AN EVENING WITH LYDIA NSIAH

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

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This fall, Spectacle is pleased to host artist, filmmaker and writer Lydia Nsiah for a special one-night evening of selected films touching on spiraling body archives, techno distortions and the getting by forgetting – followed by a Q+A with the artist moderated by filmmaker Melissa Friedling.

distortion
2016. 5 mins.

Interference signals on all tracks: booming, choppy sound. The image disintegrates into digital blocks, into patterns and grids; flickers and vibrates. Flashing in between is a figure, a landscape, and a face. An uncanny rush of image and sound that probes the aesthetic potential of digitally deformed film. The concrete disintegrates into the abstract — distorted film in its most beautiful form.

to forget
2019. 17 min.

to forget is a filmic journey on the potentialities of forgetting and its resemblance to remembering. Recorded entirely on expired Super-8 and 16mm film, forgetting becomes productive and ‘visible’ in non-existing, fading and colour transformed film exposures. This (non-)documentation of possibly empty and fading spaces (to be) is further highlighted by Jejuno’s trance-like and uncanny sound composition: The abyss is present.

vs
2021. 8 min.

Images of buildings, strange architectural structures, in between vegetation and lots of blue sky: at first glance, it could be travel photos that Lydia Nsiah uses in the film vs. But the viewers’ eyes never arrive at the point of sorting out or more closely analyzing what they see: the images are accelerated, shifted, distorted, and blurred through a spiral rotation.

The artist designed and operated the technical apparatus for this. Recordings from server farms and data centers, which are the result of various translation processes between World Wide Web, expired 16mm films, and digital video, are sent into a metaphorical and literal maelstrom – becoming a mechanical eye that looks back and looks at us, the viewers. In return we look briefly into the abyss of the resource consumption that the server farms require to store millions and millions of bits and pixels.

Hui Ye’s composition processes the analogue and digital sounds of the multiple film recordings. A soundscape of layers and samples arises, which makes the film three-dimensional. The movement of the images, the spiral camera pan, is thus located between repetition and standstill, and becomes a seemingly eerie “impossibility.”

Like in earlier works, also in vs, Lydia Nsiah is concerned with recording and forgetting. What might a “body archive” (Julietta Singh) located in the sensorial look like? Who or what do data storage systems exclude? Can gaps be intentionally included in an archive? The strudel of images, the hypnotic sound of vs set the viewer’s entire body, not only the eye, in upheaval, in rapture, which deprives the subject of an ontological base. Arising through this “queering” of an established cinematographic human-machine connection is the possibility of a new, different way of dealing with memory, production of meaning, and ultimately cinema.

LYDIA NSIAH is an artist, filmmaker and writer, working with the in-between, abysses and gaps in audiovisual knowledge production by transforming and incorporating found and recorded analogue and digital memory images, often in collaboration with sound artists. She publishes and exhibits internationally on Virtuality, Forgetting and Remembering, Failure and Error, Decolonial Practice, Film Art and Use. Her works were shown, among others, at the Berlinale Forum Expanded, the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (DE), Prismatic Grounds/ Maysles Documentary Center, NYC (US), Crossroads San Francisco Cinemateque/ SFMOMA (US), IDFA – International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (NL), Festival Ecrã (BR), Bangkok Art & Cultural Center (TH), Blickle Kino/ Belvedere 21, Kunsthalle Krems (AT), Slovenska kinoteka (SL), Curtocircuíto, Santiago de Compostela (ES), Antimatter [Media Art], Victoria, BC (CA), Kunstforeningen GL Strand (DK). Her films are distributed by Arsenal – Institut für Film- und Videokunst and sixpackfilm. Her art is in the collections of Wien Museum, Van Abbemuseum, Center for Book Arts, Mumok, Belvedere, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, University of Applied Arts Vienna et al.

AN EVENING WITH JOÃO VIEIRA TORRES

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

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Join us for this very special one-night only screening of four short films by the French-Brazilian artist and filmmaker João Vieira Torres. The program will be followed by an in-person Q&A with the filmmaker moderated by guest curator Alia Ayman.

