Experimental
filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ latest outing, “Swerve,” begins with a shot of a street
in Queens, followed shortly by a voiceover spoken in Tagalog. As the next shot
features the famed Hong Kong Food Court in Elmhurst, the voiceover continues.
“‘Mi
Ultimo Adios‘, ayon kay Original Brown Boy” (“‘Mi Ultimo Adios’,
according to the Original Brown Boy”).
This nod to one
of the most famous poems written by Philippine national hero Jose Rizal before
his death makes sense. Rizal was, after all, lamenting the need for his
countrymen to learn from the past to see how to move forward. And Sachs’ source
for this film, Philippine-born poet Paolo Javier, yearns for those same tenets.
Based on the
words by Javier from his book “OBB” (acronym for ‘Original Brown Boy’);
“Swerve” sees filmmaker Lynne Sachs on a regular Tuesday directing this
7-minute short. Equal parts experimental, incisive, and introspective; the film
works as a quick examination of one’s identity—and how it stacks up to their
endless dreams.
In 2015, The New Yorker featured a profile on Paolo Javier, who
served as poet laureate of Queens from 2010 to 2014. It, however, prefaced the
profile with an interesting piece of information: More languages are spoken in
Queens than in any place of comparable size on earth.
This explains
“Swerve’s” unconventional structure. Then again, With Sachs behind the camera,
this should surprise no one. What’s interesting to note is the filmmaker’s
reaction upon reading Javier’s book for the first time. Sachs had stated that
she began hearing the lines in her head; some of the verses, she said, played
out with people walking through a food court full of distinct restaurant kiosks
and stalls. And to support The New Yorker’s observation, the Hong Kong Food
Court in Elmhurst has long served as a gathering spot for immigrant and working
class people from the neighborhood.
Javier, for his
part, knew that poetry is an artistic expression to be shared as a gift. He
himself believed that being a poet laureate does not involve any monetary
compensation at all; on the contrary, it’s a privilege for one to be able
impart poetry to others.
Sachs manages
to translate Javier’s attempt to deconstruct the modern Filipinx identity; and
through the latter’s words, the expressions of passion, ambition, and the
search for identity overflow.
In a world—all
the more compounded by the global pandemic—where people still repress their
self-expression for fear of ridicule, “Swerve” gets its message across loud and
clear. As it nears its end, the film exhorts the audience: “Give. Love. Want.
Fight.”
“Adore
your endless monologue.”
If that call to
action isn’t enough encouragement, then I don’t know what is.
Directed by Lynne Sachs, “Swerve” will have its world premiere on June 26th at BAMcinemaFest.
While Eden may
at first appear as an image book, to be devoured with the eyes with the freedom
of a journey without plan, engaging with the book in this way will cause you to
miss its immersive, linear construction of meaning. The pages of
images with occasional text are not numbered per se, but this is a book that,
like a film, moves forward in time. I started with Kenter’s introductory text,
one that claims that the art within the book was found, like flora in “wetlands
or between clover and lace umbrellas discarded”. The ambiguity of a
made object and a found object had begun. We will be asked to parse
a “ventriloquism of dots” in the next few pages, words that become images and
images that morph into words. Next, I discovered a series of
overlaid, Cubist-esque faces, confronting me directly and in profile. This
multiplicity of perspectives accentuates a human countenance that speaks to me,
even with closed lips. A ventriloquist for the author perhaps?
Turn page to
another face, this time in the darkness, like the moon’s face but in negative.
Here, I am already wondering what we find in any face. Aren’t they
all the same, really? Soon, a two-page combination that reminds me that we are
in what Kenter calls a “menagerie of planned and found” when I see collaged
images of educational treatises and abstracted line
drawings. Detritus or culture? It matters not. Immediately after,
nature reveals its own spontaneous culture, what appears to me as ephemeral
prints in the snow are here documented, and that is enough. Next, we say
goodbye to everything made, just observing the slightest crevice of light in
the dark — suggested by white on black, black on white, the optics give us such
liberty to see things as we want to see them.
Each pairing in
this book is critical. Together they create suggestions of trompe
l’oeil, make us play with what we think we should see and what we see at first
glance. I relish these shifts in perception. In a later image, a
slit of light, like a key hole becomes explicitly a little angel, not because I
saw this but because the words on the page told me. I am seeing with Kenter,
transporting abstraction into a spirit. This is what art can do, and I am
grateful for the guidance.
Soon, I see a
musically inspired page and another sense is sparked, I hear culture in my
mind, I am aware of the work of writing notes and having them read by a person
with an instrument. I am a musician without instruments, reading and
reproducing soundless sounds. What a journey I have taken, already.
What is left in my hands are a series of word/ image engagements that stretch
and expand upon the place of poetry in all frames of culture – signage,
information tech, children’s tales. If a book is a toy, here I hold
“six toys” and I will continue to play with them when and if I
wish. Now they are mine.
Starfish
Aorta Colossus
Film by Lynne Sachs,
Poem by Paolo Javier
“Poetry
watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for the
digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the
celebration of nouns illuminate twenty-five years of rediscovered film
journeys.”
Lynne Sachs. Filmmaker & Poet
Lynne Sachs is
an American experimental filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York.
Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she
searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and
aural textures in each new project. Over the course of her career, Lynne has
worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara
Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Min-ha.
Lynne has
produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations and
web projects. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing the
challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to
image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006,
when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia,
Israel/Palestine, Italy and Germany — sites affected by international war —
where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her
own subjective perceptions.
Lynne is also
deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press
published her first book “Year by Year Poems”.
Lynne Sachs showed a rough cut of her latest film
“Swerve” to her mother, wanting to test out whether the meaning of words would
come out even if she didn’t understand all the language when a bit of Tagalog
is thrown into the mix of the mostly English-language short.
“I wanted her to think about them and allow
herself to play and to hear this phrase or that phrase and how it’s iterated,”
said Sachs, who teamed with the poet Paolo Javier on a film in which the rhythm
of the verses taken from his latest collection “O.B.B. aka The Original Brown
Boy” create an infectious energy that overtakes whatever strict definition they
have. In the heart of Queens at the HK Food Market where the food court may be
pan-Asian, but the cultural stew of customers is even more diverse, Sachs and
Javier make a meal out of zipping around table to table where a pandemic may
have kept some customers away, but as people begin feeling their way back into
the world, the sensations of reconnecting are conveyed in phrases that may come
across as nonsequiturs individually but coalesce into something greater as the
feeling behind intonations and delivery transcend the statements
themselves. Blurring the lines between what’s indoors and outdoors as the film
traverses the mall and the park just outside, “Swerve” elicits the interior
lives of its ensemble as they go about their daily lives but allow one to see
the beauty in making it another day.
With “Swerve” making its world premiere this
weekend at the BAMCinemaFest, Sachs and Javier graciously reteamed to talk
about emerging from the pandemic to shoot the eight-minute short and turning
verbal poetry into a cinematic language while making other choices about what
to translate and what not to.
How did
this come about?
