Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re thrilled to join hands with Cosmic Rays Film Festival for their 2023-2024 Touring Program! Each year, Cosmic Rays selects work from the previous year’s festival to tour at a variety of museums, universities, micro-cinemas, and other screening venues. We’re delighted to be co-presenting these singular, expansive works, in collaboration with Bill Brown & Sabine Gruffat!

This year’s program of contemporary short films probe the limits of representation. These films cut across the generic boundaries of documentary and fiction, the social boundaries of the personal and the political, as well as the material boundaries of cinema itself.

From wandering in another’s dream, expressive renderings of isolation, accounts of intimate and disorienting memories, to an archive for future sonic activists, you don’t want to miss this incredible line-up!

Come through!

Program

Prearranged Signal by Alina Taalman

5 mins, 2022

In the dream of a stranger.

Lockdown Dreamscape by Nicolas Gebbe

7 mins, 2022

When spending a lot of time at home in isolation, the walls begin to move. The sense of time fades, the days pass quietly, everything seems to repeat itself endlessly. Spaces, conversations, visual impressions and sounds merge and make everything seem like a long dream.

Lesser Choices by Courtney Stephens

7 mins, 2022

The bleached palette and home-movie aesthetics of Super 8 footage provide the image track for this testimonial about an illegal abortion in Mexico City in the 1960s, delivered in voiceover by the filmmaker’s mother. In its account of this intimate and disorienting memory, Lesser Choices summons a time of profound uncertainty—a moment from an era without rights—and offers a warning to the present.

Because the Sky is Blue by Wenhua Shi

4 mins, 2022

A short tribute to my hometown Wuhan, China. All source footage is from my childhood friends’ social media 15-second video feed. Muybridge captured the galloping horse one hundred forty years ago in a brief 12 frames. The duration of contemporary social media video clips is similar to Muybridge’s brevity.

Hors Titre by Wiame Haddad

4 mins, 2022

One October evening in Paris, 1961. A man leaves his room to join a peaceful march for Algerian independence. A photograph reconstitutes the offscreen dimension of the event using fragments of a daily life in suspended time.

Sine Die by Camila Moreiras

15 mins, 2021

Amid desert landscapes and chain-link fences, plutonium lay scattered and buried in the town of Palomares, Spain. A voiceover narration describes an undisclosed medical condition, and land and body converge in the uncomfortable difference between recovery and survival. Telling two divergent stories in parallel, Sine die is based on real events that correspond to physical contamination, whether that be the earth or the body – the director’s – that together invoke a condition of the chronically present.

NE Corridor by Joshua Solondz

6 mins, 2022

Sliced up fragments zipping and framing as the print struggles to make it through the frame. A woman stands ups and turns, a sculpture appears, a lawnmower mows, shredding and falling apart.

Phase II by Kelly Sears

6 mins, 2022

In the near future, real estate developers deploy sonic weapons used at protests to clear neighborhoods for high-end high rises. On the front lines are sound medics that tend to those injured by the assaults. As they respond, one member of the team documents the incidents to create a future archive for other sonic activists. For Phase II, the filmmaker walked around areas of rapid development in her city and took thousands of photographs. This animated, speculative fiction/non-fiction archive maps out more aggressive eviction and deployment tactics to come.

Blue Room by Merete Mueller

12 mins, 2022

In two prisons in the Pacific Northwest, incarcerated participants in a mental health experiment watch nature videos on loop, prompting them to reflect on isolation and the wilderness.

Sightings by Pere Ginard

6 mins, 2023

An underwater walker advances heavily towards the unknown. What he sees, what he finds, makes up this inventory made of melancholy, obsessions and fears.

Program Duration: 75 mins

Bios

Sabine Gruffat is a French-American artist born in Bangkok, Thailand. She works with experimental video and animation, media-enhanced performance, participatory public art, and immersive installation. In this work, machines, interfaces, and systems constitute the language by which she codes the world. The creation of new ideas means inventing new ways of using existing tools, crossing signals, or repurposing old hardware. By actively disrupting both current and outmoded technology, Gruffat questions the standardized and mediatized world around us. She has produced digital media works for public spaces as well as interactive installations that have been shown at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, Devotion Gallery, and more. She is also a filmmaker with a special interest in the social and political implications of media and technology. Her experimental and essay films explore how technology, globalization, urbanism, and capitalism affect human beings and the environment. Sabine’s films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival in Japan, The Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan, and Migrating Forms in New York, the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, and more.

Bill Brown is a filmmaker living in North Carolina where he is an Associate Professor of Media Production at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  Brown‛s films have screened at venues around the world, including the Rotterdam Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and Lincoln Center. A retrospective of his films was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Merete Mueller is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work explores our relationships with built and natural environments, and has screened at SXSW, Hot Docs, London Film Festival, AFI Fest, The Brooklyn Museum, and via New York Times Op-Docs, The New Yorker, Al Jazeera America, and Netflix.