HERE, THERE AND LISBON
2012. 18 mins.

An experimental documentary and a visual poem on the meeting of a city which we do not see but which is present through the sounds and the thermal cartography body imprints of one of its inhabitants.

TORE
2015. 15 mins.

There is that
which I see
which is shown to me
which I can’t see
which I don’t see

I was invited to film a ritual. That which can be shown to foreigners. A child of the tribe watches Disney’s FANTASIA on TV. He is interrupted. What does the child live when he dances? What am I able to see from what is shown to me?

*Shot in the Xucuru-Kariri, in Alagoas, Brazil

GHOST CHILDREN
2017. 16 mins.

Whose faces are in those pictures? Everyone here remembers the first day of their life. A birth of memories and ghosts linking the lives of the living and the undead. How can I remember what my eyes and ears could seize? If all is an ongoing construction, why couldn’t your memories be closer to mine than my own?

SEASICK
2021. 15 mins.

SEASICK is a gasp of air, a shout sung in waves moving through a body nauseated by the confrontation with the violence of the ever-swirling world. This improvised singing tries to break the invisible glass that separates the gaze and the realities of those who can observe from afar and those who are observed, but who are mostly prevented from returning such gaze. Who/what’s missing in the room?

The film was shot during the 2019 Venice Biennale and built around a performative intervention carried out by Torres himself in the exhibition space.

ALIA AYMAN makes and curates film and video and lives between Cairo and New York City. She is the co-founder of Zawya, an art-house cinema in Cairo and a doctoral candidate in sociocultural anthropology at New York University. She is a programming consultant for Berlinale Forum, The International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA), and BlackStar Film Festival. She has previously curated programs for Images Festival in Toronto, Flaherty NYC, and Arsenal Institute for Film and Video in Berlin among others.

JOAO VIEIRA TORRES is a French-Brazilian artist/filmmaker. He works between France and Brazil. MA in photography/video art, Postgraduate degree at Le Fresnoy (France). PhD in research on the use of documents in contemporary art, at École Sup. Européenne de l’Image. His artistic practice includes: photography, cinema, video art, writing, and performance. One of the main axes of his work is the issue of otherness and the need for building an anchorage, whether territorial, historical, corporeal, or identity. His work has been presented in many festivals, galleries and museums including MoMA , The Flaherty Seminar (US), Centre Pompidou (FR), New York Film Festival, Olhar de Cinema (BR), Int. Film Fest. Rotterdam (NL), Palais de Tokyo (FR), Villa Arson (FR), FIDMarseille (FR), DocLisboa (PT), MIS São Paulo (BR), Rencontres Int. du Documentaire de Montréal (CA), Anthology Film Archives (US), LABoral (SP), CPH:Dox (DK), IndieLisboa and many others.

ANTI-LANDLORD CINEMA

On Saturday August 27th, join Spectacle, Cine-Movil and the Crown Heights Tenants Union for an emergency outdoor double feature at Lincoln Terrace Park starting at 7PM. This program juxtaposes two martial arts classics: David Warmflash’s grindhouse epic DEATH PROMISE (1977) and French filmmaker Pierre Morel’s BANLIEUE 13 (or DISTRICT B13), released in 2004.

DEATH PROMISE
dir. Robert Warmflash, 1976
95 mins. United States.
In English.

DEATH PROMISE stars martial artists Charles Bonnet (also nicknamed “La Pantera”) and Speedy Leacock as two young fighters who unite to take down a cabal of corrupt and exploitative landlords after Charley’s father is murdered. Albeit a late-night exploitation thriller from the last moment of human history when “Trump” was an obscure name, DEATH PROMISE eerily invokes the 1973 suit brought against Trump Management in Brooklyn, wherein Trump was accused of discriminating against nonwhite tenants to drive up his property value. The infamous theatrical trailer climaxed with a filthy rich landlord having his head tied in a burlap sack, besieged by feral rats. The voice-over intones, “A warning to the rich: get off our backs.

