AFA Screening: MFJ 76 "Worlds"

Celebrating the publication of Millennium Film Journal No. 76 “Worlds”, the program consists of six rarely screened recent experimental media works from around the world. The subjects cover a wide range: from the ambiguity of gesture in the time of Covid (Eva Giolo, Belgium) to the hurricane battered East coast of India (Paribartana Mohanty, India), from a discussion between mother and her filmmaker son about the almost lost Pechanga language of the Luiseño Indians (Sky Hopinka, USA), to a layered animation produced as spiritual practice (Alisi Telengut, Canada/Mongolia), as well as fascinating works by Vika Kirchenbauer (Germany) and Chiara Caterina (Italy).

Selected and presented by Millennium Film Journal senior editor Grahame Weinbren and editor-at-large Jonathan Ellis.

Chiara Caterina L’Incanto [Enchantment] (2021, 20′ Italy)

In 1997, Donatella Colasanti was found alive in the trunk of a car after being raped and tortured. In 2006, Rosa Bazzi and her husband stabbed four people to death, including an infant because “I didn’t like the way he was screaming.” L’Incanto’s soundtrack includes fragments of an interview with Donatella and of Rosa’s police interrogation: the voices of a victim and a murderess. Chiara Caterina placed these audio recordings, along with segments of a Tarot card session and other women’s stories — all on the subject of death — against images from “abandoned projects” (her words).” The result is a compelling, unique film.

Grahame Weinbren “Enchantment / Spells / Murders: EMAF 2022” (MFJ 76)

Eva Giolo Flowers Blooming in our Throats (2020, 8′ Belgium)

. . . a shifting line where gestures remain symbolically ambiguous, expressing a kind of violence that is not immediately recognizable. Hands try to support or escape, but also to grip or strike, in a subtle interweaving of sounds and references that adds to the viewer’s sense of tension and unease. A dialogue of gestures, made up of repeated visual sequences where time is marked by the spinning of a small toy top, as unstable and precarious as the balance of a relationship.

Leonardo Bigazzi “In Between Art Film“

Sky Hopinka Kicking the Clouds (2021, 15′ US)

. . . a reflection on descendants and ancestors, guided by a 50 year old audio recording of my grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother. After being given this tape by my mother, I interviewed her and asked about it, and recorded her ruminations on their lives and her own. The footage is of our chosen home in Whatcom County, Washington, where my family still lives, far from our homelands in Southern California, yet a home nonetheless.

Sky Hopinka Artist Statement

Vika Kirchenbauer The Capacity for Adequate Anger (2021, 15′ Germany)

. . . brief excerpts of animation film The Rose of Versailles recur-—the only motion sequences—at least a dozen times in The Capacity for Adequate Anger. The work is otherwise composed of stills from archival and personal sources, meticulously placed against the filmmaker’s voice relating episodes of her childhood and artistic development. Connections between narration and images are at first obscure, but progressively resolve into a lexicon of word-image relationships: allegorical, symbolic, illustrative, metaphorical, referential, captional.

Grahame Weinbren “EMAF 2022 Continued: Commentary on Selected Works” (MFJ 76 online)

Paribartana Mohanty Rice Hunger Sorrow (2021, 20′ India)

Rice Hunger Sorrow investigates deeper the changing cultural meanings, manifestations and representations of environment disaster, through the invention of new technological mediations, interventions and new government public policies in Odisha. It studies new environment-disaster-landscapes evolving near the coast of Bay of Bengal in Odisha since the 1999 Super Cyclone. The project pursues basic ground level experiments in the form and medium of ‘storytelling’. How does one tell the same story repeatedly with different contexts, materials and mediums, the way our mythologies are told.

Paribartana Mohanty Artist Statement

Alisi Telengut Fourfold (2020, 7′ Canada/Mongolia)

To make her films, Telengut works on a single surface or piece of paper, painting with pastels and fingertips, to produce a three-dimensional picture on a magazine-sized substrate. Scenes are painted, photographed, and then either adjusted, erased, or painted over. Films are produced live on the canvas, which, at the end, stands tall and thick. This procedure is repeated over many months, concluding with the creation of two interrelated yet distinct artworks: a digitally rendered film made via stop motion animation, and a sculptural artifact made by hand.

Chris Dymond “Media of Devotion” (MFJ 76)

Total running time: ca. 90 min.

Anthology Film Archive Film Notes

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This program is partially funded by NYSCA through the Millennium Film Workshop, affiliated with Millennium Film Journal.