Paolo
Javier: I’ve known Lynne for quite a while now and in terms
of the pandemic, time has been really altered forever right, so I’m hanging
onto all those seconds I’ve known Lynne and doubling the length. [laughs] I’m a
big admirer of hers and we just clicked as friends. Lynne also is a poet and
for this particular film, I had a book that was forthcoming and I asked Lynne
if she would like to collaborate on something to occasion the release of the
book. It could be really any form that she wants to take. I didn’t expect it
being the film that Lynne ended up making, and I say this with awe and
astonishment and just deep humility because I’m just over the moon. Every time
I watch “Swerve,” I get something new from it. But [initially it was] the idea
of doing something low-key and not necessarily elaborate, and collaborations
take a life of their own.
Lynne
Sachs: I just adore the way that Paolo puts words
together, and the way that he listens in a parallel fashion to a documentary
maker because you’re always soaking up the world, but as an experimental
filmmaker, you listen to the world, and in this case, you observe with your
ears, but then you allow yourself to rearrange the words to become more aware
of their meaning outside or beyond or even within reality. One of the things
that I wanted to do with this film was to examine what it meant to write poetry
within a pandemic and specifically in a place that was a vortex of some of the
worst hit communities, at least in the United States. That was Elmhurst,
Queens, which that market you saw [in the film] was much more thriving than it
is now before the pandemic. And in that community, there were so many
languages, I started to think about, “Okay, you have Spanish, you have Chinese,
you have Tagalog — so many different ways that different communities
communicate and then you have poetry. [So I wondered] Can poetry be a language?
Why does poetry always have to be part of a remove from the quotidian? And my
goal was to make poetry quotidian, not just available or accessible or
understandable, but more like let’s celebrate all the languages and then
there’s this one which is Paolo Javier’s poetry language – it’s not just any
poetry, but it’s his poetry. So I said could people speak in Javier?
Lynne,
were you free at first to take Paolo’s words and run with them in terms of
finding corresponding images or did you work together on that?
Lynne Sachs: I would say the images were my idea and I
decided to do it in the Hong Kong Food Market, mostly because [Paolo]
introduced me to it. Paolo was, for four years, the Queens poet laureate, so he
got to know all the restaurants and he knows everyone. Food is a big part of
our family’s relationship. We eat meals together, so it has to be about food,
but not just look at these pretty plates and take pictures. It has to be
eating. And we were supposed to shoot the whole film in that market, but then
something called the Delta Variant came in and we almost canceled the whole
thing. [The shoot] was pretty challenging to coordinate, and I’m actually glad
that we have the masks in it because it’s more about now. We didn’t have to
fake it.
For
Paolo, I’m guessing the words were locked in, but was the meaning of them
changing as this unfolded?
Paolo
Javier: Yeah, I was hoping for the language to take a life
of its own, especially as it’s spoken, uttered, performed by our individual
actors, and one of the great experiences I have of watching “Swerve” is how
much of a Lynne Sachs film it is. I really feel like I’m just a bit part in it,
that it’s my poems that are being performed, but it’s its own thing and that’s
what you hope for. The language that’s uttered by the actors, they’re
performing sonnets — Shakespearean sonnets for that matter, so you have this
tension between old form, but it’s not these are rhyming poems and the syntax
is not really syntax, it’s more like parataxes where the word order is really
slippery. There’s a lot of slippage just within the lines. So what I was really
hoping was that the actors were not terrified by this poetry and they could
really make it their own. Because it’s Lynne Sachs directing this, I think they
knew what they were signing onto and made it their own within the space of HK
Food Court in Elmhurst and also the space that Lynne gave them.
Lynne
Sachs: Actually, Paolo, there’s a little bit of Tagalog in
the film. What does that mean to you?
Paolo
Javier: Well, this is actually something we discussed. Do
we translate the Tagalog that appears in the film? I’m all for having captions,
just for accessibility, but then this became an aesthetic consideration of do
we include a translation of Tagalog. Lynne made the call to not translate it
and as a sound poet, I have to respect that. Language is an aural experience,
but [especially] pre-Hispanic, Filipino poetry is an aural experience, so to
hear Tagalog spoken and experienced as a sound in a film that really asks you
to open up your experience of language and poetry, I feel was a really daring
decision, and aesthetically, it just makes sense. Legibility is always
something that artists think about, some more than others, but this film came
about in anticipation of a launch of a book of mine, an experimental comics
book and the aim of the book when I was making it was to really blur the lines
between poetry and comics, so I really feel that decision of not having Tagalog
be translated is Lynne really taking the next step in terms of making a
cinepoem, [where] it’s not a film striving to illustrate a poem.
Lynne
Sachs: I did want to extract certain words and phrases and
put them on screen. That was fun.
Paolo
Javier: And Lynne shared several edits of this film and the
decision to translate or not translate Tagalog comes out of the various edits
that Lynne was making. This is what I love about cinema is just how hands on
and how tactile all the elements are and that’s the kind of poet that I am with
language. Lynne shared with me several versions of this film and asked what my
opinion was and she was very generous to include me.
Lynne Sachs: Very
precise notes. Very good notes.
You
mentioned this quotidian idea of poetry before and in a literal sense, there’s
a flow to the visual language, but you keep it grounded. What was it like to
figure out?
Lynne Sachs: Maybe I can talk a little bit about the actors because this text is pretty intimidating and there’s an old fashioned term in theater like oh you have to memorize your lines. This text is pretty intimidating — and only one person in the group really was capable of it — but I really liked their awkwardness [generally]. I like that they don’t own it and one guy who wrote it on his hands and you wouldn’t even see it, one wrote it on his mask. You would say it was on book [in film parlance], but also we are talking about something that comes from a book, so we want to say this is about reading. Paolo actually used a term when we were talking the film, “Ars Poetica” cinematically because it tells you about the ways that cinema or poetry picks up on how we conduct our lives, but then we’re given permission to rework it and throw it into a soup that doesn’t have a recipe. I really thought that was similar.
How did
you end up with your ensemble?
Lynne
Sachs: I’ll start with Inney Prakash — Paolo and I met
Inney for the first time on Zoom in May of 2020 and we were supposed to teach a
film and poetry workshop at Maysles Documentary Center and then the pandemic
happened. And what’s incredible is [Inney] had just moved to New York and to
have such a major impact on this city is amazing, so I had met him there and
then he did his [virtual] film festival, Prismatic Ground, and when I saw him
in the little box [on screen] when he was being a host, I thought he had a nice
charisma and presence, so I asked him if he wanted to be in the film. I didn’t
know that Inney is a professional actor basically — it’s not his main
interest or commitment, but he’s been in theater and some film, so he came
totally prepared. And Juliana Sass is someone I’ve known since she was a little
baby and I think she’s a great actor. I always wanted to have her in a film and
her mom is a good friend of mine, so I asked her to be in it and then I knew
Jeff Preiss, a renowned filmmaker and a big supporter of independent film. He shot
“Let’s Get Lost,” which was a classic on the ‘80s on Chet Baker, so I’ve
admired lots of his work, but I almost could’ve guessed that he never did
anything in front of the camera and out of the blue Paolo asked me if I
happened to know Jeff…
Paolo
Javier: Because during the pandemic, I was working at a
different job as a curator and program director working from home remotely and
while I’d assemble my programs, I’d just watch what films of Jeff Preiss I
could just find online. At one point, I just kept rewatching his video of the
REM song “Near Wild Heaven” and snippets of “Let’s Get Lost” and whatever I
could find and I always have music or cinema on to sustain me, so I don’t get
stuck. And when it came time to cast, I just asked Lynne, “do you know Jeff?”
