ENG Ursula invites you to ON EROSION, a short film programme surrounding Alex Schuurbiers’ new film Placeholder, comprising experimental shorts that deal with remembrance, terrain, geology and forgetting.
The screening will be followed by a short talk with Alex & writer Vincent Van Meenen. With a video introduction from Lynne Sachs
Ursula is an Antwerp based collective of women working with the moving image.
A tactile journey in three parts. Markings 1-3 is an attempt to connect with nature through the surface of 16mm celluloid film, using such techniques as tinting, toning, painting and scratching.
Deepwater Horizon: Exhalation blends weathered archival footage portraying a community of female free-divers from ancient Japan with CGI imagery documenting the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Sonar audio of the spill dances around deep inhalations, creating counterpoints of a claustrophobic sonic tapestry and a transfixing marine meditation.
The Great Kind Mystery, Ella Morton, CA, 2022, 16’
Inuk and Mi’kmaw artist Amy Hull tells stories about growing up in Newfoundland. Her words are illustrated by altered Super 8mm footage of Newfoundland landscapes, where the distortion of the celluloid film reflects the wonder and nostalgia of her relationship with the land.
Babel, Meggy Rustamova, BE, 2018, 8’
Everything begins on a fixed shot of a middle-aged lady, serious, thoughtful. She tries hard to remember some words from a language unfamiliar to our ears, her native language: Assyrian. Simple words (numbers, days, expressions,…) reappear from the bottom of the ages; they emerge little by little memories of Juliette Rustamova which one understands later that she is the mother of the artist.
Same Stream Twice, Lynne Sachs, US, 2012, 4’
“My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.”
Placeholder, Alex Schuurbiers, BE, 2025, 8’
Placeholder is an attempt at holding it together in the face of absence; of a mother, of a memory, of something tangible. Images oscillate between dreams and recollection, distorted and transformed over time.
Eight Films on Tarot To Be Shown in Any Order traces the imprint of tarot on film. Spanning artists’ moving image, archive television and cult cinema, a selection of rare archival works will be drawn at random in the Warburg’s auditorium, revealing a remarkable film history guided by chance.
We are holding a film screening event in conjunction with our current exhibition, “Tarot – Origins & Afterlives”, which has inaugurated the Warburg Institute’s new artistic programme and has received over 15,000 visitors to date. The Tarot by Lynne Sachs screened alongside Derek Jarman’s Tarot aka The Magician, an extract from Agnes Varda’s Cleo de 5 a 7, and many other artist films. During the event cards representing each film in the programme will be selected at random to determine the order of screening.
William Fowler is Curator of Artists’ Moving Image at the BFI National Archive where he acquires, restores and curates films. Recent projects include People Make Television and Together: The Films of Lorenza Mazzetti. His co-authored book The Bodies Beneath: The Flipside of British Film and Television is available through Strange Attractor Press/MIT.
Lori E Allen is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice focuses on sound design and experimental composition. She is published, with collaborators, on various record labels including Tapeworm, Wormhole and Bloxham Tapes under the name TEARS | O V. Recent projects include, People Make Television, and TRANSMISSIONS TV, on which she worked with various collaborators.
The event will be on April 12 at All Street Gallery NYC on Hester St, Juanita Umaña’s short will play alongside other shorts music videos— work by Karina Dandashi, Luis Figueroa Caunedo and more. A few bands will be playing and a DJ set. April 12, 2025 Doors at 2pm Screening at 3pm Bands! at 5pm 119 Hester St
1. Excerpt from: Wind in Our Hair (Con viento en el pelo), 2010, directed by Lynne Sachs
2. They Got Me Goin’ In On My Day Off. , 2023, directed by Luis Figueroa Caunedo
3. Cousins , 2023, directed by Karina Dandashi
4. Weapons and their Names , 2023, directed by Melina Valdez
5. Unifying Thought , Music Video for Chanel Beads, 2024, directed by Harleigh Shaw
6. Half Siblings , 2025, directed by Matthew York
7. Turn On The Bright Lights, 2025, directed by Juanita Umaña, story by Mario Escoto and Juanita Umaña
John Bleasdale talks to Lynne Sachs, the Memphis born, Brooklyn based filmmaker. Since the 1980s, Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, she investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.
