We are thrilled to bring you an evening of cinema and conversation with Kera MacKenzie & Andrew Mausert-Mooney as we screen their feature documentary film Make a Distinction! 

Make a Distinction explores American landscapes and unearths the carceral and imperial undertones embedded in them. Through a lens that fuses ecological concerns with questions about state power and the structures that keep the scales unbalanced, Make a Distinction offers us an important example of how experimental documentary practices can create bridges across seemingly disparate conceptual terrains.

Hailed as a film that “…demonstrates how historical consciousness can orient diverse experimental tactics towards a unitary, emancipatory purpose” by Michael Metzger in CINE-FILE, you don’t want to miss it!

We’ll open the evening with short film from Brooklyn-based filmmaker Amanda Katz’s Under the paving stones, the beach (2019), that investigates the necessary human labor that sustains life inside of One Brooklyn Bridge Park, a luxury condominium on Brooklyn’s newly redeveloped East River waterfront.

We’re excited to bring together these works and the artists behind them for this night where we can understand the broad systemic inequities baked into our contemporary public and domestic landscapes. Bad At Sports called Make A Distinction “an innovative, hybrid non-fiction feature that blends together strains of essayistic, observational and agitprop filmmaking into a blistering montage. Political in a capital P way, it’s urgent for most everyone” 

Amanda Katz will join Kera MacKenzie & Andrew Mausert-Mooney for a conversation following the screening.

Program

On Brooklyn’s East River waterfront, a new park built on tenuous ground, a new residence converted from a formerly industrial shell, a promise of lives of convenience. A film that circles around rhythms of labor and leisure.

A family rests in the shade of a C-47 warcraft. An army installation contains the last remnants of an endangered grassland ecology. Young filmmakers hone their skills making cop shows on Chicago streets.

A debut hybrid non-fiction feature, Make a Distinction maps unseen forces of US imperialism through ostensibly disconnected aspects of daily life. If you can’t name the enemy do you become it?

62 mins

Kera MacKenzie is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist working primarily in film, video, live broadcast and installation. Through her works she speculates on radical subjectivities, the mechanisms of empathy, suspense, liveness, control, and performing with a camera. She has screened and exhibited her work at spaces worldwide including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rencontres Internationales Sciences & Cinémas (France), Anthology Film Archives and UnionDocs (NYC), Echo Park Film Center (Los Angeles), Microlights (Milwaukee), La lumière collective (Montreal), Cellular Cinema (Minneapolis), Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, High Desert Test Sites (New Mexico), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Nightingale and the Chicago Underground Film Festival (all Chicago). Kera has been an artist in residence at The Luminary (St. Louis), ACRE (Wisconsin), and Culturia (Berlin) and was recently a researcher in residence at Signal Culture (Owego, NY). Her latest film Make a Distinction, co-directed with Andrew Mausert-Mooney, premiered as the centerpiece screening at the 2021 Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival where it won a Best of the Festival (Jury Award) and then went on to screen as the opening night film at the 2021 Chicago Underground Film Festival where it won another Jury Award. Additionally, Kera is a Founding Co-Director of ACRE TV (an artist-made live-streaming television network) and an educator.

Andrew Mausert-Mooney is a Chicago-based artist working with 16mm film, video, performance and broadcast. Andrew’s work has shown in festivals, galleries and exhibition series around the world including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the American Film Institute, UnionDocs, Anthology Film Archives, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Gallery 400, Pleasure Dome, The Nightingale, Microlights, and Other Cinema. He received his MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2012. In 2018 he was named, with Kera MacKenzie, as one of  Newcity’s Film 50. Currently, Andrew is a founding co-director of ACRE TV and an educator.

Amanda Katz makes films that investigate the built environment, everyday life, and the tension between public and private space. She works with film and digital video, and draws on documentary, experimental, and performative modes. Her films have received grants from institutions such as the New York State Council on the Arts and The Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, and have screened at film festivals, museums, galleries and community spaces including The San Francisco International Film Festival, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, DOCNYC, Antimatter Media Art, FLEX Festival, Encuentros del Otro Cine Festival Internacional (Ecuador), Athens International Film and Video Festival, FRACTO (Germany), The Sunview Luncheonette, The Astoria Historical Society, and Microscope Gallery. Katz holds an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College– City University of New York, and works professionally as a film editor out of her apartment in Brooklyn.