DEATH PROMISE, acclaimed by critics as a chilling and exciting motion picture in the tradition of DEATH WISH… A film of poor against the rich…..

DISTRICT B13
(aka BANLIEUE 13)
dir. Pierre Morel, 2004
81 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

BANLIEUE 13 explores a different set of issues, as an elite undercover cop infiltrates a notorious 21st century ghetto housing project after a nuclear weapon falls into the hands of a powerful drug lord. A violent bromance takes place as one of the building’s residents joins his struggle after his sister is kidnapped by the same kingpin. Produced by Luc Besson at the peak of his Europacorp phase, BANLIEUE 13 is a nonstop martial arts thrill ride, but also endeavors to be a scabrous critique of the failures of social democracy for residents of slums like the suburb B13, almost as if LA HAINE were remade as a parkour movie. It was followed by DISTRICT B13: ULTIMATUM a few years later and, in 2014, remade by RZA and the late Paul Walker as BRICK MANSIONS (with DISTRICT B13’s original star David Belle bringing his irreplaceable stuntwork.)

Special thanks to Magnolia Pictures, Crown Heights Tenants Union, American Genre Film Archive and Cine-Movil.

Cine Móvil is a pop-up cinema collective spreading revolutionary culture across the five boroughs. Founded in the wake of the 2020 uprisings, the collective endeavors to bring together audiences to view and discuss radical cinema. Cine Móvil recognizes the role that culture plays in movements, and aims to uplift the revolutionary consciousness of people, connecting the films they screen with the real material conditions which people and organizations face in the present. Cinema is for the people!

Crown Heights Tenant Union was founded in 2013, and is a union of tenant associations. We are a mix of both long-term and new tenants who collectively fight against gentrification, harassment, displacement, and illegal rent overcharges in the neighborhood. We provide education, advice, and support for all of our neighbors. We also demand and fight for stronger tenant protections and rights throughout the state of New York. As of today, we have over 40 member buildings, and have recently been involved in campaigns to #CancelRent, establish an eviction moratorium, and fight the Adams’ administrations attempts to raise rent on rent stabilized units. We believe that when we fight, we win!

AN EVENING WITH LARRY GOTTHEIM

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 6 – 7:30 PM with Larry Gottheim in person for Q+A!
(This event is $10.)
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

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One of the fundamental figures of American avant-garde cinema, LARRY GOTTHEIM has composed a diverse body of work over the span of 50 years. His films stretch the boundaries of cinema as a vessel for deeply personal and philosophical expression and explore the rich blurred zone between the life of the mind and the material world. In 1967, Gottheim founded the Cinema Department at Binghamton University, which was the first regular undergraduate program that dealt with cinema as a personal art, bringing along key avant garde filmmakers like Ken Jacobs and Ernie Gehr as faculty. Considering the theme of nature in art and functions of racial, cultural and personal identity, Gottheim’s practice explores the ways in which time, movement, and becoming are bound up in a complex relation between formal cinematic patterns and pro-filmic subjects. In the beginning is the ending. (All film descriptions written by the artist.)

BLUES
1969. 8 ½ mins. 16mm at 16fps.

“A close continuous view of a bowl of blueberries and milk. A spoon comes in and scoops up some of the berries, presumably to be eaten, until they are all gone. The milk, that is always there, manifests itself more and more as the berries are removed and finally seems to rise up and be washed over by light that struck the end of the camera roll as it was removed from the camera. A malfunction with the camera motor of a rare 8mm Bolex produces a regular pulse against the slight flicker of the shutter at silent speed. There are already indications of a mystery as some of the berries move down as though charged by the energy of the camera’s and viewer’s concentration. This is my first real film; all the others rise out of this one.”

CORN
1970. 11 mins. 16mm.

