Nov 17, 2018 at 7:30 pm
CIFF x UNDO: Camden Shorts “Fire”
Screening to be followed by a discussion with Courtney Stephens, Martin DiCicco, Claudia Zamora Valencia & Sky Hopinka. Plus stick around for a fiery party after the program!
Missed the stellar programming at this year’s Camden International Film Festival? Don’t fret. We’ve invited our friends from Maine down to Brooklyn for a weekend long celebration of the short form in documentary. Get to know the team from Camden and some of their most exciting boundary pushing featured filmmakers from this year’s festival program.
Saturday evening we share one of the most popular programs of shorts from this year’s fest, FIRE, which presents a collection of shapeshifting, and transportive shorts that delve into poetic territory of memory, perception, and recollection through examinations of sexual promiscuity, borders, violence, family strife, language, codes, allegory, and adaptation. “When you stare into a fire, your mind is slowly captivated by its shifting shapes and colors. The gaze of the fire overtakes you: the ghosts of your mind begin to dance.”
This program will be followed by a reception with a thematically appropriate bonfire in the backyard. Come through for a classic UNDO evening hang as we channel CIFF after dark and convene for a festive evening to celebrate the kick off to this collaboration.
Program
Here There is No Earth
Martin Dicicco, 2018, Turkey, Armenia, 6 min.
Testimony about a shepherd’s fatal encounter at the Turkish-Armenian border provides a haunting perspective on the countries’ physical and invisible lines of separation.
Fainting Spells
Sky Hopinka, 2018, USA, Ho-Chunk Nation, 11 min.
Recollections of youth, learning, and lore create an imagined myth for the Indian Pipe Plant, Xąwįska, used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who fainted.
I Have Sinned a Rapturous Sin
Maryam Tafakory, 2018, Iran/UK, 8 min.
Fragments of Forough Farokhzad’s poem, Sin, are read out against Islamic clergies advising women on how to control their lust.
Las Nubes
Juan Pablo González, 2017, Mexico, 21 min.
In the town of Las Nubes, an anonymous rancher recounts how since he stopped measuring time his memory has clouded almost completely. What he does remember with exact precision is the last night he saw his daughter.
Mixed Signals
Courtney Stephens, 2018, USA, 8 min.
A female patient, undergoing a neurological exam, must communicate through the narrow language of medical phrases and physical compliance. She transforms into a military supply ship and charts a new course, while sounding her alarm in an antiquated maritime code. The film is a loose adaptation of Hannah Weiner’s 1982 chapbook, Code Poems.
The Market
Claudia Zamora Valencia, 2018, United States, 24 min.
Through post-apocalyptic, science fiction allegory, The Market explores the values attached to “local food” and consumption. Tracing the relationships between customers, farmers and their produce at a market in a gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.
78 min
Party starts at 10pm
Martin DiCicco’s first feature, All That Passes by Through a Window That Doesn’t Open, The film, a journey by rail through the dreams and regrets of railway workers in Azerbaijan and Armenia, won the Regard Neuf award at Visions du Reel, Camden IFF’s Cinematic Vision Award and Taiwan IDF’s Artistic Merit Prize. As a cinematographer he has shot shorts for Field of Vision, including Cecilia Aldarondo’s Picket Line and Brett Story’s CamperForce. He shot and directed Here There Is No Earth, which recently premiered at the 56th New York Film Festival.
Claudia Zamora Valencia uses video and photography to explore the connections between ethnography, community work and art. Her work focuses on the act of documentation, social processes, and memory, particularly as they relate to issues of migration, labor, class, consumption and nature. She currently works for NICE, a grassroots organization that fights for undocumented immigrants’ right to dignified work. Claudia has taught at at Hunter College, CUNY, where she earned a MFA in Integrated Media Arts, and is also a member of Meerkat Media Collective. Her writing has been published in academic journals, and her personal and collaborative films have screened at various festivals. Her film The Market premiered at Camden International Film Festival in 2018.
She is from Oaxaca, Mexico and lives Brooklyn, New York.
Courtney Stephens is a filmmaker and programmer based in Los Angeles. She has combined her interest in geography and archives into live essay-documentary, curated programs, alongside her work in experimental documentary. Her films have screened at SXSW, The Wexner Center for the Arts, UnionDocs, Anthology Film Archives, Mumbai International Film Festival, Dhaka International Film Festival, and elsewhere. She co-programs the film and lecture series Veggie Cloud, and has presented events at The Getty Museum, REDCAT, AM-London, Art Contemporary Los Angeles, Human Resources, the Velaslavasay Panorama, and ongoingly at Veggie Cloud’s space in Los Angeles. Stephens attended the American Film Institute, is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and a Sloan Scholarship, and periodically lectures on subjects relating to film and geography at the Royal Geographical Society, London.
Sky Hopinka was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, and Portland, Oregon and is currently based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His work centers around personal positions of homeland and landscape, designs of language and facets of culture contained within, and the play between the accessibility of the known and the unknowable. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
His work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images Festival, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, American Indian Film Festival, Sundance, Antimatter, Chicago Underground Film Festival, FLEXfest, Projections, and the LA Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial. He was awarded jury prizes at the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and 3rd Prize at the 2015 Media City Film Festival.
