Film Categories: Essay

  • Rough Blazing Star

    A new experimental documentary film project from artist/filmmaker Christopher Wiersema examines anarchism, local history and memory, Emma Goldman’s writing, and a shared love of flowers. Told through a poetic inquiry and response to the text and research – beginning with a visit to the Old Labor Hall in Barre, Vermont – the social center of the Italian anarchist and socialist community in the early 1900’s.

  • Hier und Dort

    Since I arrived here in Germany from Korea, I always find myself in the unlearning situation. While I encounter completely different cultures, languages, situations, I have had to throw away a lot of what I have already learned and at the same time take away a lot of what I need to learn anew. I am already a learned person, but at the same time an unlearned person here.

  • MRI fiction journey

    During MRI scanning, I would fall into a profound deception, and in this unpredictable space, all alone and completely disconnected from the outside world, I would travel the universe and ponder about incidents that I would never be able to experience. Incomprehensible yet significant senses and experience that I accidentally faced one day. And the goosebumps from the realness of those moments is weighing down on me. Based on such experience, I visualized my fictious stories along with those of others.

  • All my sign

    Shinjuku in winter, 2017-. I feel useless when I try to look at coincidence as inevitability or create romance from mundane things. So I drink alcohol now in an ordinary bar with nonsensical neon lights. I thought my destiny was to drink alcohol, by necessity alone, in any place. I never tried to change that. Then I make eye contact with a man sitting across from me. Outside the window it is snowing. Between the things that fall naturally and naturally, I was alone.

  • Cinabrethe

    I have a strangely comfortable feeling in the porch, being neither outside nor inside. Since then, the porch has a role for me above the space. My porch, existing as an ambiguous size, occupies the role between outside and inside. neither cold nor warm, neither dangerous nor safe, neither noisy nor quiet. Why do I feel safe in this indeterminate space? I recapitulate the insignificant events in my everyday life, I am on the trail of the past and the already disappeared.

  • Memory Rituals [Part One]: Memory of Trees

    Memory Rituals [Part One]: Memory of Trees three-screen video, 5.44 minutes, made with support from Media City Film Festival’s Chrysalis Fellowship 2023. Thinking about remembering, about forgetting, and about the memory of trees. [more info: https://cbattle.com/memory-rituals-part-one-memory-of-trees/]

  • Meditation 4 Black Women

    Four women, with seemingly unrelated lives, meditate on identity setting off a mystical event that allows them to breathe again.

  • Goin ape 2

    Three stories intertwine in a climatic double ending, Ape is stuck in the middle.

  • Away

    A new immigrant applies for a visa and endures the long and demanding wait for approval or denial. An epistolary poetic film that navigates the inner thoughts of an applicant’s last half of a two-year process for a residency visa in Canada. This long and tumultuous journey that for many can take at least 24 months from the application date demands a high level of resilience as it imposes dramatic waves of anxiety and loneliness. Away turns a sharp light into one of the consequences of the current process we have for economic immigration in Canada, a country with immigration…

  • FOTO CINE MAMA & I

    There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We’ll dream of being blind.” — Paul Virilio If you have no room for a film essay work – don’t waste your time further. A film essay delving into the essence of photography, intrinsically incomplete, lacking, fractional. All images inherently reach beyond their boundaries—this is a truth rooted in history and made even more evident in our current age, dominated by the astonishing and decisive powers of artificial intelligence. The film’s core utilizes a collection of personal photographs of the filmmaker’s mother and…