“This is one of the films that came out of a rejection of expressive camera work, sound, language, editing. I wanted to offer a rich experience of phenomena and associations that could come from a continuous moving image the length of a roll of film. The scene is a space of ceremony, of an offering. This is the world of my house in the country, of my marriage to a potter whose bowl represents her. She is the actor. There are actions that have to do with the transformation of ears of corn into sustenance. These actions take place within a space/time theater of slow continuous changes of light and shadow. There are long spaces where the viewer is free to look at various parts of the screen and, with the steam that rises from the cooked ears, into the very grains of the film itself. The sinuous dance of steam is a counterpart to the fog of FOG LINE. The two films are joined.”

DOORWAY
1970. 7 ½ mins. 16mm at 16 fps.

“Finally I moved the camera, in a slow pan from one side of the wide door of my wife’s pottery studio to the other. While the camera is panning left, the visual sense is of the features of the near and far landscape moving right. The doorway itself marks a plane separating the inside from the outside, as windows will do in other films. Because of the change in temperature between the inside and outside there is a pulse that is visible along with the shutter’s pulse when the film is projected at the correct silent speed. This pulse seems like the pulse of vision that emanates out from the camera, making a moving cow stand frozen behind another. That image stands out from the other material as most charged with meaning, but it too passes by. The lines of hills and fences end edges continue the motif of the line in FOG LINE, and prefigure HORIZONS.”

THOUGHT
1970. 7 ½ mins. 16mm at 16 fps.

“The last of my continuous shot silent films. There is a very limited field of view, with small sliding and focus motions, but a lot to see. The previous films grew out of formal ideas, without much conscious concern with meaning, but now I was becoming aware of the implications of these works, and so I gave it this title.”

HARMONICA
1971. 10 ½ mins. 16mm.

“This concludes the series of continuous shot films, but now with sound. The sound is produced by the car and the people inside it. The car window is both a screen and a plane that separates the inner world from the outside. Shelley, the performer, generates the primary sound when he breaks through that plane. The film is popular because of the vibrant energy of the performer, the music, and the autumn landscape, but it is also complex. As with the previous films, I myself am passive. The driver and the car and Shelley are the creative forces. He is the first of many avatars, doubles of me, that appear in many of my films and that became one thread of my later attraction to ceremonial possession.”

KNOT/NOT
2019. 22 mins. Video.

‘“KNOT”—wrapping things up, tying things up. “NOT “– cross out, erasure. Material from a documentary about conductor Wilhelm Fürtwangler, material from a graffiti stencil work on a brick wall near where I live, a stencil of a girl writing something on the wall, what she wrote crossed out by another act of graffiti. These are the main elements. Also footage looking down at the water of Pearl Harbor with the ruins of battleship Arizona beneath. It had turned red with age. And some footage from Manchester the morning after the terrorists struck. All composed against a sound piece, a multiplication table repeated in four languages. Everything superimposed. It’s not just about what it’s about, but also memory, negatives that try to get negated. About music and painting. Politics, longing and regret. Superimposition is the primary device. The doubling and tripling suggest many implications.’

Special thanks to Malkah Manouel, Christian Flemm and Phil Coldiron.

SHADOWS PASS AWAY: THREE REMASTERED FILMS BY SCOTT BARLEY

Intended to be witnessed in complete darkness, Spectacle is pleased to dim the lights extra low for a sampling of recently remastered works from acclaimed slow cinema practitioner Scott Barley, whose immersive and dread-inducing nocturnal landscape films have found international recognition despite relative underappreciation in New York City. Throughout August, Barley’s seminal shot-on-iPhone feature debut SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE will be preceded by two other dense doses of ecological and cosmic terror: HINTERLANDS and WOMB.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 – 5PM with Scott Barley for remote Q+A!
(This event is $10.)
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – MIDNIGHT
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 10 PM

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SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE
dir. Scott Barley, 2017; 2021 remaster
United Kingdom. 90 mins.