And I never would’ve imagined or even ever dared to ask Jeff [to be in the
film], so that was Lynne’s idea.
Lynne
Sachs: [Paolo] just wanted to know, “Do you know Jeff
Preiss?” And [Jeff] burst out laughing when I asked him to do it. But I liked
that. That’s one of the interesting things that happens in New York is that
people wear different hats and you can be fluidly part of someone’s community
and if you’re not very good at playing the piano, but a little good, then you
can do it in the way that you don’t know it, but you’re into doing it.
Paolo Javier: Yeah, I never once doubted that Lynne would just engage all the performers in a meaningful way, just because I’ve seen what she’s done in her previous films. “Your Days, My Night” is one of my all-time favorite films, period and for Lynne to have assembled a crew and direct all of those performances in that film, [I thought] this film is a piece of cake. [laughs] And the other performers, Emmey Catedral and ray ferriera are from Queens and they’re both familiar with the park that is the other location of this film, so it was really important to include both in this film for that fact that they’re locals and this is a space that they frequented, but also they’re artists. They’re both good friends of mine who I participated in the Queens Biennial with in 2018, and there’s so much in the DNA of this film that’s in the DNA of other aspects of the location, so it’s really great that both said yes.
When
this was filmed in the summer of 2021, what was it like getting together for a
film as you’re coming out of quarantine?
Lynne
Sachs: That’s probably the most important question of all,
really, at that moment in all of our lives. As the director, it was a major
responsibility and I was a little scared for myself to be in this group
dynamic, but I was even more scared because I was asking people to do something
that could’ve compromised them. I was scared because I didn’t want to put
anybody in a situation where they would either feel pressured or nervous or
that they might get COVID, so some of them were willing to not wear the mask
indoors and we were super strict.
Paolo Javier: Yeah, we had these deliberations several times and when Lynne made the call to do it, [she] had made an earlier call to pause it, and then said, “No, let’s just do it.” And following through was contingent on how we all felt when everybody gathered. It’s when we all got together and we were all outside of the space and just checked in to see how we were all feeling. That was empowering for me [because] you always take a risk, and it’s a legitimate consideration and a concern, but I trusted Lynne and I trusted everybody [else].
Lynne
Sachs: We gave everybody a low pressure option not to show
up.
Paolo
Javier: Yes, that was really important. But they all showed
up and I think they were excited and the shoot started off rainy and grey and
drizzly and then the sun came out later in the afternoon and the community was
out and it’s just beautiful, what Lynne was able to capture.
Lynne
Sachs: One of my favorite moments was the end of the day
we were in this playground park and all of a sudden all these middle-aged Filipino
men show up and they all had prepared food and they put out this big spread…
Paolo
Javier: Yeah, it was a picnic. They had pancit and lumpia
and they meet there every Sunday.
Lynne
Sachs: And then they offered the food to everyone in our
production. That’s like 12 people.
Paolo
Javier: They had enough and then some! [laughs]
“The Black
Phone” (R) (3) [Violence,
bloody images,a some drug use, and language.] [Opens June 24 in theaters.] —
When a smart, bullied, doggedly determined, 13-year-old baseball pitcher (Mason
Thames), who lives with an abusive, alcoholic. widowed father (Jeremy Davies)
and his feisty, psychic sister (Madeleine McGraw), who sees visions in her
dreams, is kidnapped by a devil-mask-wearing killer (Ethan Hawke) known as the
Grabber and held in a soundproof basement in North Denver in 1978 in Scott
Derrickson’s taut, original, tension-filled, well-acted, suspenseful, twisting,
102-minute, 2021 thriller based on Joe Hill’s 2004 short story, he quickly
starts to receive calls from a disconnected black phone the killer’s previous
victims (Tristan Pravong, Miguel Cazarez Mora, Jacob “Gaven” Wilde, Jordan
Isaiah White, and Brady Hepner) who give him advice and tips on escaping while
detectives (E. Roger Mitchell and Robert Fortunato) search for the missing
Colorado students.
“Cured” (NR)
(3.5) [Played June
17 as part of AARP’s Movies for Grownups and available on Amazon Prime Video
and various VOD platforms.] — Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer’s gripping,
award-winning, eye-opening, educational, powerful, candid, insightful,
80-minute, 2020 documentary that examines homosexuality as a mental illness,
the use of various treatments to cure the condition, and the American
Psychiatric Association’s decision in 1973 to remove it as a mental disorder in
the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual” and consists of archival photographs,
film clips, and interview snippets with minister and activist Dr. Magora
Kennedy, APA Nomenclature Committee member Robert Campbell, psychiatrists (such
as Dr. Lawrence Hartmann, Dr. Richard Pillard, Dr. Richard Green, Dr. Charles
Socarides [archival footage], Dr. Irving Bieber, Dr. Judd Marmor [archival
footage], and Dr. Jerry Lewis [archival footage]), APA CEO and medical director
Dr. Saul Levin, psychologist Dr. Evelyn Hooker (archival footage),
electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) patients Rick Stokes and Sally Duplaix, photographer
and activist Kay Lahusen, writer and activist Gary Alinder, activists Don
Kilhefner and Barbara Gittings (voiceover and archival footage), astronomer and
activist Dr. Frank Kameny (voiceover and archival footage), journalist and
activist Ronald Gold, Dr. Charles Socarides’ son Richard Socarides, Dr. John
Fryer’s friend Harry Adamson, Dr. John Fryer (voiceover and archival footage),
and psychologist, activist, and former schoolteacher Charles Silverstein.
“Elvis”
(PG-13) (3.5) [Suggestive
material, smoking, substance abuse, and strong language.] [Opens June 24 in
theaters.] — Superb acting, costumes, and makeup dominate Baz Luhrmann’s
entertaining, factually inspired, captivating, over-the-top, well-written,
star-studded (David Wenham, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Anthony LaPaglia, Xavier Samuel,
Luke Bracey, Kate Mulvany, and Nicholas Bell), 159-minute biographical film in
which legendary, talented, charismatic, gyrating, rock’n’roll singer Elvis
Presley grows up as an inquisitive boy (Chaydon Jay) in a Black neighborhood in
Tupelo, Miss., with his alcoholic mother (Helen Thomson) and felon father
(Richard Roxburgh); Black influences on his music and his rise to fame
orchestrated by his dysfunctional relationship as an outspoken singer (Austin
Butler) with Carnival-educated, gambling-addicted, duplicitous manager Colonel
Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) who cheated him financially for more than 20 years; and
his marriage to Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge) who he met overseas while in
the Army.