Film Stories is a UK based, magazine, website, podcast and (as you can see) YouTube channel that loves to dig into the stories behind popular movies.
Writers on Film Season 1, Ep. 23 by John Bleasdale 10/14/2021
This edition of the Millennium Film Journal is marked, above all, by grief. We felt it painfully during our fall screening at Anthology Film Archives in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, and later as wildfires tore through Los Angeles, devastating members of our community directly and irrevocably. Loss is a part of human life, always, everywhere, but today there seems so much to mourn, as wars rage, ecosystems collapse, injustices multiply and worsen, and hopes of humanitarian justice founder.
Excerpted from Nicholas Gamso’s Introduction, MFJ 81 “Dedication” (Spring 2025).
Remembering Gunvor Nelson
Gunvor Nelson was a profound presence in my life – a teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute first and then for decades a dear friend. Her films made you think about everything from the taste of a shiny green apple to the mortal coil. Whether using a light meter or working with the laboratory on the timing lights for a new film, Gunvor relished every aspect of her art, including the technology. I would sit with her for hours in front of a 16mm editing machine, knowing that I was learning from a brilliant, committed artist with the most lucid, precise advice.
“Before you shoot film, it is helpful to think through what style of editing would be most appropriate so that you will not leave out necessary liaisons or steps.”
Transitions were extremely important to Gunvor. She was always thinking about how to enter the front door of an image and how and when to get out. A shot was like an airport and the arrival and departure times of every single plane were critical. Otherwise there might be too much chaos on the tarmac!
“Surprising solutions can be had with the most deficient of material if you let it speak to you, if you learn what really is in the film. Sharp jumps in the editing can be, at the right places, most exhilarating.”
One of the most lasting suggestions Gunvor made to me was that a filmmaker should always return to their outtakes just before the completion of a film. These “mistakes” that were initially disregarded become extremely useful punctuation – like a period or an exclamation mark – that assists the completion of a visual thought.
Gunvor’s movies also made me think about being a woman in the most visceral ways. Here film “Schmeerguntz” (1965) captured the raw, messy ecstasy of being a mother, and her film “My Name is Oona” (1969) celebrated the fierce passion of her daughter Oona Nelson, inspiring me to shoot 16mm footage that spins, dances and, soars with my daughters Maya and Noa.
A few years ago, I traveled to Gunvor’s home in Kristinehamn, Sweden, to spend time with her as I was making my film “Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor” (2018). We often found ourselves in her lush garden just outside the back door. On our last day, we were standing in front of a patch of snapdragons when she decided she couldn’t resist being my teacher again. She noted that everyone shoots colorful, living flowers. It’s more interesting and sculptural, she explained, to film the dead ones.
I am reminded of Gunvor often – in dreams and in my consciousness as an artist. Like Cézanne, she was more intrigued by the shapes that surround an object than the object itself.
“Study negative space.”
Gunvor once explained to me that when you finish editing your film, you will feel ecstatic. Then, there will be a profound sense of loss. To be inside the making of a film is an incredibly consuming fusion of the intellectual and the artistic. No matter what is going on in your home or in the world beyond, you have your film, and that, sometimes, is enough.
Lynne Sachs
Remembering Narcisa Hirsch
I arrived in Buenos Aires in the summer of 2008, ready to immerse myself in a city with a reputation for celebrating avant-garde films with the same intensity that Hollywood lauds mainstream movies. Within the first few days of landing in Buenos Aires, I started to hear about this extraordinary 80-year-old woman who lived at the vortex of all things experimental. She had not only spent a life-time making her own work, but was also supportive of other film artists whose 16mm prints she collected and exhibited in her home. Her name was Narcisa Hirsch.
