**This event takes place at Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue New York, NY 10003), not at UnionDocs. **

This night of short films from Germany, Iran, Australia, and the U.S., advances the allegory of Plato’s Cave into contemporary geopolitics, to focus on all that is not clearly visible, including those who are denied access to public space. Manipulating the images with text, animation, and hand-processing techniques, the filmmakers reenact and exorcise situations of confusion, exclusion, and trauma. In this play of light and shadow, the works suggest that in the camera, as in life, all is not as it may appear. While artifice often becomes accepted reality, it is often by inquiring into this very metamorphosis that one may reflect on the nature of truth, transgression, and freedom.

For ticketing information visit: http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/buy-tickets

Joshua Gen Solondz is an artist working in moving image, sound, and performance. He’s screened in a variety of festivals including Images, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Onion City, Black Maria, Portland International, Milwaukee Underground, CAAMFest, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Chicago Underground, Mar del Plata, FIC Valdivia, Viennale, and New York Film Festival’s Projections. He’s has also shown at venues such as REDCAT, Light Industry, UnionDocs, Harvard Film Archive, MoMA, DINCA, NYU, Red Room, ATA, 3s, and Black Hole Cinematheque.

Solondz has received awards from Black Maria, New Orleans Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and Ann Arbor Film Festival as well as commissions for shows at Heliopolis, ACRE TV, and microscope gallery. He has an ongoing collaboration with Jim Supanick as the electronic slime duo known as SynthHumpers.

Josh studied at Bard College and received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his partner and occasional collaborator Emma Brenner-Malin.

Maryam Tafakory  (b. Shiraz, Iran) is an artist-filmmaker based in London. Her work draws on the notion of personal as political in a fractured narrative that involves a subtle negotiation between factual and fiction, exploring allegorical forms of visual narrative, using abstracted, symbolic and textual motifs and their on-screen representation. Part performance, her work draws on womanhood and rites of passage, interweaving poetry, (self)-censorship and religion, combining a formal minimalist syntax and figurative mode of representation.

She studied her MFA at Oxford University and her work have exhibited internationally including, Rotterdam IFFR; Edinburgh EIFF; Zurich Film Festival; Melbourne MIFF; ZINEBI; Hamburg IKFF; ICA London; BFI London; Kurzfilmtage Winterthur; Ji.hlava IDFF; Barbican Centre London; New York UnionDocs; and BBC Three. She has received several awards for her films including Best Short Film at Dokumenta-Madrid.

Leo Goldsmith is a writer, curator, and teacher based in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in Artforum, art-agenda, Cinema Scope, and The Brooklyn Rail, where he was film editor from 2011 to 2018. He is currently writing a book about the filmmaker Peter Watkins with Rachael Rakes.