“Escape the
Field” (R) (2) [Violence
and language.] [Available June 21 on DVD and Blue-Ray.] — After six frightened
strangers (Shane West, Jordan Claire Robbins, Theo Rossi, Tahirah Sharif, Elena
Juatco, and Julian Feder) suddenly regain consciousness in a remote, perpetual,
trap-filled cornfield, which is guarded by a creepy scarecrow, with sirens
blaring and left with only a single-bullet gun, a container of matches, a
lantern, a knife, a compass, and a flask of water in Emerson Moore’s
convoluted, tension-filled, violent, 88-minute psychological thriller with
overly dark visuals, they struggle to work together to find a way out while
being stalked by a menacing, mysterious creature (Dillon Jagersky) at every
turn.
“Fast Five”
(R) (3) [Intense
sequences of violence and action, sexual content, and language.] [DVD and VOD
only] — While a hulking, tenacious, special FBI agent (Dwayne Johnson) and his
task force team up with a rookie Brazilian cop (Elsa Pataky) to track down an
escaped convict in Brazil after three agents are murdered during a three-car
heist from a moving train in this frenetic-paced, action-filled, entertaining
film packed with car crashes and stunning choreography, three felon
professional drivers (Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and Jordana Brewster) and their
cohorts (Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Matt Schulze, Sung Kang, Gal-Gadot, et al.)
plan an elaborate, dangerous $100 million robbery from a ruthless drug dealer
(Joaquim de Almeida) and his henchmen (Michael Irby, et al.) in Rio de Janeiro.
“Jumping the
Broom” (PG-13) (2.5) [Some
sexual content.] [DVD and VOD only]— Tensions escalate, tempers flare, secrets
are revealed, and nuptials are threatened in this engaging, predictable,
romantic, star-studded (Julie Brown, T.D. Jakes, Gary Dourdan, Pooch Hall, et
al.) click-flick drama when a widowed, feisty postal worker (Loretta Devine)
with anger management issues leaves Brooklyn with her best friend (Tasha
Smith), her flirty brother-in-law (Mike Epps), and the best man (DeRay Davis)
to meet the beautiful fiancée (Paula Patton) her handsome, successful son (Laz
Alonso) is about to marry, along with the bride’s wealthy parents (Angela
Bassett and Brian Stokes Mitchell) and other wedding guests (Meagan Good,
Valarie Pettiford, Romeo, et al.) during a weekend of celebratory festivities before
the wedding on Martha’s Vineyard.
“Paid in
Blood” (R) (3) [Subtitled]
[Available June 26 on various digital platforms.] — Bodies drop like flies in
Yoon Youngbin’s gripping, action-packed, fast-paced, dark, blood-soaked,
violent, 118-minute, 2021 noir crime thriller with awesome fight choreography
in which a ruthless, ambitious, power-hungry, former South Korean assassin
(Jang Hyuk) from Seoul pits rival gangs against each other when he decides to
challenge powerful, knife-wielding members (Yoo Oh Sung, Oh Dae Hwan, et al.)
of a crime ring in 2017 after he learns that they are building the largest
casino in Asia in Gangneung, and the crime lord (Kim Se Joon) then puts a
target on his back while a Korean lieutenant detective (Park Sung Keun) tries
to protect his gangster friend and to control the escalating mayhem and
murders.
“Potato
Dreams of America” (NR) (3) [Available
June 21 on Blu-ray™.] — Wes Hurley’s weird, factually based, award-winning,
coming-of-age, arty, twist-filled, wit-dotted, unpredictable, 95-minute, 2021
autobiographical comedy in which a struggling, wannabe-actor, movie-loving, gay
student (Hersh Powers/Carter Coonrod) grows up in the USSR in the 1980s with
his compassionate, open-minded, prison doctor/actress mother (Sera Barbieri)
and ends up as a teenager (Tyler Bocock) moving with her to Seattle to the
disappointment of his father (Michael Place) and grandmother (Lauren Tewes)
when she becomes a mail-order bride (Marya Sea Kaminski) to a duplicitous,
conservative American (Dan Lauria) and finds happiness with various lovers
(Nick Sage Palmieri, Cameron Lee Price, Aaron Jin, Bailey Thiel, Dexter
Morgenstern, Drew Highlands, Dylan Smith, and Randy Phillips) after he comes
out of the closet and is free to be himself.
“Swedish
Auto” (NR) (3) [DVD and VOD only]— A touching, sad, 2006 film in which
a shy, music-loving mechanic (Lukas Haas), who works with the kindhearted owner
(Lee Weaver) and an African-American mechanic (Christ Williams) at a small-town
garage in California, pines for an out-of-reach violinist (Brianne Davis) while
getting closer to a beautiful waitress (January Jones) who lives with her
mother (Anne Brown) and her abusive, cancer-stricken boyfriend (Tim De Zarn).
“There
Be Dragons” (PG-13) (3) [Violence and combat sequences, some language,
and thematic elements.] [DVD and VOD only]— While a journalist (Dougray Scott)
travels to Madrid to gather information for a historical epic set against the
violent backdrop of the Spanish Civil War in 1918 about the life of St. Josemaría
Escrivá de Balaguer (Charlie Fox), who founded the Roman Catholic Opus Dei and
was later canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002, in this poignant, compelling,
factually inspired, colorful, 2-hour film highlighted by striking
cinematography, he is shocked to learn that his own terminally-ill, estranged
father (Wes Bentley) was a childhood friend of the priest who sought peace
through the beauty of everyday life, but they became bitter enemies when he
fought as a soldier in war-torn Spain and ended up being driven by his jealous
anger after becoming smitten with and rejected by a gorgeous Hungarian (Olga
Kurylenko) who falls for another Spaniard (Rodrigo Santoro).
“This Prison
Where I Live” (NR) (3) [DVD
and VOD only] — Veteran documentarian filmmaker Rex Bloomstein narrates his
eye-opening, informative, poignant 2010 documentary about popular, feisty,
courageous, outspoken standup Burmese comedian, film star, poet, and playwright
Zarganar (aka Maung Thura) from Yangon, Burma, who was sentenced by the
oppressive military junta in Sept. 2007 to serve 3 weeks in prison for his
support of the monks during the Saffron Revolution and again in 2008 to serve
59 years (reduced to 35 years) for his continual satire of the tyrannical
government, censorship, life in Burma, and speaking to the press about the
government’s shortcomings after Hurricane Nargis; famous standup German
comedian Michael Mittermeier joins the filmmaker in a return to Burma to gain
further insight to Zarganar’s current plight and to showcase Myitkyina Prison
in which he now resides.
“Twisted
Roots” (NR) (3) [Subtitled]
[DVD and VOD only] — While a suicidal, terminally-ill, Finnish antiques store
owner (Pertti Sveholm), who has a free-spirited 16-year-old daughter (Emma
Louhivuori) and an imaginative, adopted daughter (Silva Robbins) from China,
tries to tell his biological children about his inherited, debilitating,
degenerative disease and to reconnect with his estranged adult son (Niko Saarela)
and young grandson (Leo Leppäaho) in this gut-wrenching, down-to-earth, 2009
film, his distraught, financially strapped wife (Milka Ahlroth) tries to figure
out to raise $150,000 Euros due to the reckless spending of her brother (Jarkko
Pajunen) without burdening her husband.
