Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We are beyond honored to be hosting a two-night focus on the legendary filmmaker Paula Gaitán in conjunction with our monthly online cineclub Artistic Differences.

As our co-collaborator and programmer for the cineclub, Cíntia Gil wrote, “Gaitán is one of the most exciting contemporary artists and filmmakers of our time, whose work is both brutally sensitive and free. She aligns a strange capacity to listen to all things around and respond to them through radically singular gestures. Her films are not only voyages through deep modes of thinking and feeling, but also strange investigations on the minimal and most subtle aspects of the encounter between the camera and the world.

Not really interested in canons, norms and “good practices”,  Paula Gaitán obsessively looks for the vibration of things in the filmic matter, for how life is manifested in a filming body.”

DAFilms calls the body of work of Colombian-Brazilian filmmaker Paula Gaitán, “one of the most radical and uncompromising to appear in Latin America in the last 30 years…ever occupied by the forceful movement of a human body in and through a space; a background in poetry and the visual arts seemingly setting the stage for a performative, mutant, and highly material cinema.”

Noite, a sensorial portrait of a possible urban night, is an extraordinary example of this filmmaker’s radical precision — using the camera as a haptic device, the montage as the construction of a world and its lines of flight.

Don’t miss this immersive and transporting film, and come back on 6/2 for SUBTLE INTERFERENCES, her iconic portrait of musician,  Arto Lindsay.

Paula will be in attendance for conversations following both programs. Come through!

Program

Noite by Paula Gaitán

The Audio Rebel experimental music space in Rio de Janeiro, the city’s streets, the obscurity crossed by the night colors, are materials that respond to and embody an angled and multi shaped soundscape. Opening our senses, Noite enfolds us into a meditation on presence.

Because the night belongs to lovers. Because the night belongs to lust. Because the night belongs to lovers. Because the night belongs to us.” (Patti Smith)

83 mins, Brazil, 2015
Cast: Clara Choveaux, Nash Laila, Cassius Augusto, Ava Rocha, Negro Leo, Andre Novais, Maíra Senise, Daniel Passi, Mell Brigida, Carolina Caju, Joana dos Santos, Bella, Daniel Fernandes –
Production: Bernardo de Oliveira,Paula Gaitán

Program Duration: 82 mins

Bios

Paula Gaitán was born in Paris in 1954. A visual artist, photographer, poet, and filmmaker with a Visual Arts degree from the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, Gaitán has been working in film since 1978, when she participated as an art director in Glauber Rocha’s The Age of the Earth. She has created several documentaries, video art, and plastic art installations for numerous collective exhibitions.

Paula’s work combines a deeply personal artistic vision with palpable reality. Her filmography consists of 9 feature length films. In 2016, the Cinematheque of Museum of Modern Art (MAM – Rio de Janeiro) presented a retrospective of her work , and Mostra Tiradentes, also in Brazil, presented a homage to her work in the 2021 edition. .

Currently lives and works in the city of São Paulo, Brazil.

Andrea Avidad is a PhD candidate and adjunct professor in the Cinema Studies department at NYU Tisch. Her research focuses on sound and vocality in nonfiction film and acousmatic sound and aurality in film and literature. Her publications include book chapters in Sound Affects, published by Bloomsbury US, and the Oxford Handbook of Media and Vocality, as well as essays on film sound and acousmaticity published in journals such as Film-Philosophy and Soapbox (Radical Open Access Collective). Her pedagogical practice focuses on documentary art history, early cinema, and all things sonic.