Structured as if it were the final inhale and exhale of Mother Nature from her deathbed, the carefully assembled long takes and immersive soundscapes that make up Barley’s masterful debut feature transmute shadow-blanketed trees, waterfalls and sparse signs of wildlife into haunting alien figures. With one last breath, a decaying post-human world collapses into eternal abstraction. Shot on iPhone 6 Plus.

screening with

HINTERLANDS
2016; 2019 remaster. United Kingdom.
7 mins.

Something seems to be coming from the sky, but we are pulled into its grasp before we can comprehend what awaits. Initially inspired by a repetitive nightmare and the first-person viewpoint of Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro’s canceled video game project SILENT HILLS, Barley ended up repurposing 5 minutes of footage shot from a car passenger seat to create this descent into blunt-forced formalist horror.

WOMB
2017; 2019 remaster. United Kingdom.
17 mins.

Though some of Barley’s earlier films feature human beings on camera, WOMB marks a decisive development in his aesthetic treatment of darkness, death and rebirth. Within a pitch-dark maw that opens between the stars, writhing bodies suspended in the void become as immense and uncanny as any of Barley’s wilderness tableaus.

SCOTT BARLEY is an artist-filmmaker, drone musician, writer and lecturer working between Scotland and Wales whose films (much of which are generously accessible through his website) have been exhibited over the last decade at venues such as BFI Southbank, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Venice Biennale and Telluride Film Festival. In 2018, Barley co-founded the filmmaking collective Obscuritads, and in 2021, EYE Filmmuseum permanently inducted SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE into its archive. Since 2017, Barley has been making his ambitious second feature film, THE SEA BEHIND HER HEAD, with support from the BFI and DocSociety, along with two new shorts titled THE FLESH and WITHIN WITHOUT HORIZON.

Total runtime: 114 min. These films contain intense strobing sequences that may not be safe for those sensitive to light.

ALI IN WONDERLAND


ALI IN WONDERLAND

(علي في بلاد العجائب)
dirs. Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy, 1976
59 mins. Algeria/France.
In French and Arabic with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 9 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 19 – 10 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 22 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 27 – 5 PM

4K RESTORATION – NYC PREMIERE

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Miraculously blending styles of militant polemical and experimental essay filmmaking, ALI IN WONDERLAND speaks to the struggle of Maghrebi workers in Paris in the 1970s. Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy made the film in their twenties, as participants of the Centre Universitaire de Vincennes – a leftist cinema collective formed in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprisings. Fully living up to their stated intention to imbue images “like blows of the fist” upon the film’s viewers, Abouda and Bonnamy paint a visceral and unforgettable portrait of migrant exploitation as it manifests (whether in history or today) in western urban capitals – essential viewing alongside Spectacle favorites like Sidney Sokhona’s NATIONALITE: IMMIGRE and Madubuko Diakite’s THE INVISIBLE PEOPLE.

Formally playful yet ferociously political, ALI IN WONDERLAND is among the most important Francophone films of the (increasingly so-called) postcolonial era, yet has been unavailable to see for decades. Following streaming engagements organized by our friends at Another Gaze and ArteEast in 2021, Spectacle is thrilled to host the New York City premiere of ALI IN WONDERLAND’s new 4K restoration, based on original negatives and a 16mm exhibition copy, supervised by Léa Morin at Image Retrouvée in collaboration with the filmmakers.

“Shaky and stirring, ALI IN WONDERLAND shows an increasingly devastating conflict between the actions of workers and those of the society that employs them without ever seeing or considering them. Luxury shops and boutiques selling haute couture contrast brutally with the living conditions and work undertaken by the Algerians. Images of narrow walkways between tower blocks, slums, substandard apartments, respond figuratively to society’s repressive order of police violence and racism, as well as France’s colonial legacy (the filmmakers include archival images of the Algerian War of Independence, the Sétif massacre, and photographs taken by journalist Élie Kagan on the night of the Paris Massacre of 1961). Abouda and Bonnamy make use of the full audio-visual arsenal of experimental cinema at the time: superimposition and flicker; mosaic images and split screen; fast and slow motion; the integration of still images and animation; jump cuts and shots where the cut is almost imperceptible; and glitching and distortion, either done in-camera or in the edit. Each aesthetic choice is justified by a politics that is precise and easy to decipher – following in the footsteps of the soviet tradition of “ciné-poing” / “cine-fist” (Eisenstein) and even the “ciné-œil” / “cine-eye” (after Esther Choub and Dziga Vertov) and avant-garde documentary of the twenties and thirties (Alberto Cavalcanti, Hans Richter, Jean Vigo).