“Actual
People” (NR) (2.5) —
Kit Zauhar’s realistic, down-to-earth, low-budget, predictable, 84-minute, 2021
film in which an apathetic, emotionally distraught, anxious, constantly
complaining, philosophy major, biracial Asian-American college student (Kit Zauhar),
who was dumped by her boyfriend (Randall Palmer) of three years in New York
City and then asked by her roommate (Henry Fulton Winship) to move out, wastes
time partying and hanging out in bars, engaging in one-night stands, and
pursuing an Asian man (Scott Albrecht) from her hometown of Philadelphia rather
than trying to keep focused to finish her coursework in order to graduate and
make plans for the future and not causing her concerned parents (Shirley Huang
and Richard Lyntton) more worry.
“Alma’s
Rainbow” (NR) (3) —
When her eccentric, wild, free-spirited lounge singing aunt (Mizan Kirby)
unexpectedly shows up after spending 10 years performing in Paris in Ayoka
Chenzira’s engaging, multifaceted, well-acted, coming-of-age, humorous,
90-minute, 1993 film highlighted by terrific costumes, a feisty, rebellious,
Brooklyn student (Victoria Gabrielle Platt), who gets into trouble with the
nuns at the Catholic school, entering puberty gets help and advice from her
estranged aunt in her relationship struggles with her strict, conservative,
straitlaced salon owner mother (Kim Weston-Moran) and about a boy (Lee Dobson)
she likes.
“The Body Is
a House of Familiar Rooms” (NR) (3.5) —
Stunning imagery dominates Eloise Sherrid and Lauryn Welch’s compelling, colorful,
creative, imaginative, artistic, informative, 10-minute, 2021 documentary that
intertwines gorgeous artwork by painter Lauryn Welch, live-action footage, and
commentary by Eloise Sherrid and girlfriend Lauryn to try describe the
day-to-day life of Samuel Geiger who has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which affects
connective tissue and nerves in the body that “vibrates with pain” and the
smoking of marijuana that partially relieves his symptoms and improves mobility
and functionality.
“Chee$e”
(NR) (3) [Subtitled]
— After an ambitious, perpetually broke apprentice cheesemaker (Akil Williams)
learns his craft from a kindhearted master cheesemaker (Piero Guerini) in
Trinidad and Tobago and then discovers that his girlfriend (Yidah Leonard), who
is the daughter of a religious restaurant owner (Binta Ford), is pregnant in
Damian Marcano’s quirky, award-winning, well-acted, humor-dotted, 105-minute
film highlighted by wonderful cinematography, he must abandon his dream of
leaving the island and concocts a plan to work with the local drug dealer
(Trevison Pantin) to earn money by selling marijuana with his friend (Julio
Prince) by hiding it in blocks of cheese while becoming suspicious targets of a
tenacious police sergeant (Kevin Ash).
“Crows Are
White” (NR) (3) —
Amazing cinematography and landscapes highlight Ahsen Nadeem’s captivating,
poignant, touching, thought-provoking, educational, 97-minute documentary in
which L.A.-based filmmaker goes to mist-enveloped monastery atop Mt. Hiei near
Kyoto, Japan, to gain insight, answers, and direction from Tendai “marathon”
monks, including head Buddhist monk Kamahori, who put their bodies and minds
through unimaginable, tortuous suffering and pain, such as the Kaihōgyō ritual
where monks walk 1,000 days without food or sleep, to reach Nirvana, regarding
his personal struggles with life and religion and his dishonesty and conflict
with his estranged devout-Muslim Pakistani parents who live in Ireland and are
unaware of his 3-year marriage to his patient, non-Muslim wife (Dawn Light
Blackman) and gains a meaningful friendship with wannabe-sheep-farming,
heavy-metal-loving, dessert-obsessed, calligraphy-writing, unorthodox,
apprentice monk Ryushin when his is expelled from the 1,200-year-old
monastery.
“The Feeling
of Being Close to You” (NR) (3) [Partially
subtitled] — Ash Goh Hua’s engaging, heartbreaking, realistic, poignant,
heartwarming, 12-minute autobiographical film in which the Singapore filmmaker
examines the longtime dysfunction in her family while growing up with her abusive
mother she was unable to hug and now tries to connect both physically and
emotionally through the use of intimate conversations, phone calls, and
videotapes with her distant mother that she was unable to do as a young girl.
“Ferny &
Luca” (NR) (1) —
The plot takes a backseat in Andrew Infante’s bizarre, slow-paced,
award-winning, avant-garde, redundant, low-budget, 70-minute, 2021 film in
which a handsome, unemployed, money-strapped Brooklynite (Leonidas Ocampo)
falls for a free-spirited, ambitious, wannabe singer DJ (Lauren Kelisha
Muller), who commiserates about her troubles with a close friend (Alexa
Harrington), but their tumultuous relationship seems to go nowhere.
“Happer’s
Comet” (NR) (1) —
Nothing happens in Tyler Taormina’s experimental, nonsensical, dialogue-free,
oddball, surreal, dark, 62-minute film that follows an eclectic group of
people, including a woman (Gianina Galatro) meeting a lover (Jax Terry) in a
cornfield, a dog-walking insomniac (Dan Carolan), an old woman (Grace Berlino)
resting at her kitchen table, a driver (Michael Guglielmo) falling asleep at
the wheel, a rollerskater (Tim Sullivan) going around the neighborhood, and a
rollerblader (Tyler Taormina) traversing the sidewalks, in the middle of the
night on Long Island.
“Last Days
of August” (NR) (2) —
Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck and Robert Machoian’s morose, award-winning, depressing,
arty, unexpected, 13-minute documentary that showcases dilapidated stores and
broken down vehicles to emphasize the death of small towns in Nebraska as
residents discuss their frustration, anger, and helplessness from experiencing
the pain of life passing them by and the realization that they are powerless to
combat the many things that are making life miserable, which causes some people
to turn to religion, crackpot theories, and blaming others, and how big box
stores such as Walmart and Costco, the advent of the Internet, and the rise of
Amazon have put a dagger in the heart of small towns.
“ᎤᏕᏲᏅ(Udeyonv) (What They’ve Been
Taught)” (NR) (3.5) — Awesome scenery and cinematography dominate Brit
Hensel’s intriguing, heartwarming, inspirational, educational, 9-minute
documentary, which was filmed on the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina and in
the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, that examines through storyteller Thomas Belt
how the Cherokee people try to be responsible as they live in this world so
that it’s a give and take with nature.
“Portal”
(NR) (3.5) —
Rodney Evans’ captivating, poetic, down-to-earth, poignant, candid, 12-minute
documentary that follows single filmmaker Rodney Evans who used striking poetry
to stay connected with the outside world and his friend Homay King used other
communication venues while she struggled with loneliness and isolation as she
recovered from unconfirmed COVID-19 during the pandemic in 2020.
“Shut Up and
Paint” (NR) (3) —
Titus Kaphar and Alex Mallis’ engaging, award-winning, original, inspirational,
20-minute documentary that showcases the historically relevant paintings of
talented African-American artist Titus Kaphar and the futile efforts of art
critics to stop the activist who is involved in promoting racial justice and
equality from speaking out through his artwork and includes commentary by Yale
philosophy professor Jason Stanley.
