BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JUNE commemorates the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, referred to in mainland China as 六四事件 – the “June 4 incident”. None of these movies adopts an explicitly polemical stance; instead, it’s a necessarily imperfect selection of works shedding light on the botched dreams and secret economies that came after the Cultural Revolution, but before the liberalizations of the 1990s – a process that led, of course, to the present moment’s extravaganza of state-managed turbocapitalism. In the spirit of the infamous “tank man” photograph (iconic to the rest of the world, but scrubbed near-entirely from the Chinese internet), this series takes a look at the cultural context surrounding the 1989 protests (and, implicitly, their bloody suppression) in media res.

BUMMING IN BEIJING
(流浪北京)
dir. Wu Wenguang, 1990
70 minutes.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.

MONDAY, JUNE 3 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 11 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 27 – 10 PM

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In 1990, Chinese documentaries were almost exclusively stodgy, didactic talking-head affairs broadcast on state-run media. Then came Wu Wenguang’s BUMMING IN BEIJING, kicking off an entire independent documentary scene in the country. Shot directly before and after the Tiananmen Square Massacre on cameras taken from a government TV station, BUMMING IN BEIJING follows five broke bohemians (including future art stars like Zhang Dali, long before they found fame) in grimy late 80s Beijing. Shot in a vérité style that would soon be adopted by a new generation of filmmakers, the movie includes an onscreen mental breakdown, a time-capsule view of the emergence of the country’s avant-garde, and proof that the hippest place in China used to be KFC.

“The prolonged moments of near silence in BUMMING IN BEIJING produce the aesthetic effect of outlasting the remembered roar of government tanks.” – Ernest Larsen, Art In America

( poster by Wendy Cong Zhao )

BLACK SNOW
(本命年)
dir. Xie Fei, 1990
107 mins. China.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.

MONDAY, JUNE 3 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 11 – 10 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 24 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 28 – 10 PM

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Winner of the Silver Bear at the 1990 Berlinale, Xie Fei’s kitchen-sink drama BLACK SNOW was in production before the June 4 Incident, but reflects the bitterness and unease of the period from first frame to last without need for any explicit political statement or reference. In a smoldering early performance, Chinese superstar Jiang Wen (DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP, KEEP COOL, ROGUE ONE) stars Li Huiquan, a derelict twentysomething returning home after a three-year term at a labor camp, having been implicated in the murder of a young man who was hanging out with his ex-girlfriend. Surrounded by alcoholic friends from childhood and squabbling adults in his claustrophobic slum, Li falls for a torch singer at his favorite nightclub named Yaqiu (Lin Cheng), and the ensuing struggles – freedom versus the need to make a living, going straight versus turning a profit – are unique to this vision of Beijing as a den of black-market iniquity, while linking seamlessly with the classic themes of film noir. Bleak but exhilarating to behold (largely thanks to Jiang’s tight-lipped leading turn), BLACK SNOW is ultimately about the lack of options for Li’s generation to have an undisturbed inner life, living in close quarters in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution.

“Li represents a lost generation of young people who rebel against the ideals of their forefathers and the traditions of their country… The tragedy is that they are at a loss where to go or what to believe in. Everyone in China now wants to find a new ideal, a new belief, because the Cultural Revolution destroyed our old beliefs and our old system… We realized, after it was too late, that we had been deceived — we had destroyed our past, our values, our lives, but had created nothing.” – Xie Fei

( poster by Wendy Cong Zhao )

THE SQUARE
(广场)
dirs. Zhang Yuan and Duan Jinchuan, 1994
100 mins. China.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, JUNE 4 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 10 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 18 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 21 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, JUNE 29 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 30 – 5 PM

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Never before screened in New York City and long-suppressed in China, this documentary by the renowned Sixth Generation filmmaker Zhang Yuan (MAMA, SONS, BEIJING BASTARD) sprang from an innocent-enough idea in the years after the June 4 Incident: Tiananmen Square was a public space, so who was to stop Zhang (with Duan Jinchuan) from filming day-to-day mundanities in the guise of working for state TV? It’s a fascinating (and sometimes, dryly funny) glimpse at China on the eve of sweeping economic transition, with accoutrements of the Mao era perhaps uncanny present. Largely emptied out in the years after the Incident, this Square is defined by its absences, and the unease of its own legacy.