From the moment we met, I knew that I wanted to spend as much time as I could with this woman who was so candid about everything surrounding film form and feminism, in equal measure. Clearly, she had a profound interest in unraveling the ontology of cinema and challenging the way that film as an art had been hijacked by the entertainment industry. She was always thinking about the camera’s ability to rearrange reality and the way it allows us to better understand how we think and move. She made it clear that she had her own perspective and it was clearly female.
One morning I went to Narcisa’s home in the neighborhood of San Telmo. Knowing how much she loved children, I brought my camera and my young daughters Maya and Noa. She immediately explained to us that painting on an easel had “died” in the late 1960s. Consequently, she’d made and documented far more radical feminist performances, what people were starting to call “Happenings”. She created Marabunta (“swarm of ants”) collaboratively in the Buenos Aires theater where Antonioni’s Blow Up was premiering. In Munecos she gave away 500 baby dolls on the streets of London and New York City. Narcisa vividly described her first witnessing of Michael Snow’s Wavelength, fully aware of how influential this seminal 16mm film would be to her film Taller, a starkly structuralist, yet personal, survey of her own studio space. She showed us her visualization of Steve Reich’s Come Out which she integrated into a filmed document of the sound piece as it plays on a portable record player. In her mind, purchasing films by artists she respected was the best way to support the work she loved. She proudly swung open a closet which contained the work of Carolee Schneemann, Su Friedrich, Stan Brakhage and so many others.
Narcisa was exquisitely aware of what she was doing. She committed herself to filming her daily life both in the city and on her farm in Patagonia — close ups of leaves and water, her feet, a fly, her shadow in the sand as she carries her film camera, cherries on skin, a fly, a mouth luxuriating at the taste of fruit, a baby on the grass, a breast, and a belly in the sunlight. As long as she was world famous for 50 people, she was happy.
For its 8th edition the Festival Filministes is once again offering a program entirely dedicated to cinema and the art of under-represented people, both in front of and behind the camera.
This year’s resonate with current political events, portraying singular and collective struggles and bring to the screen singular and collective struggles, resilient and committed communities, and solidarity networks that reflect the multiplicity of feminist positions. For us, feminism is about solidarity with all, and in the current unsettling political and social climate, we want to emphasize the importance of put forward marginalized voices and reiterate our support for the LGBTQI2SA+, racialized, Black and Aboriginal communities.
If the worrying rise of far-right rhetoric proves one thing, it’s that we need more than ever spaces to come together, to discuss and reflect on what unites us and makes us stronger.
That’s why the Festival Filministes invites you to a celebration of feminist cinema through a program a rich program of powerful, moving and hopeful films.
Tënk Canada is a solidarity cooperative based in Tiohtiá:ke / Montreal dedicated to the promotion of creative documentary cinema. Through curation and cultural mediation, Tënk’s mandate is to make this film genre more accessible and to encourage the discovery of socially important documentaries that sometimes struggle to reach their audience.
A word from Tënk on Contractions:
Contractions is a much-needed film in the current political climate, as the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. Offering an intimate look at abortion rights, this experimental short exposes the poignant testimonies of people directly connected to a clinic in Memphis, Tennessee. As we observe the slow march of women and their allies to the clinic, the voices of an obstetrician and a reproductive rights activist echo the disastrous consequences of ending women’s right to a safe, legal abortion in the United States. In the film, it’s the strength of community that shines through, as these people can no longer make decisions for their own bodies.
“Practice Thing” is a generative ritual to encourage playing around, applying your skills, and getting unstuck in your creative endeavors with a quick helpful nudge from those who are inspiring us at UnionDocs.