The montage brings together musical and vocal refrains with visual motifs and the repetition of certain sounds and images takes the viewer into an almost ‘fantastical’ dimension (as noted by the writer Tahar Ben Jelloun in Le Monde in 1978), making the city feel even more oppressive, presented like a great biopolitical and disciplinary laboratory. This ensemble of themes (work, city, lodging, women, children, men, sex work) is contained within a circular construct that echoes the “City Symphonies” genre of the twenties, beginning and ending at night with a shot of the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Élysées, having taken the viewer through all the stages in a day in the life of an Algerian worker.”Federico Rossin, Cahiers du Cinema (via Another Gaze)

screening with

ALGERIE COLOURS
dirs. Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy, 1972
16 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

CINE-CITE
dirs. Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy, 1974
15 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

Via Association TALITHA Films. Special thanks to Peter Limbrick and Lea Morin.

(poster by Benjamin Tuttle)

DOOMED

DOOMED
dir. Allen Riley, 2021
58 mins. United States.
In English.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6 – 7 PM with filmmaker Allen Riley in person for Q+A!
(This event is $10.)
TUESDAY, AUGUST 9 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 13 – 5 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 22 – 10 PM

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DOOMED is a grunge fantasy narrative made with point-and-shoot cameras. The film was made by a group of friends in the hills and swamps surrounding Stroudsburg, PA during the course of three years. With a backpack, a couple of small cameras, a digital audio recorder and a thrift store tripod that had missing feet, the cast created a lo-fi parable about the creative process told through 90’s alternative rock iconography.

According to Riley (the director), the production crept into a realm of immersive fiction with the cast/crew living collectively for weeks and even sleeping overnight in the abandoned chicken coop where the interior scenes were filmed.

The centerpiece of DOOMED is a fantastical tree creature named Glofin constructed using burlap, latex, alpaca wool, and glass taxidermy eyes. At one point, production was halted when Glofin was destroyed by wild animals which marked the end of the film’s production, but years later, a complete narrative within the footage was about to be salvaged and constructed. As a grunge opera, the musical score was physically processed using analog cassette tapes recorded by Riley, who practiced guitar as a teenager in the 90s. The resulting film is charged with spontaneous energy and moments of heavy reverb.

TWO FILMS BY GABRIEL BARTALOS

This August, join us for two feature films (and a few odds and end short surprises!) from Gabriel Bartalos, the practical effects mad man behind most of the LEPRECHAUN series, as well as a resume that spans from DAWN OF THE DEAD and FRANKENHOOKER to TIM AND ERIC’S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE. There’s something for everyone (?) in these two singular ‘horror’ flicks from a living effects master.

SKINNED DEEP
dir. Gabriel Bartalos, 2004
97 mins. United States.
In English.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7 – 5 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 8 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 20 – 9:30 PM with Q&A with Gabriel Bartalos
(This event is $10.)
SATURDAY, AUGUST 27 – MIDNIGHT

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A family’s flat tire on a barren stretch of road, with only a diner dotting the landscape, leads them to Granny, the seemingly nice old woman who runs the establishment.

Released in 2004, SKINNED DEEP plays like a surreal riff on THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE from an alternate dimension. It follows a family on a cross country road trip who stumbes into a hellish diner run by ‘the Surgeon General’ and his nightmare family, including ‘Brian’ (who has a massive cranium) and ‘Plates’ – a maniac who throws….plates – played by Warwick Davis.

Clearly crafted with a lot of love and care, SKINNED DEEP is mandatory midnight viewing for slasher fans.