“Anyone who knows about Chinese history understands that whatever huge historical changes play out, Tiananmen Square is often the stage – for instance, the June Fourth Incident in 1989, Tomb-Sweeping Day in 1976 when crowds came out to mourn Zhou Enlai. In 1966 it was there in the square that Mao Zedong received more than six million Red Guards. If we go back even further, there is the 1949 ceremony to celebrate the founding of the People’s Republic of China and, if we like, we can go back even further to the May Fourth Movement and beyond. On one level, Tiananmen Square can be said to be a political symbol; at the same time, it is like a massive stage… Especially in the years following the June Fourth Incident, I noticed how quiet it had become. I would see people there flying kites, peddling things, going for strolls, and I would see so many policemen, plainclothes officers… I felt the pressing need to pick up my camera and record some of those more interesting people and attempt to capture that feeling of the square.” – Zhang Yuan

LAN YU
(藍宇)
dir. Stanley Kwan, 2001
96 mins. China/Hong Kong.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, JUNE 4 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 16 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 20 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 23 – 7:30 PM

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Based on a novel first published online by one “Beijing Comrade” in 1998, LAN YU is a breakthrough film, a queer drama set against the backdrop of the student movement that culminated in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. While the book was infamous for its erotic descriptive passages, director Stanley Kwan wanted to expand the source material to focus on the tortured romance between the story’s eponymous architecture student (Liu Ye) and his lover, a closeted businessman of the older generation named Chen Handong (Hu Jun). The result is a film that’s both elliptical and brutally sharp, a diagnosis in the class differences and mores (and thus, denials) that helped foment the dissent of the late eighties – in particular, the corruption of China’s bureaucratic (and, by proximity to government, emerging bourgeois) classes. It’s also an edge-of-your-seat portrayal of desire and devastation through Lan Yu’s fast-eroding innocence, with a plot spanning multiple years of unrequited passion.

Widely heralded as one of the greatest living Hong Kong filmmakers for works like CENTER STAGE and ROUGE, Stanley Kwan has still never gotten a proper retrospective in North America; hopefully these screenings will help renew interest in his fascinating and singular body of work. “In my last film THE ISLAND TALES, I made simple things too complicated, “he said. “And so this time I’ve tried to make complicated things less complicated, or simple things even simpler… What I was interested in was how we could transform June 4 into the moment that Chen Handong commits to Lan Yu… The fact that the story took place in Beijing, a city foreign to me, didn’t bother me…. I might not be Lan Yu and my boyfriend might not be Chen Handong, but virtually everything they go through in the novel I’ve been through with my partner.”

“Courageously simple and frank… The film eliminates most of the novel’s near-porno sex scenes and tones down the melodrama, producing a matter of fact and emotionally truthful account of a relationship marked by its time and place. Superbly acted, too.” – Time Out London

“Pulpy and mesmerizing.” – Carla Meyer, San Francisco Chronicle

In keeping with recent events with independent filmmakers currently forging their own paths – Nuotama Bodomo, Ricky D’Ambrose, Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn, Amir George – Spectacle is pleased to invite Chicago-based film critic and director Michael Glover Smith to our humble theater to present the New York City premiere of two recent works: MERCURY IN RETROGRADE (2017) and RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO (2018). Just in time for your most recent imploded relationship, Smith’s films draw unabashedly from the influence of Eric Rohmer, alongside classic walk-and-talk romantic comedies of the eighties and nineties. Already it’s a signature body of work, alternately warm and humanist but without Hollywood allusions about the pitfalls of complicated people trying to forge a life together in the Windy City (or, for that matter, anywhere else.)

MERCURY IN RETROGRADE
dir. Michael Glover Smith, 2017
105 mins. United States.

SATURDAY, MAY 25 – 5 PM with Q&A featuring Michael Glover Smith, producer Kevin Wright and actor Shane Simmons
ONE NIGHT ONLY! (This event is $10.)