We’ve assembled a godsmackin’ troika of the most superhumanly gifted women makers of our time, a truly fortuitous curatorial coup that coincides with Sachs‘ visit to the Bay Area. She is showing a ½ hr. cut from her her new feature project, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, and fielding questions about her intentions and trajectories with this current long-form. AND: Old ATA comrade (relocated to Berlin) Sylvia Schedelbauer finally peeps back up with her 24-min. multi-layered portrait of her mother, also settled in Berlin (from Japan), an astounding feat of family-archive excavation (mostly from S8 color!) that is ever-so-meticulously ordered into a profoundly resonant, and revelatory montage. The third component of this collective debut comes from Kamila Kuc, the formerly London-based cine-artiste who has now moved to the Coast, Her Plot of Blue Sky.This jaw-dropping, never-before-seen penetration of Moroccan women’s society and sub-culture (Amazigh)–in fact enabling the women to use cameras(!)–gives voice to a huge marginalized population who are accustomed to being shuttled from forced marriage to prostitution to institutionalized old age dead-ends, by an oppressively patriarchal Arab state. $14
Other Cinema is a long-standing bastion of experimental film, video, and performance in San Francisco’s Mission District. We are inspired and sustained by the ongoing practice of fine-art filmmaking, as well as engaged essay and documentary forms. But OC also embraces marginalized genres like “orphan” industrial films, home movies, ethnography, and exploitation, as media-archeological core-samples, and blows against consensus reality and the sterility of museum culture.
Whether avant-garde or engagé, our emphasis is on the radical subjectivities and sub-cultural sensibilities that find expression in what used to be called “underground cinema”.
Our calendars are curated on a semi-annual basis, mostly comprised of polymorphous group shows–several pieces, in different moving-image and intermedia formats–organized around a common theme. Almost always the artist herself appears in person, bringing new work to a energized microcinema audience opting for the provocative images and ideas only available in a non-commercial and non-academic salon environment.
Conceived and stewarded by Craig Baldwin, with a whole lotta help from ATA Gallery, Steve Polta, Christine Metropoulos, and others in a core collective whose commitment has created a space for contemporary cinematic expression and exchange.
Framework explores a variety of topics in film, media, art, politics, and cultural studies. The journal publishes valuable and innovative work with a wide international range and promotes theoretical and avant-garde approaches from its contributors.
“This is a very special double issue devoted to the work of MM Serra: Film-Makers’ Co-operative Executive Director Emeritus, teacher, mentor, and artist. That list of titles and roles hardly indicates the extraordinary breadth of MM’s work, art and interests, her long friendships, rich artist networks, and commitment to diversity, to outsiders, to the flourishing edges. Framework’s celebratory double issue includes testimonials, art pieces, memoirs, biographies, and conversations from friends and colleagues, stitching together a multi-perspectival, layered collage of MM’s life work.”
—Drake Stutesman and Susan Potter
“From My Mouth to Your Ear”: Recounting a Life in Art and Cinema MM Serra with Lynne Sachs
Introduction
MM Serra is a powerhouse New York City cinema visionary and a beloved friend since the late 1980s. As Executive Director of the Film-Makers’ Coopera- tive, Serra (as I have always called her) asked me to join the Cooperative’s board of directors in 1997, soon after I moved to town with my partner filmmaker, Mark Street, and our daughters, Maya and Noa Street-Sachs. Over the course of the next 17 years, we worked together on innumerable projects including: a 2006 anti-war exhibition (fig. 1) and DVD entitled For Life Against the War . . . Again (US, 2007), currently distributed by the FMC (fig. 2 and 3 For Life Against the War . . . Again photos); a PS1/ MoMA children’s film series entitled “Cinema of the Unusual,” curated by Maya and Noa (fig. 4 and 5 “Cinema of the Unusual” with Maya and Noa Street-Sachs photos) in 2008 and 2009; and many FMC benefits at locations like the then crumbling nineteenth-century synagogue at the Angel Orensanz Foundation in the East Village (fig. 6 and 7 Film-Makers’ Cooperative Benefit photos) and other venues around town. Together in the Coop office on Leonard Street or later on Park Avenue South, we toiled over grant applications, usually meeting their deadlines with only minutes to spare. In 2009, I co-edited the 51st issue of Millennium Film Journal (fig. 8, 9, and 10 Millennium Film Journal photos) which featured writing on the then burgeoning genre of experimental documentary and included Serra’s essay on her film Chop Off (US, 2008).
