Film Categories: Time + Space

  • The Williamsburg Houses

    This film gazes into the architecture and lives of the occupants of one of the most ambitious public housing projects ever built in the US. Exploring the remains of a utopian design in contemporary context, we are immersed in the life of a building and a community.

  • Kaleidoscope

    Kaleidoscope explores depression in an otherwise vibrant life. It is an original film poem edited to 16mm hand-processed B&W film that has been manipulated through tinting, toning and other cameraless techniques to reflect the fluctuations of living with a mood disorder. Footage collected during the Film for Artists and Film Farm residencies in 2016.

  • XANH

    XANH is a short-film that explores clothing as a form of liberation. Xanh’s (they/them) mother is a seamstress who polices Xanh’s gender presentation through the creation of feminine clothes. As their mom continuously criticizes their wardrobe, Xanh experiences nightmares that push them to search for peace within their spirituality.

  • Ghost Copy

    A flock of birds; an airplane; a soldier turns his head; a child sprints towards the camera. These four settings, and the many that follow in the next two-and-a-half minutes, each last a split second, a handful frames – just long enough fo rmoving forms to become perceptible as shapes, gestures, artefacts. in-between is darkness. The form of Ghost Copy is owed to a double work with the archive: The moving images are taken from Austrian amateur films from 1935 to 1965. The staccato of clips and black frames is sythesised with the compositional principle of the 8 mm film…

  • Noema

    Audio-visual notes on the encounter with 93-year-old painter Tatjana, who is losing her eyesight. Gestures gently observed through the tips of her hair interfere with thoughts about the sense of time and a dreamlike reality. Moving images follow the painter’s alignment relying more than ever on her experienced hand and imagination and exploring sensory perception beyond seeing.

  • aw • rah • nyoosh

    A documentary filmmaker attempts to imagine, along with his father, his grandmother’s experience at a labor camp during the holocaust. As they get drawn into a world of the grandmother’s romance, they begin to lose control of their imaginations. “The son installs the camera, the father stands on the sofa. They are preparing to begin an intergenerational dialogue based on the newspaper that their mother and grandmother, Sari, held in the 40s, during his deportation. aw • rah • nyoosh [aranyos] , from Ben Neufeld, takes time to set up; the viewer takes time to understand the contract that the…

  • Loathing

    The film depicts a society controlled by an autonomous system. While plebs are unhappy with their Designer overlords, a smart assistant takes part in a Luddite conspiracy against them. The conspiracy fails. The assistant recounts the events of the revolution in a court of law

  • Looking for Jiro

    “Looking for Jiro” explores the hidden dimensions of same sex intimacy for Japanese Americans incarcerated by the US government during World War II. This experimental performance video is inspired by Jiro Onuma, a gay Issei (immigrant) who was imprisoned at Topaz concentration camp in central Utah. He worked in the prison mess hall and was also an avid fan of homoerotic male physique magazines. How did this dandy gay bachelor from San Francisco survive the isolation, humiliation, and homophobia of imprisonment? This queer musical mash-up video features drag king performance, US propaganda footage, muscle building, and homoerotic bread making. This…

  • Warning Shot

    One death. Three versions of the crime. James H. Wakasa, a 63-year-old Japanese American bachelor, was shot to death by military police at Topaz concentration camp during World War II. Was it justifiable homicide, an accidental fatality, or second-degree murder? The press said he was trying to escape, the shooter claimed it was a warning shot, the case file suggests he was killed while walking a dog. This experimental film essay uses the “Rashomon effect” to juxtapose the conflicting accounts detailing the circumstances and cause of Wakasa’s untimely death. Part of the Queer Camp Trilogy.

  • Semiotics of Sab

    This experimental film essay explores the poetics of identity through an oblique portrait of gay Japanese American actor Sab Shimono. For more than five decades, Shimono has performed on stage and screen in over 150 roles as warlords, bus boys, and businessmen. Shimono asks, “How is it that we know who we are?” Recalling early structuralist works by Hollis Frampton and Martha Rosler, Semiotics of Sab displays the grammatology of queer Asian American masculinity through conflicting lexicons of race, representation, and selfhood.