“Sirens”
(NR) (2.5) — Heavy
trash metal music highlights Rita Baghdadi’s award-winning, insightful,
inspirational, behind-the-scenes, 78-minute vérité style documentary that
follows the friendship and struggles of twentysomething songwriters and
guitarists Lilas Mayassi, who has a Syrian girlfriend Alaa, and Shery Bechara
who cofounded the five-member (guitarist Lilas Mayassi, guitarist Shery
Bechara, vocalist Maya Khairallah, bassist Alma Doumani, and drummer Tatyana
Boughaba), heavy thrash metal Lebanese band Slave to Sirens in Beirut, Lebanon,
amidst political turmoil, explosions, homophobia, ongoing anti-government
protests, and culture constraints.
“Swerve”
(NR) (3) [Subtitled]
— Lynne Sachs’ intriguing, original, arty, well-written, 8-minute film in which
performers Emmy Catedral, Ray Ferreira, Inney Prakash, Jeff Preiss, and Juliana
Sass recite Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems from “Nightboat Books” as
they wander around a food market and playground in Queens, New York.
“When It’s
Good, It’s Good” (NR) (2.5) —
Alejandra Vasquez’s educational, disheartening, gritty, down-to-earth,
16-minute documentary in which the filmmaker goes home to Denver City, Texas,
to document the ups and downs of the fluctuating oil business and its devastating
effect on the West Texas town’s population through interview clips with locals,
including district attorney Bill Helwig, truck driver Arturo, teenager Dezy,
and housewife Claudia.
“Winn” (NR)
(3.5) — Joseph
East and Erica Tanamachi’s gripping, educational, surprising, 17-minute
documentary that chronicles the valiant efforts of Georgia activist and
RestoreHER founder Pamela Winn, who was formerly incarcerated and pregnant, to
pass in 2019 the HB345 Dignity Bill to legally stop the solitary confinement
and shackling of imprisoned pregnant convicts in Georgia and in 2018 the First
Step Act prohibiting shackling of pregnant women on the federal level.
Sachs, who has
made dozens of films in a variety of genres since the mid-80’s, is perhaps best
known for her 2020 feature documentary about the life of her father, “Film
About A Father Who.” Also a poet, her work often
combines poems, essayistic narration, collaborations with non-filmmakers and
autobiographical content. (Her brother Ira is also a filmmaker.) In “Swerve”
she has taken a book of poetry, “O.B.B.” (or “Original Brown Boy”) by Paolo
Javier, and reacted to it by having Javier and five other performers read lines
from the book during a visit to the Hong Kong Food Market in the Queens borough
of New York City.
“O.B.B.,”
published by Nightboat
Books in 2021, is not a conventional book of poetry. For 276 pages,
Javier and illustrators Alex Tarampi and Ernest Concepcion combined words with
collages based on D.I.Y. techniques like “the Mimeo
revolution,” Kamishibai street theater and Surrealist cut-up
aesthetics. Born in the Phillipines, Paolo has lived in Queens since 1999 and was the poet laureate
of that borough from 2010-2014. With “O.B.B.” he used this techno comix format
to reflect on topics like America’s continuing colonization of the Phillipines
and other countries and his Filipinx identity. It was also heavily influenced
by the work of the late Canadian poet Barrie
Phillip Nichol (AKA bpNichol).
In an interview
for the Filmwax Radio podcast, Lynne said her idea for the film was
to have a small number of “performers” visit a food court in Queens, the most
internationally diverse place in the country and a borough also famous for its
vast selection of cuisines. She wanted the multilingual cast to read the poems
“as if poetry itself was a language.” In the same interview Javier explained
the title of the short. In Lucretius’s ancient poem “De rerum natura” (On the
Nature of Things) he proposed that atoms have a tendency to swerve randomly and
that this accounts for the free will of humans. (Literary scholar Harold Bloom
later used “clinamen”–Lucretius’s
name for this phenomenon–”to describe the inclinations of writers to swerve from
the influence of their predecessors.”)
In the seven
minute film, five performers visit Hong Kong Food Market, an Asian food court
located in Elmhurst, Queens and the nearby Moore Homestead playground. Shot
during the time of the Delta variant of Covid, many of those seen are wearing
masks. This was also a time when many local businesses failed because of the
pandemic. Quite a few in the food court are boarded up and only a few customers
are seen eating there.
These
performers (plus Javier) speak lines from “O.B.B.” while exploring the
location. “Emboggled minds may puff and blow and guess,” artist and curator
Emmy Catedral says and Sachs has the three verbs in that phrase appear on the
screen. Actress Juliana Sass sits on a bench outside of the Elmhurst subway
stop to read her lines; ray ferreira and Javier visit the playground to
perform. Filmmaker Jeff Preiss (who has words from the book written on his
mask) and film curator Inney Prakash order grilled pork sandwiches while
trading lines such as, “Already imposing 5’6 Wil E. Coyote.” Later, in the
park, Prakash seems to sum up a key point of the work by saying, “Adore your endless
monologue.” The film ends with a waving Maneki-neko (lucky
or beckoning cat) in a store window that may be a reference to Chris Marker’s
masterful “Sans
Soleil.” (And Javier and Sachs both cite film director Wong Kar-wai as an
inspiration, especially the food courts inside Chungking Mansions seen in his
1994 film “Chungking Express.”)
“Swerve” is a
lovely, serene cinematic meditation on postmodern/avant-garde/post-colonial
poetry construction in general and specifically it’s a terrific incitement to
read Javier’s book and seek out more of Sachs’s fascinating body of work.
Besides this
intriguing collaboration, four other films will be shown at
BAMcinemaFest’s second
collection of shorts. The total running time for the program is 73 minutes
and there will be Q&A’s with the artists afterwards.
Sachs and
Javier are also doing a poetry reading and book signing this Friday, June 24.
Details can be found here. Earlier this month, the two discussed their
collaboration on an episode of the podcast “Filmwax
Radio.” Go here to listen or watch.
Have you ever experienced an entire film in verse, in which five New York City performers wax poetic, and recite poetry instead of reading from a script?
One of Queens’ most diverse neighborhoods became the real-life setting for a new boundary-crushing film by director Lynne Sachs. You can see Elmhurst’s bustling Asian food market, called HK Food Court, filled with vendors serving up mouth-watering eats, and located across the street is another popular spot, where locals and their kids like to hang out: Moore Homestead Playground. Both are featured in the filmmaker’s newest cinematic offering, titled “SWERVE,” which was inspired by Queens’ former Poet Laureate (2010–2014) Paolo Javier’s “Original Brown Boy” poems.
This indie short, which world premieres/screens at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) this Sunday, June 26, at 1:30 p.m., — followed by a Q&A — was shot entirely in Elmhurst, in local parks streets, and the HK Food Court. Tickets are on sale now: BAM | BAMcinemaFest Shorts Program 2.
“’Swerve’ engages with language in a distinctly poetic way. While the setting of the food market in Elmhurst is as real as can be, the words that my performers speak emerge from the work of Paolo Javier,” Sachs noted, adding, “Each performer memorized one of Paolo’s sonnets from his new book “OBB/ Original Brown Boy” (Nightbook, 2021.) Then they spoke the poems to one another as if they were communicating in verse.”