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MERCURY IN RETROGRADE follows three couples who spend a weekend together on Lake Michigan: Jack (Jack C. Newell) and Golda (Alana Arenas) have been married for a decade, Richard (Kevin Wehby) and Isabelle (Roxane Mesquida) are in a committed love relationship but clearly on (or near) the rocks, and Peggy (Najarra Townsend) and Wyatt (Shane Simmons, who will reprise the character in Smith’s followup RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO) just linked up. Embracing the intrinsic anxiety of its classic setup, Smith’s film is a handcrafted trip into the terra incognita of monogamy, epitomized by a jarring sequence of dudes being old-fashioned dudes back at the cabin while (because) their partners have repaired to the local watering hole. MERCURY IN RETROGRADE is that rare slice-of-life film with a grip on the darkness below its surface, driven forward by its flawed characters’ alternating fears of being committed or alone (no spoilers!) and anchored by six committed performances from a pitch-perfect cast.

RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO
dir. Michael Glover Smith, 2018
69 mins. United States.

SATURDAY, MAY 25 – 7:30 PM with Q&A featuring Michael Glover Smith, with actors Claire Cooney and Rashaad Hall
ONE NIGHT ONLY! (This event is $10.)

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RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO is separated into three discrete vignettes: the first concerns a young man named Paul (Kevin Wehby) angling to woo a grad student named Delaney (Clare Cooney) he meets in a bar. Paul’s innocuous-enough pickup attempt sets the stage for a bittersweet and frequently hilarious rumination on compatibility in short-and-long-terms, perfectly matched by the subsequent passages. Part II follows a couple (Rashaad Hall and Matthew Sherbach) weighing whether to get a cat or a dog, while one half privately considers popping The Question. Perhaps inevitably, Part III addresses breakup, in the form of a 20something schlub named Wyatt (Shane Simmons) whose girlfriend Julie (Nina Garnet) happens upon him in bed with another woman. The overall portrait of dating life – with all its agonies, ecstasies and nauseating in-betweens – is drawn with a delicate touch and a knack for sparkling dialogue.

MICHAEL GLOVER SMITH‘s debut feature COOL APOCALYPSE (2015) won multiple awards at festivals across the U.S. and screened at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center and Movies in the Park before being released on home video by Emphasis Entertainment. His second feature, MERCURY IN RETROGRADE, starring Roxane Mesquida and Najarra Townsend, won the top prizes at the 2018 Tallahassee Film Festival and the 2017 Full Bloom Film Festival and was the subject of a rave review by the Chicago Sun-Times’ Richard Roeper who wrote: “Smith has a deft touch for dialogue, creating six distinct characters who look and sound like people we know…a smart, funny, quietly effective and authentic slice of older millennial life.” His most recent feature, 2018’s RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO, is the final installment in his “relationship trilogy” and has won four awards in its first 10 festival screenings. He was a recipient of the Siskel Center’s Star Filmmaker award in 2017 and made Newcity Chicago’s “Film 50” list in 2018. He teaches film history at several Chicago-area colleges and is the author of the film blog Whitecitycinema.com.

POLYMORPH
dir. J.R. Bookwalter, 1996
86 min, USA

SUNDAY, APRIL 14 – 7:30 PM with director J.R. Bookwalter and star Sasha Graham in person for Q&A.
ONE NIGHT ONLY! 
(This event is $10.)

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Horror Boobs and Saturn’s Core present POLYMORPH with director J.R. Bookwalter and actress Sasha Graham in attendance for a post screening Q&A.

Lauded as one of America’s most revered regional, genre filmmakers, Akron, Ohio’s resident indie writer / director J.R. Bookwalter created a broad cinematic universe far outside of the Hollywood studio system and inspired a whole generation of backyard movie makers in the process. Horror Boobs and Saturn’s Core Audio & Video are proud to present “Tempe Apocalypse”; a jam-packed weekend of screenings and events all featuring J.R. Bookwalter in person for the first time in the NY area in over a decade.

Join us for a special screening of Bookwalter’s 1996, shot-on-video sci-fi / horror / action mash-up POLYMORPH. Shot on Mini-DV with a script penned by long time collaborator James L. Edwards, POLYMORPH was one of the pioneering feature films of the digital video revolution and remains a fan favorite amongst Tempe loyalists to this day. J.R. will be reuniting with star Sasha Graham (ADDICTED TO MURDER, VICIOUS SWEET) for a Q&A following the feature.

