002 → Short Films
Gaada translates as “togetherness” in Arabic. It is precisely this togetherness that guides and designs a road trip across Algeria. Upon arrival to Algiers the filmmaker meets Dalel Ziour, an Algerian artist and fellow traveler - together they set on a search to collect stories about contentment. Their research focuses specifically on middle aged men and leads them from Algiers to the desert, and the towns of Ghardaia, Timimoun and Taghit. The collected stories coalesce into one of ten segments of a feature film called Aleph. Gaada is a film detailing that process - it describes the road trip, the research, the casting, and decision making behind the making of Aleph. It celebrates togetherness as a way of being and making.
( RT: 19 minutes )
The film is comprised of a collection of Instagram story posts taken with an iPhone during the pandemic year 2020. Reflections on isolation, separation, and distance - as felt in remote locations of interior Alaska and a village on the island of Lesbos.
Utuqaq is a sci-fi poem set in the Arctic. On its vast lunar landscape, the main protagonist is Ice. Four visitors arrive one spring to camp on the ice sheet.
A and B fall in love during their individual trips to Taipei. They take care of each other in ways uncommon to strangers. But where does W fit in?
Notes from the Border documents the refugee migration on the borders of Europe during the summer of 2015 through the tale of N’s journey to the continent.
One morning in central Athens, a man gets shot in the head on a small quiet street. Two men with masks and a gun riding a motorbike quickly vanish.
The protagonist is a traveling nomad. Exiled from his own land, he searches to find a home in unknown places. Experiences trigger the traveler's memory as he searches through personal and collective histories to decide who he wants to be.
Ideas of Ben, of schizophrenia, dreams of Rio De Janeiro, and music compositions.
An animated portrait of a small Mexican town by the way of colors, sounds and memories. Mixba (Meesh-bah) is "welcome" in one Mayan dialect.
Every summer steel drum orchestras gather in panyards across Brooklyn to gear up for the annual Steel Band Panorama Competition. The Despers come together for nightly practice.
Xartini writes a song.
An attempt to rebirth Jenny Holzer's 1986 installation "Protect Me From What I Want".
About 40miles from Las Vegas, in the middle of the desert there is a small called Nipton. It's divided by railroad tracks.
If it’s our sharing that makes us powerful, why return to normal?
This life is more worth living than the one we left behind.
(Leaflet, Solidarity March with Occupy Wall Street, October 5, 2011)
How do our voices of dissent encounter each other?
What if the voice of the people is always in a mode of becoming?
Welcome to the hidden track of Occupy Wall Street:
We are discovering new ways in which our desires can resonate together.
This space is our sonogram of potential.
"We want to share insights into the formation of a new social movement as it is still taking shape in real-time. The video was shot during the 5th and 6th days of the occupation. This idea to occupy the financial district in New York City was inspired by recent uprisings in Spain, Greece, Egypt, and Tunisia which most of us were following online. Despite the corporate media's effort to silence the protests, and Yahoo's attempt to censor it in e-mail communication, the occupation is growing in numbers and spreading to other cities in the US and abroad."
Louis Reyes Rivera was a poet laureate, writer, educator, artist, activist and people’s historian of the CUNY movement. Rivera passed away on March 3, 2012. Our film is dedicated to him and the fire that he sparked.
We show Rivera in one of his last speeches at an intergenerational exchange between former and current CUNY student activists. The event was organized by Students United for a Free CUNY – on October 27, 2011 at the AME Church in the Bronx, New York. Intercut with students protests at Union Square as part of the Occupy Wall Street Day of Action on November 17, 2011.
"Louis Reyes Rivera, known as “the janitor of history,” is the type of person who we often allow to fall through the cracks of recorded “official” history, but whose memory is passed on through the African oral tradition."
Hank Wiliams
One blue August in North Carolina, the landscape conjures memories of past lives.