Sachs explained that her film embraces Paolo’s poetry by “tugging his language away from its book form” and into daily life.
“This all happens in an extraordinarily dynamic and diverse part of NYC, where a plethora of languages dance and swim around us. The ‘swerve’ in language is the acceptance of difference in the face of routine and formula,” she said.
The Brooklyn-based filmmaker previously noted that she views life through the creative lens of a painter/poet. That winning combo has given rise to a series of experimental and avant-garde works exploring her own family life, as well as histories of personal, social and political trauma, marginalized communities and a variety of other intriguing topics.
Last January, the director’s film about her enigmatic dad’s life and loves, titled “Film About a Father Who,” was highlighted in the Museum of the Moving Image’s Virtual Cinema, in Astoria as part of a 20-film online retrospective of the artist’s celebrated body of work, which spans more than three decades.
“The first time I read Javier’s sonnets from his new 2021 book, I started to hear them in my head, cinematically. In my imagination, each of his 14-line poems became the vernacular expressions of people walking through a food market full of distinct restaurant stalls,” Sachs recalled, adding that she had re-watched Wong Kar-wai’s film “Happy Together,” a favorite of hers and Javier’s, and immediately thought of that food court in Elmhurst, a gathering spot for immigrant and working-class people from the neighborhood.
“As we all know, restaurant owners and workers experienced enormous economic hardship during New York City’s pandemic. Nevertheless, the market and the playground become vital locations for the shooting of this film, inspired by Javier’s exhilarating writing.”
Together, they invited local performers and artists Emmy Catedral and ray ferriera from Queens, NYC-based creatives Jeff Preiss and Inney Prakash, as well as Brooklynite Juliana Sass to participate in a challenging yet playful endeavor. In the film, each performer devours Paolo’s sonnets, along with a meal from one of the market vendors.
“Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, they speak his words as both dialogue and monologue,” Sachs continued. “Like Lucretius’s ancient poem “De rerum natura/On the Nature of Things,” they move through the market as Epicureans, searching for something to eat and knowing that finding the right morsel might very well deliver a new sensation.”
The camera records it all.
“‘Swerve’ then becomes an ars poetica/cinematica, a seven-minute meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next,” Sachs added.
The film took one day to shoot in HD video and Super 8mm film — in August 2021 — during the first few days of the Delta variant.
“It was only a
few days before our scheduled shooting day that NYC returned to wearing masks
indoors. Still, our determination and commitment persisted, and we simply
integrated the tell-tale masks of our moment into the fabric of the film,”
Sachs noted, adding, “It had to be that way!”
“Shot in
Elmhurst, a richly diverse immigrant space that saw its residents endure our
country’s ground zero phase of COVID-19, ‘Swerve’ brings tremendous visibility
to an Asian food court and workers, otherwise invisible and ignored by the
city,” Javier said. “Together, we all honor the resiliency of Asian American
and Pacific Islanders, underscoring the vitality of poetry and cinema in these
fraught times.”
Performer Emmy
Catedral, a native of the Philippines and a Queens-raised artist and curator,
chose to recite one of Javier’s poems, called “Sun and Moon Chilis.”
“Lynne’s film
is in response to Paolo’s work, which is absolutely singular and expansive,”
she noted. “Paolo is also one of my closest friends and collaborators, so I had
to say ‘yes’ to being a part of this. It’s a collaboration among friends. I was
excited to be among this fantastic cast that included ray ferreira; she grew up
in Corona.”
What does
“Swerve” mean to you?
“The film
celebrates the possibilities of language through Paolo’s beautiful book. It’s
impossible for me to not think about language in the context of Elmhurst — the
countless ones spoken here, the language justice work people have been doing
and the emergency of translation that wasn’t coming quickly enough from the
government; the mutual aid translation that people did for each other as the
pandemic was unfolding,” Catedral continued.
“I cannot say
enough about this neighborhood because it’s my environment, and I feel the
neighborhood itself. I feel its grief. I grew up here. My friends and I
loitered in the playground after junior high. The HK Food Court holds memories
of being with my family. I went to HK for spicy fish soup laced with chilis,
and other side flavor bombs. In the ’90s, across the street on Broadway, I’d get
haircuts at a salon called Rosa’s with my mother and sisters.”
Talking about
the current status of HK Food Court, Catedral told QNS that she recently passed
by and it remains open. Many of the vendors — in fact, all of the featured
businesses in the film — are no longer in operation, but it seems there are new
tenants keeping the food market open, with a slightly different configuration,
according to the performer.
Jeff Preiss,
another “Swerve” performer, said that he never felt he was playing a character
or a role.
“I projected a
fantasized meaning onto the circumstance we inhabited, where Paolo’s and
Lynne’s poetics were routine commonplace frameworks,” he explained.
“I am a
director and a filmmaker, but to take part in another filmmaker’s project,
among friends, produces a kind of effervescent joy. It was through the
production that I met Paolo and was introduced to his work. Important events,
to say the least! Being allowed a personal ownership of his text was
beautiful…getting to where I felt I could imprint myself into his writing, was
of itself a swerving journey.”
“It’s an intoxicating, vertiginous title…like a swooping course to avoid catastrophe, unscathed,” Preiss added. “And by the way, Queens is exactly what I dream New York should be.”
Cine Poetics screenings and “Sanctuary & Apocalypse” Summer Writing Program Naropa Institute Curated by Anne Waldman and Diana Lizette Rodriguez June 21, 2022 https://www.naropa.edu/academics/swp/swp-2022/
Cine Poetics: “He Ain’t Ever Coming Back That Blonde Hair Jesus”
Naropa Performing Arts Center June 21, 2022 3:30-4:50pm
Screenings: Akilah Oliver Three Readings – Ed Bowes Fantasma – Emma Gomis Poets Temple – No Land Task of the Translator – Lynne Sachs Skid Bid – Natalia Gaia Acción Fértil – Lucía Hinojosa Ancient Rain – Lumia La Tierra Era de Nadie – Sofía Peypoch She Got Love – Carolina Ebeid Emerging – Mary Shoen Carrier Waves – Diana Lizette Maria – Jose Antonio Hinojosa
Curated by Anne Waldman and Diana Lizette Rodriguez
Summer
Writing Program: “Sanctuary & Apocalypse”
At its
root apocalypse means “out from the hidden,” thus one enduring
English translation of αποκάλυψη has been “revelation.” And because it has also
named a genre of prophetic writings, catastrophe and disaster have always
shadowed the word, and obscured the real of history with an ideology that holds
the catastrophe of this or that war is exceptional, that the emergence of the
novel corona virus pandemic was an unforeseeable event, rather than an
inevitability of the ceaseless engine of capitalism pressing against every
limit of global ecology. As Benjamin writes in the eighth thesis on history:
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in
which we live is not the exception but the rule.” So our apocalypse is in part
a refusal, a refusal to be amazed, and stupefied, to be mystified while the
forces of reaction extract, exploit, and profit.
