help therapy, film surface abrasions and alleged paranormal photos, the film gives shape and form to various unseeable forces. You’re worth it, you deserve love, you can grow.
Deadphant / Ayo Akingbade
United Kingdom // 20202 // 3:00
A portrait of Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre in South London, a weekend before it permanently closed, after fifty-five years on September 14, 2020.
(Always) Next to Me / Emma Piper-Burket
USA // 2021 // 3:42
(Always) Next to Me is a 16mm film that pairs abstract sequences of plants developed directly on the film emulsion with intertitles briefly describing what was going on for me personally at the moment the plants were collected.
I started the film at the beginning of the pandemic, just after I found out I was pregnant for the first time in April 2020 and finished it just before the birth of my baby in December of the same year.
The film is a compilation of significant and insignificant occurrences- an experiment in co-existence. As we go through our very human experiences and emotions, there is an entire surrounding ecosystem that bears witness, supports, and exists alongside [often with total indifference to] that experience.
The plants leave their image on the film, but my state of mind at the various points over the 9 months of production is also reflected in the care to layout and exposure that I exert over the material. The one rule I made for myself was that I had to use all the plants that I gathered, so some sequences are long and careless, while others are concise and delicately constructed. Stressful moments are revealed by the haphazard placement of random plants across the film strip, the times of serenity can be spotted by recurring patterns, and carefully selected leaves. A reminder that when we are not well grounded, we cause more destruction to the life around us- take more than we need.
Saturday May 1 @ 6:30pm
Competitive Program 6: Memory Manifesto
The Length of Day / Laura Conway
USA // 2020 // 15:00
The Length of Day is a collaged essay film that tells an emotional history of socialism in the United States. Filmmaker Laura Conway enacts a cinematic seance using archival documents to communicate with her departed communist grandparents and ask them questions about the end of capitalism. An account of the dreams, struggles, and losses of revolutionaries in the United States.
Hi Dad / Karolina Baranowska
Poland // 2020 // 3:00
The film Hello Dad is a short documentary showing how difficult it is for us to talk about important things and core feelings, it is difficult to ask about them, it is difficult to answer. The relationship of Father and Daughter is just an excuse to tell about the fact that we are all on both sides of the handset. What would you say?
Double Whammy / Tristen Ives
USA // 2021 // 4:09
A diaristic short exploring mental illness.
Exit Strategy #5 / Kym McDaniel
USA // 2020 // 8:00
An origin story and the rebirth of an identity after trauma. The fifth in a series regarding my emotional and physical traumas.
Maat means Land / Fox Maxy
USA // 2020 // 29:59
What does it mean to come from somewhere?
I Think It’s Enough, Isn’t It? / Emily Shir Segal
Israel // 2020 // 4:00
Reconstructing one last encounter with Dad.
Too Much Fun / Grace Mitchell
USA // 2020 // 12:00
TOO MUCH FUN is an attitudinal account of familial tragedy surrounding suicide, incest & identity.
Saturday May 1 @ 8:30pm
Awards Announcement
ICDOCS 