Film Categories: Culture

  • Searching for Justice

    Searching for Justice is a thought provoking short film by Tasha Brown that delves into the lack of fairness and equality, which is deemed insignificant in many societal norms. Fluid eclectic movements of dance are interwoven with the illuminating original spoken word written by poet Kells James.

  • Plato’s Cave

    Shadows on the wall and Einstein’s mental musings form a short meditation on the nature of reality. With voice-over quotes from Albert Einstien querying the distiction between the physical and the metaphysical, “Plato’s cave” continues Sternberg’s filmic wonderings about the nature of reality: temporal, ephemeral, tangible, ecanescent, ghostly, haptic, remembered, dreamt, momentary, eternal – the shadow and the light, the quick and the dead.

  • seeds are meant to disperse

    seeds are meant to disperse (2015-ongoing) is an ongoing project where I grow, save and share seeds. Seeds take time to grow, to harvest, to prepare, and to share—an act that I see as gift as much as necessity and survival. As such, the seeds are offered as trade or gift, in an attempt to encourage and support alternative systems of exchange. As the seeds are gifted and grown they are meant to help others imagine building a world different from the trajectory it is currently on. As an ongoing and forever growing project, I continue to adapt and rethink…

  • connecting thru grasses

    Looking to prairie grass ecosystems, as well as the technologies that map and reflect the diminishing biome, connecting thru grasses considers how we might both map and define prairie boundaries anew. Considering how satellites passing overhead reflect an image of the earth (and thus of ourselves) back to us, and how these images shape or mis-shape our understanding of the land and our relationship to it, the work looks closer at TERRA, a research satellite that has circled the earth since 1999 constructing images for use in the monitoring of environmental and climate data. http://cbattle.com/connecting-thru-grasses/

  • BAD STARS

    Beginning with the root of the term disaster – from the Greek (dus-) ‘bad’ and (aster), ‘star’ this project considers disaster from an astronomical sense, imagining multiple scales of disaster as causing disruption and temporary disorientation on a planetary scale. Humans have looked to the movement of stars as a way to make sense of the terrestrial for millennia, developing elaborate systems to read celestial bodies as a way to explain and predict events on earth. Studying the stars in order to discover more about the galaxy, astronomy tells us that we are in fact born of the stars, made…

  • the air we breathe

    the air we breathe is an experimental documentary that thinks through the complexities of air pollution by weaving together themes of environmental catastrophe, environmental racism, cultural and political shifts, and conspiracy. Combining research into air pollution along with personal storytelling and speculative imaginings, this project deeply considers the complicated ways in which our air impacts us: from the way that smells travel through it and the memories they evoke; to the physical impacts of pollutants through shared inhalation; to the ways in which the air serves as a metaphor of connection in a cultural sense.

  • Lion in the Wind

    Fugue for wushu in the West.

  • After Bed

    Pulsing flashbacks from the summer of love reawaken a queer California classic.

  • The Translation is Approximate

    This video focuses a conversation that Naqvi witnessed between her aunt and a domestic worker over financial matters. For many reasons — the ambivalence of the situation, the respective socioeconomic positions of the two women involved in the scene, and the very nature of the recording, which careened between documentary and voyeurism — these images have long haunted Naqvi. In the Translation is Approximate (2021), Naqvi retrieves the original footage that she shot in 2013 and traces back her thoughts about what motivated her to revisit this material. This short video both provides insight into her approach and fundamentally questions…

  • Seaview

    Seaview (2015) is an experimental film which combines home video and captured footage from Karachi, Pakistan. Naqvi travels back to her family’s country of origin to compare childhood memories of this place with lived experience. In the first sequence, she shows video footage of her first trip to Clifton Beach in Karachi. The accompanying text describes her visit to the same beach seventeen years later, and the difficulties in trying to document this place, both as an image maker and as a woman. Naqvi confronts her own personal struggle of being caught between the ideals of Western and Eastern societies.…