SAINT BERNARD
dir. Gabriel Bartalos, 2019
97 mins. United States.
In English.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 18 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 26 – 9:30 PM – with Q&A with Gabriel Bartalos
(This event is $10.)
TUESDAY, AUGUST 30 – 7:30 PM

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A classical musical conductor unravels into the abyss of insanity.

Gabriel’s second feature manages to outdo its predecessor in terms of both scope and tone – SAINT BERNARD has far more in common with experimental classics like ERASERHEAD than the bizarro 70s/80s slasher fare of SKINNED DEEP.

Those expecting a linear narrative (or the WTF slasher antics of SKINNED DEEP) will have their expectations twisted like a Bartalos clay sculpture, and if you allow yourself to get on the movie’s wavelength, there is a lot to love – a sincere, surreal exploration of obsession and addiction, full of chaos and mind blowing practical effects.

ARMY OF LOVE + OCEANO DE AMOR


ARMY OF LOVE

dirs. Ingo Niermann and Alexa Karolinski, 2016
40 mins. Germany.
In German with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 6 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 17 – 5:30 PM
THURSDAY, JULY 21 – 7:30 PM


OCEANO DE AMOR
dirs. Ingo Niermann and Alexa Karolinski, 2020
90 mins. Germany.
In German with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 6 – 8:30 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 8 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 17 – 6:30 PM

Originally created for the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, ARMY OF LOVE is a short film created by Ingo Niermann and Alexa Karolinski that premiered at The KW Institute (Germany) in 2016. Ingo Niermann is a German author and artist, and Alexa Karolinski is a German filmmaker, known for her work on the television series Unorthodox. OCEANO DE AMOR is a follow-up set on the beaches of Cuba. Both films explore the impact of alienation and how to solve it. We, the audience, are asked: what do we need beyond the redistribution of money? According to Niermann and Karolinski, it is the redistribution of love, which the films present as a remedy for loneliness. An all-encompassing, deep, and profound sense of love – that does not exist in a marketplace.

You might ask, who gets this “love?” Those who need it the most; those who society deems unlovable, due to their appearances, health status, or age. Ultimately, the directors seek to highlight the struggle between the mind and the body (i.e., how we want love but the way our body looks prevents it in society) and how such dynamics play out in contemporary economic systems and in our interpersonal relationships.

DEATH OF A BUSINESS JERRY

DEATH OF A BUSINESS JERRY
dir. Jeremy Finch, 2019
90 mins. United States.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, JULY 16 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JULY 21 – 9:30 PM with special musical introduction courtesy The Timewolf Order
(This event is $10.)
FRIDAY, JULY 22 – 7 PM with filmmaker Jeremy Finch for Q+A! 

(This event is $10.)
SUNDAY, JULY 24 – 5 PM

Business Jerry is done with the business of life. Working at a cafe and music venue in Brooklyn feels like spiritual death. Each night Jerry returns home to confide in his dog Linda. As Jerry tries to keep his band together, PRIIVLEGE, a menacing media start-up wants to appropriate all the New York venues, and life itself, into it’s brand. The only hope for Jerry and Linda is the natural world. Can Jerry and Linda escape the grip that PRIIVLEGE now has on New York City, or will Jerry sign away their lives altogether? Shot on miniDV mostly in Ridgewood and Bushwick, DEATH OF A BUSINESS JERRY features a large community of artists including Juan Wauters, Sophia Lamar, Masma Dream World, Bobby Puleo, Trouble Troupe, Timewolf Deluxe, Mysterease, Sage Sovereign, Champdope, Yairms and more.

JEREMY FINCH is a seasoned food service worker. He has seen many faces consuming various food items. In 2018, Mr. Finch was struck by some ominous recurring situations around the neighborhood. He decided to write a movie, and with the help of many friends it was made. That movie, DEATH OF A BUSINESS JERRY, cultivated a beautiful community and inspired Finch to make more films. His next LA BUFADORA is due out soon.