Sanctuary might
in fact start within the many acts of refusal needed to become a living
community, society, or congregation, And sanctuary is surely within the radical
forms of interdependence that animates our best dreams for collective being,
and the truest understandings of global ecology––and you see it in the eye-beam
branching entanglement of tree––oracle––bat––squirrel––owl––fawn––sky––sea
within Kiki Smith’s “Congregation,” which is the image we’ve chosen as the
signal icon for our collective undertaking. What follows, what are the
ramifications––etymologically to form branches––from seeing
sanctuary in these lights; what are the other aspects dimensions, and
directions of sanctuary that need to be brought out from the hidden in order to
truly imagine and materialize credible forms of rest, refuge, and safety in
this world; how can we live up to the sense of artistic vocation that Etel
Adnan indicates when she writes: “We are all the contemplatives of an on-going
apocalypse
As start to
these questions we invoke the necessary and alchemical possibilities of coming
together in community–––all the more crucial after years of isolation and
separation enforced by the pandemic; and we invite writers, and students, and
thinkers, and performers to continue the lines of critical voicing, creative
work, and spiritual sensibility that have defined the Summer Writing Program
since 1974.
Boulder Book Store, the
bookseller for SWP, will have these available at the book fairs during
SWP (Each Tuesday at noon, and Fridays after Collqiuium), or for pick up
at their location.
About Naropa
Located in
Boulder, Colorado, Naropa University is a private, nonprofit, liberal arts
university offering undergraduate and graduate degree programs in the arts,
education, environmental studies, peace studies, psychology, and religious
studies.
Buddhist-inspired and
nonsectarian, Naropa University is rooted in contemplative education, a
teaching and learning approach that integrates Eastern wisdom studies and the
arts with traditional Western scholarship. Naropa was the birthplace of the
modern mindfulness movement.
Director: Lynne Sachs, ENG + ENG subtitles Lynne Sachs is an American filmmaker and poet who focuses on documentary and short experimental films, film essays and live performances. Her work often pushes on the boundaries of genre, relying on a feminist approach and an introspective form to explore the complex relationship between personal observation and universal historical experience. She is interested in the implicit connection between body, camera and the materiality of film. She has produced a body of more than 40 films, several installations and hybrid performances. Our selection will feature the short film A Month of Single Frames (2020), which Sachs has made for legendary American experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer and which earned the main prize at last year’s International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, as well as her piece Maya at 24, screened for the ‘Fascinations’ section at Ji.hlava IDFF 2021.
Films screened Following the Object to its Logical Beginning The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor Month of Single Frames Maya at 24 Window Work
About us A4 – Space for Contemporary Culture is an independent cultural centre focusing on contemporary forms of professional theatre, dance, music, film, visual art and new media. Established in 2004 as a result of a joint effort between several civic cultural organisations, it became one of the first cultural centres in Slovakia founded by a bottom-up initiative. Since its beginning, A4 has been a vivid and active location on the Central European cultural scene, an open field for creative experimentation as well as a home for fresh and unique experiences. Besides presenting innovative contemporary art, it actively supports the new creative activities and education. A4 engages in public debate on important social issues, and attempts to foster conditions for non-commercial cultural activities, culturing of public space, urban development, etc.
Dedicated to Craig Baldwin’s Other Cinema Performed live on April 9, 2022 with accompanying video at 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco, California
Strip it all down and get into the raw material. Let me share with you the images I’ve excavated from this archaeological hollow. Nowhere else on earth but here at 992 will you find so much material to send your artist brain a-soaring.
I don’t come here to be inspired. I come to make my mind work so hard it’s dizzying. The cave below our feet, Craig Baldwin’s film archive, holds us. It contains the way we see ourselves, the way we depict others, it guides us toward what we need to think about. It makes me sick, angry, depressed, humiliated, devastated and so painfully aware.
It’s not the Internet. It’s not vast, intangible, omniscient, everywhere or nowhere. It’s something to hold, has weight, will decay, and destruct. I need to rush, don’t stop for even a minute to breathe because if I do it will all be gone, back into the soil.
Since 1989, I’ve been walking down those stairs, opening those cans, spinning those reels in my search for all that I didn’t know I could find but Craig led me toward, with cans and clips under his arms, in his grip. Now in mine.
I leave San Francisco, fly home to New York City and begin the exhilarating process of foisting those images and sounds into my movies. They take me where I never want to go and that’s the place I should be. A year or so later, I’ll come back to this place.
On this trip, I won’t just visit the film cave below. I am here for the theater above, basking in the glow of the screen where the treasures I found downstairs will dress up for the show, now pulled from their context, liberated from their intention or relevance, allowed to soar as free agents in their renaissance, their new collaged lives.
It’s not the images we record with our cameras or the ones others take of us that reveal who we are in the world. The ultimate film striptease of the soul is the dance we play with those images we FIND, or find us, and gravitate towards, the few and the mighty which will puncture our very being, until, at last, we can bleed.
THE HOOSAC INSTITUTE The Hoosac Institute is a curated platform for text and image focusing on pieces that don’t fit conventional disciplinary narratives.
The
experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs returns to Fimwax to discuss her latest
work, “Swerve” which screens at BAMcinemaFest this month. She’s joined by poet
Paolo Javier. And the director of a new intimate & experimental documentary
called “Beba”, Rebeca Huntt makes her first appearance.
Experimental
filmmaker Lynne
Sachs makes her 5th appearance on Filmwax with her latest short
work of non-fiction, “Swerve”. She’s joined by former Queens Poet
Laureate Paolo Javier who leant his poetry to the film. A food
market and playground in Queens, NY becomes the site for this film inspired by
Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. The film itself transforms into an ars
poetica/cinematica—a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal
space between a global pandemic and what might come next—as five New York City
performers speak in verse while wandering through food stalls in search of a
new sensation. “Swerve” gets its festival premiere at BAMcinemaFest on
Sunday, June 26th, at BAM in Brooklyn.
Filmmaker Rebeca
Huntt makes her first appearance on Filmwax with her first feature
film, “Beba” —also quite experimental in its approach— which is currently
screening at the Tribeca Film Festival and will be having its
theatrical in NYC & LA beginning Friday, June 24th. With “Beba”,
Huntt undertakes an unflinching exploration of her own identity in the
remarkable coming-of-age documentary/cinematic memoir BEBA. Reflecting on her
childhood an adolescence in New York City as the daughter of a Dominican father
and Venezuelan mother, Huntt investigates the historical, societal, and
generational trauma she’s inherited and ponders how those ancient wounds have
shaped her, while simultaneously considering the universal truths that connect
us all as humans. Throughout BEBA, Huntt searches for a way to forge her own
creative path amid a landscape of intense racial and political unrest. Poetic,
powerful and profound, BEBA is a courageous, deeply human self-portrait of an
Afro-Latina artist hungry for knowledge and yearning for connection.
Filmwax Radio is America’s favorite podcast featuring luminaries from the indie film community. Guests include actors, filmmakers, festival programmers, journalists and just about anyone else with a stake in the game. Listeners can expect engaging and nuanced conversations.
Hosted by Adam Schartoff, Filmwax Radio began in September of 2011 and has had thousands of guests over the years, many of whom make a point of returning over and over.