With the recent announcement that Bookwalter’s legendary company Tempe Video will be forever closing its proverbial doors and bidding adieu to the world of cinema, the “Tempe Apocalypse” weekend is certain to be a once in a lifetime, not to be missed happening celebrating the work of one of micro-budget cinema’s most beloved and influential filmmakers.

So far, Iranian director Kamran Heidari’s 2012 documentary MY NAME IS NEGAHDAR JAMALI AND I MAKE WESTERNS is his only film to receive any exposure in the States, and even that has been fairly limited. Hopefully, this series, which presents the New York premiere of his  2014 documentary DINGOMARO and world premiere of his latest, NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS, can help remedy that. Born in 1977 near the city of Shiraz, Heidari began directing films after graduating from college.  Parallel to that work, he has built up a substantial body of work as a photographer. The four  films included in this series insist on the specificity of  Shiraz and the south of Iran. At the same time, they exist in a dialogue that acknowledges national boundaries as well as the power of culture to bypass narrow nationalism. NEGAHDAR JAMALI engages in a complex feedback loop between American and Iranian cinema, while DINGOMARO and, to a lesser extent, NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS show how the power of the African diaspora’s music extends to Iran.

Programmed in collaboration with Steve Erickson. Special thanks to Garineh Nazarian, Maaa Film, and Mehdi Omidvari.


MY NAME IS NEGAHDAR JAMALI AND I MAKE WESTERNS
(من نگهدار جمالی وسترن میسازم)
dir. Kamran Heidari, 2012
65 minutes. Iran.
In Farsi with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, APRIL 7 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 18 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 20 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 27 – 10 PM

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Paraphrasing a famous John Ford quote, this film profiles Negahdar Jamali, a director who lives in Shiraz and makes micro-budget Westerns in the desert outside the city. Having started out with silent Super-8 footage, living in poverty and spending all his spare money on this work, Jamali dreams of being accepted by his country’s film industry and being able to work on a much larger scale. However, the kind of movies he makes are too influenced by American culture, even if he has made sure that his Tarzan conforms to Islamic standards of modesty instead of appearing nude. Producers would prefer that he made actions films about the Iran/Iraq war, instead of setting films in Death Valley a century ago.

MY NAME IS NEGAHDAR JAMALI AND I MAKE WESTERNS falls into a tradition of reflexive Iranian movies about filmmaking and directors that includes Abbas Kiarostami’s CLOSE-UP and THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s SALAAM CINEMA, and A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE, Jafar Panahi’s THE MIRROR and most recently, Mani Haghighi’s PIG. It departs from them in that there’s very little roleplay on Heidari’s part here; the film presents itself as a Western of sorts while always remaining a documentary. MY NAME IS NEGAHDAR JAMALI AND I MAKE WESTERNS remains upbeat, even celebratory, for its first two thirds, as Jamali buys costumes for his films and talks about his plans to the camera. Then, life intrudes.

Ultimately, MY NAME IS NEGAHDAR JAMALI AND I MAKE WESTERNS strikes a more ambivalent tone than one would initially expect. Jamali has made a choice between art and his family, and he’s not very kind to his wife and son as a result. Indeed, his son calls Heidari a “fag” and “asshole,” apparently because this documentary’s project has taken so much time away from his father. In the film’s final stretch, Jamali provides pleasure to his community (he holds both rehearsals and screenings in the open air) but winds up as lonely and isolated as many heroes in American Westerns. MY NAME IS NEGAHDAR JAMALI AND I MAKE WESTERNS ends with an extreme long shot of Jamali riding alone on desert roads, to the tune of Ennio Morricone.

“His {Jamahli’s} minimalism and no-budget, semi- experimental films, like a crossover between the poorest of B westerns and Jack Smith, stands out as ultra primitive drafts of {Budd} Boetticher’s westerns, and, on the other hand, his individualism puts him is the same category as Randolph Scott’s laconic avengers.” – Ehsan Khoshbakht

( poster by Tyler Rubenfeld )

DINGOMARO
(دینگه‌مارو)
dir. Kamran Heidari, 2014
66 min. Iran.
In Farsi with English subtitles.
(Note: depicts animal slaughter briefly in the context of a religious ceremony.)

