RIGA

SCREENINGS

 

 

SCREENING ONE

All Falls Down

oberon strong | 6:00 min

Shot entirely on a VHS camera, All Falls Down launches us into a digital hell-loop in which the transgender antagonist comes to terms with ideas of home, anxiety, intimacy, our inevitable death, longing, and the conversation between obsolete and current technologies.

Man Made

Elian Mikkola | 8:08 min

A repurposed narrative of a boy who gets introduced to the wonders of life by a beautiful shining trumpet. But the struggle to be oneself has only begun. Utilizing found 16mm footage and both digital and analog manipulation techniques, Mikkola pierces conventional masculinity with a transformative queer gaze.

Concrete Shape

Jesi Jordan | 5:08 min

To face your fear, you must let it enter your life as a Concrete Shape. An onsite video performance by Jesi Jordan created at the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City. This film is made using hand made special effects and biodegradable materials such as Oaxacan clay, lava rocks, chicken eggs, cactus husks, and water.

Thorn on her side

Vjosana Shkurti | 5:27 min

A human narrates the story of a bad dream after buying a gorgeous plant at the market. What starts as an innocent encounter to relieve loneliness from isolation becomes a nightmarish seduction scene between a plant and its human. Together they give birth to a new creature.

PAISA

Dorian Wood and Graham Kolbeins | 8:0 min

PAISA is an immersive fever dream that celebrates the beauty of queer brown sensuality, body positivity and individuality. Says Dorian – "...I wanted to create a permanent reminder for us queer, trans and non-binary folks of color that our beauty stretches within and far beyond our times, in either direction...sex positivity grounded in mindfulness and consent. We are wiser than this world gives us credit for. We are powerful and plentiful. We are forever."

Sexy Highland Stream

Nathan Adler | 4:00 min

Nathan Adler’s spoken word poem and minimalist audio track about a sexy highland stream offers a love letter to the beauty found in nature and the mysterious way beauty is suffused in the natural world. Written in English and Anishinaabemowin.

Small Fires

Nic Wilson | 5:30 min

Small Fires is a real-time video of a bouquet of flower-shaped candles burning until they extinguish themselves. There is an essay about the mythology and use of candles embedded in the subtitle track.

Compositions For Understanding Relationships

David Delafuente | 5:30 min

A Love Letter.

Fragmentasia

Robin Riad | 3:57 min

An exploration of the sense of self, through kaleidoscopic imagery, distorted sounds, and a flurry of colours. Fragmentasia is a self-reflexive short, shot on 16mm and Super8, using animation techniques, prisms, and mirrors, to examine the outward self versus the internal self.

UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS

Vika Kirchenbauer | 12:31 min

Composed of short vignettes in different techniques and materialities, UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS uses the form of an essay film to approach trauma-related memory loss via reflections on light outside the visible spectrum – on what is felt but never seen. Carefully shifting between planetary macro scales, physical phenomena and individual accounts of affective subject formation, the artist's voice considers violence and its workings, class and queerness not through representation but from within.

Total running time: 65:00 minutes

 

 

SCREENING TWO

Heaven Reaches Down To Earth

Tebogo Malebogo | 10:00 min

After Tau comes to a realization about their sexuality, it sets in motion a cascade of thoughts and emotions in Tumelo - nothing will ever be the same between them.

Odehimin

Kijatai-Alexandra Veillette-Cheezo | 2:45 min

A lyrical film ode to the odehimin or heart berry. A two-spirit Anishnaabe person finds themself in a dark place with their body. They undertake a healing journey, stating aloud their intentions and reconnecting with the land and the water for strength. As they get more in touch with their body and the beings around them, we begin to see them heal.

Running

Zachery Cameron Longboy | 3:46 min

a poem for my captor.

Comme tous les garçons

Morisha Moodley | 10:13 min

comme tous les garçons meditates on images and ideas of masculinity and transmasculine identity. The film combines found footage and personal archive in an act of assemblage that mirrors the erratic and eternal piecing together of a queer identity. Showing, too, how this process first consumes, then corrupts and queers. The film attempts to trace a story of becoming, laying bare the moments of conflict along the way. It asks what it means to be and become like all the boys, what it means to want this and how the spectre of Whiteness haunts the wanting.

Self-Portrait in Hell

Federica Foglia | 3:30 min

Self-Portrait in Hell is a hybrid film that combines analog and digital film manipulation techniques. Multiple layers of 8mm films and disparate fragments are amalgamated to create a self-portrait of the director. A singular self-portrait, since ironically the subject of the film is not the director but the image found in abandoned film archives, the image of another, unknown woman.

The Sky's In There

Dani Leventhal ReStack, Sheilah (Wilson) ReStack | 11:24 min

This latest work from the ReStack’s pulls the experience of becoming mother (both through fostering and bio) through the lens of personal lives that are always, also, steeped in a world where systemic racism, classism and heteronormativity influence and shape.

Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung)

Tina Takemoto | 6:20 min

Inspired by San Francisco’s first Chinese American female physician, this film envisions the euphoria and despair of Margaret Chung and her insatiable desire for women and celebrity through her forays into drugs, sapphic surgeries, and queer flights of fancy.

Policephaly in D

Michael Robinson | 23:00 min

Existential drift in the age of rupture. Leaping, falling, and meeting your new self in an earthquake. Losing one’s head, growing another.

Total running time: 72:00 minutes