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 11 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 14 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24 – 10 PM

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Dingomaro is a wind that sweeps Iran from the African coast. It’s also the nickname of musician Hamid Said, adopted proudly to reflect his African heritage. A population of black Iranians live in the south of the country, having arrived both from voluntary immigration and slavery, but they’ve been almost entirely absent in the country’s arthouse films. (The recent HENDI AND HORMOZ, which played the Iranian Film Festival NY in January, is an exception.)

Heidari films Said, in the wake of his hit “Bad Shans” (“Hard Luck” in English), traveling around the province of Hormozan as he organizes a concert celebrating Afro-Iranian roots. This is his most joyful documentary. Sajjad Avarand’s cinematography – three different cameramen, including Heidari himself, shot the film – captures the region’s immense natural beauty without any of the ironic or melancholic undertones of MY NAME IS NEGAHDAR JAMALI AND I MAKE WESTERNS. (The two films’ endings rhyme exactly.) It’s a documentary that Jonathan Demme could have made.

However, it doesn’t focus wholly on music, never playing a song all the way through. As cheerful as it is, it’s not without drama, stemming from tension within families. But that gets defused at a father-son concert mixing hip-hop with older forms of Iranian pop. Racism is never expressed overtly in DINGOMARO, but the invisibility of black Iranian identity bites at Said. It’s the reason why he thinks his heritage needs to be explicitly pointed out and celebrated. When he meets up with his friend and fellow musician Carlos Nejad, Carlos says “our younger generation doesn’t even accept that they have African roots… I don’t even know why insist so much that you’re African.” While music is the main means by which DINGOMARO’s subjects assert their blackness, the film also shows ceremonies of the Zar sect, which mixes Shia Islam and indigenous African traditions in a manner akin to Santeria.


ALI AQA
(علی آقا)
dir. Kamran Heidari, 2017
82 mins. Iran/France/Switzerland.
In Farsi with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, APRIL 4 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 15 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 19 – 10 PM
SUNDAY APRIL 28 – 5 PM

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If I AM NEGAHDAR JAMALI AND I MAKE WESTERNS is a mostly sympathetic treatment of male obsession, ALI AQA returns to the subject with a much darker tone. Instead of profiling an artist, Heidari chose Ali Aqa, a man devoted to the pigeons whom he keeps on the roof of his apartment building. Ali pays more attention to the birds’ health than this own; his wife points out that he’s willing to perform surgery on them while delaying an operation that he needs himself. Now 70, he looks like an aging biker or Grateful Dead roadie, with white hair past his shoulders and a full beard. But he turns out to be a rage machine. There’s a stereotype that some people’s love for animals is actually an expression of misanthropy and contempt for their fellow humans, and in Ali’s case it’s quite true. He’s diabetic and starting to have difficulty getting around, but does nothing to try and preserve his quality of life.

Around the 45-minute mark, something happens which alters one’s perception of Ali: he goes from being a grumpy old man to a danger to the people around him. And while Heidari obviously isn’t a passive observer, Ali and his wife show their awareness of the camera. The film becomes a reflection on the responsibility of documentarians towards their subjects. On the website of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Heidari revealed to Mark Baker that “Ali told us not to meddle with his personal life ever again, and even banned us from visiting his home for a while. But after some discussion with him, everything got back to normal and we resumed shooting.” A key moment is edited from the film, although after one has seen it, it’s quite clear what has happened. With this film, Heidari put his body (and camera) on the line in a way that raises the stakes considerably from the friendlier subjects of I AM NEGHADAR JAMALI AND I MAKE WESTERNS and DINGOMARO.

ALI AQA evolved from Heidari’s interest in photographing pigeons. The project started out as a documentary about them, but he settled on depicting men who love the birds instead. While it respects Ali’s passion, one watches in dismay as the film reveals his enthusiasm devolving from a healthy hobby to something that detracts from his attention to his family. If I AM NEGAHDAR JAMALI AND I MAKE WESTERNS had a similar underlying drama, ALI AQA raises it to the level of overt critique. But it makes one understand that Ali is trying to find something therapeutic in his pigeons that he can’t get from people, even if this is a largely failed quest.

NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS
(واکس چه)
dir. Kamran Heidari, 2019
67 mins. Iran.
In Farsi with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, APRIL 2 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 16 – 7:30 PM followed by a Skype Q&A with Kamran Heidari
THURSDAY, APRIL 25 – 7:30 PM

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NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS is named after a song by Ibrahim Monsefi, which gets played in several versions during the film. Near the end, its narrator says “how I lived and died is up to me.” Nevertheless, this fictional autobiography tries to reconstruct his life without turning it into a conventional narrative. The film begins with images of the skyscrapers of Bandar Abbas, the city where he was born, taken from a drone. Most of it consists of drifting camera movements, relying heavily on drones, that try to capture the perspective of a person walking slowly while high on heroin. Monsefi died of an overdose of that drug, possibly deliberately. After descending from the sky, the camera takes us to the room where he died.

Heidari and two other screenwriters created a voice-over told by the dead Monsefi. He starts the film by taking about his early life, bringing us to his childhood home and the Hindu temples where he first got a taste of the power of music. As the camera travels around Bandar Abbas, musicians perform Monsefi’s songs in the city’s streets. (It’s reminiscent of the great Brazilian singer/songwriter Caetano Veloso.) While not overtly concerned with race in the same way as DINGOMARO, NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS still showcases the diversity of Southern Iran, emphasizing the coexistence of Islam and Hinduism and the presence of black Iranians.

Mixing elements of fiction and documentary, it tells the story of Monsefi’s life. If the voice-over moves ahead in a fairly linear manner, the images rarely simply illustrate his biography. Instead, the film takes many detours to enjoy the street life of Bandar Abbas and the pleasure of listening to Monsefi’s music. Real and fictional stories of musicians whose early promise – at his peak, Monsefi wrote poetry and acted in addition to his songwriting – vanishes in a haze of drugs may be very common, but NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS is formally unconventional enough that it never feels remotely like a BEHIND THE MUSIC episode. It uses home movie footage gingerly, but its most powerful moment is the ending, where a grainy video of Monsefi performing the title song disappears into flickering electronic snow.

STEVE ERICKSON is a film and music critic who writes for Gay City News, Cineaste, the Nashville Scene, Studio Daily and Kinoscope. He has written and directed 6 short films. His first foray into film programming was Anthology Film Archives’ Mehrdad Oskouei retrospective in February 2018.

KAMRAN HEIDARI was born in Gachsaran, near Shiraz, in 1977. He is a freelance documentary filmmaker and photographer, with an interest in street photography, graffiti and ethno-music. His work focuses on film and photography about the people of Shiraz (Fars Province) and the South of Iran. MY NAME IS NEGAHDAR JAMALI AND I MAKE WESTERNS was screened at many festivals around the world, including the 2013 Busan International Film Festival and Rotterdam.

SUNDAY, MARCH 17 – 5 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
FACEBOOK EVENT

Calling all tapeheads! Do you have mystery MiniDV, Hi-8, or VHS assets languishing in storage? Unsure of what to do with these plastic treasures, or even what’s on them? Put your trust in radical archival group XFR Collective for a special one-night only event at Spectacle.

XFR Collective “partners with individuals and organizations to provide low-cost digitization services and to develop sustainable models for managing and providing access to audiovisual materials.” With their mobile tape transfer units, XFR has been popping up in venues all over town, ingesting and preserving now-defunct formats for special events that combine the best of a swap meet with a little experimental cinema exhibition. Think of it as Antiques Roadshow, for fans and collectors of analog video!

Here’s how it works: you, the audience, bring your mystery tapes to Spectacle. While XFR Collective is transferring the goods, sit back and enjoy a showcase screening of their best finds! When the evening’s transfers are complete, the veil is lifted and all participants can get a nice juicy eyeful of what turned up.

So bring a buddy, bring a beer, and bring that dusty unlabeled MiniDV tape you found at Goodwill, because you never know what’s going to happen when XFR Collective is on the scene!

Tape transfers start at 6pm, but get there early to grab a set and a spot in the queue!

( poster by Lauryn Siegel )