Screening: aCinema Summer Screening Series *IN PERSON*

In person at Woodland Pattern

Join us for the first-ever aCinema Summer Screening Series, featuring a weekend of six programs curated by Takahiro Suzuki and Janelle VanderKelen! We are thrilled to welcome them back to the gallery for this special, condensed presentation, which comprises aCinema’s Season 8. 

Screenings will take place at 7 pm on Friday; 3 pm, 5 pm, and 7 pm on Saturday; and 5 pm and 7 pm on Sunday.

The first two screenings will feature 17 works selected from the aDifferent Program open call held this spring, which received nearly 200 submissions from around the globe. The weekend will then move into four additional curated screenings including works by Asako Ujita, Ayla Dmyterko, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Panu Johansson, Victoria Verseau, and more!

A specially designed commemorative program produced by Woodland Pattern will be available for purchase.

FULL PROGRAM DETAILS:

FRI @ 7 PM SAT @ 3 PM SAT @ 5 PM SAT @ 7 PM SUN @ 5 PM SUN @ 7 PM

Friday, July 19th | 7pm :

Lines That Fold The Wind (TRT approx 62 min)

why some people be mad at me sometimes, Mahlet Cuff, 2 min 40 sec

SYNOPSIS: A meditation on the misappropriation of Dancehall music while using Black Feminist Citational praxis. why some people be mad at me sometimes is a single channel experimental film that cites the mother of Dancehall Sister Nancy singing her song Bam Bam in dialogue with Maya Angelou’s performance of the poem The Mask. The video is a meditation on the misappropriation of  Blackness within music, and how often Black folks are told to not criticize but to smile and be grateful. All while tracing the filmmakers' relationship to Dancehall and Afro Caribbean culture through archival footage of themselves as a young person dancing at Folklorama. Folklorama has the intention to be a space for sharing diverse cultures but oftentimes a space of cultural consumption that erases the colonial history of the countries that are on display.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY: Mahlet Cuff is a Black queer femme born and based in Winnipeg, Manitoba (Treaty 1 Territory).  They are a writer, programmer, artist, curator and DJ. In their artistic practice they question conventional narratives about relationship-building both within themselves and with their kin in the world. They draw inspiration from the idea of creating their own worlds, building and rebuilding what it means to generate bonds with one another. They have written pieces for  BlackFlash, Peripheral Review, Cmag, Public Parking and Akimbo. Cuff's interest as a curator focuses on the ways that Black women and gender non-conforming artists are able to use critical fabulation as a way to understand themselves and their histories. She has curated work for Window Winnipeg, Take Home BIPOC arts house, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, The  Dave Barber Cinematheque, the8fest, Vancouver Queer Film Festival, BlackFlash Expanded,  and VTape. Why some people be mad at me sometimes is their first short film.

Calls and Candle Light, Juyi Mao, 5 min 58 sec

SYNOPSIS: Calls and Candlelight is an experimental short film that delves into the interplay of hope and connection in the darkness. The candlelight, with its gentle, flickering presence, symbolizes tradition, warmth, and as a metaphor of the enduring aspects of human experience. In contrast, the telephone represents modernity, a technological communication to the outside, offering a different kind of warmth – that of human connection.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY: Juyi Mao (Hefei, Anhui Province, China, 1991) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his BA from Xiamen University and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art.  

He has received grants from United States Artists, NYFA, Queens Council on the Arts, and the  Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He is a MacDowell Film/Video fellow, and he has attended numerous other artist-in-residency with awards, such as Millay Arts, Vermont Studio Center,  NARS Foundation, and Franconia Sculpture Park.  

His work has been exhibited and screened at renowned art venues internationally, including  Anthology Film Archives, ARGOS Centre for Audiovisual Arts, CAFA Art Museum, La Mama  Experimental Theatre Club, Museum of Modern Art, among others. His films have played at  various festivals including the 2019 Channels Festival International Biennial of Video Art, 24e 

Rencontres Internationales Traverse, 67 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Beijing  International Short Film Festival, Bogota Experimental Film Festival, Kinemastik International  Short Film Festival, Reykjavík International Film Festival, the One Minutes, and Video Art  Miden.

Wasting, Sinking, Dazzling, Floating, 찬민 김 (Chanmin Kim), 11 min 36sec

SYNOPSIS: I am now located in the time and space between dreams and reality. Perhaps I fell asleep or almost fell asleep at some point. But still I blink and stare at something or am stared at by something. Between the noise, the leaking light, and my perceptions, I am wasting, sinking,  dazzling and floating.  

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY: 찬민 김 Chanmin Kim was born in Korea and majored in digital arts at university. Currently studying experimental film in Germany. Chanmin Kim is interested in personal experiences and fiction derived from them. It is often a real event, but sometimes it has to do with a dream. 

Alberta’s Room, Victoire Karera Kampire, 17 min 38 sec

SYNOPSIS: Alberta's Room is a journey into the dreams and nightmares of Alberta Gay. The film looks back at a pop icon's tragic fate, exploring a female perspective on a tragedy that has been described as a man's business. Alberta's Room is an experimental film about absence and grief, straddling the border between documentary and fiction.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY: Victoire Karera Kampire is a Rwandan-Belgian director and sound designer (Solange Brought Mona Lisa Home, Too Many Birds, Alberta's Room). At the heart of her artistic quest is the notion of absence filling her films - places of hallucinated archives and experimentation at the border of documentary and fiction - with ghostly presences.   

In addition to her personal projects,Victoire Karera K. has collaborated with Johan Grimonprez,  as documentary reseacher, on his latest feature "Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat" awarded at  Sundance. She also created vidéo pieces for the stage, in collaboration with South African choreographer Moya Michael (it is like a finger pointing a way to the moon the moon, KVS/Wiels) and with the Collectif Faire-Part, Fallon Mayanja & Mawena Yahouessi (Joy Boy, A tribute to Julius Eastman - De Singel). Victoire Karera K. is currently developing her next film "Ejo".

Bruised Fruit & Underfed Flora, Justin Rhody, 6 min 17 sec

SYNOPSIS: A straddling of the dynamics that link and distort sound and image. Beginning with a soundtrack that Rhody composed from recordings by long-time collaborator, Jeremy Kennedy, the structure  and visual anatomy of the film was then constructed around its sonic form. The interplay,  independence and connection between the two components intuitively create an indefinite non linear narrative, resulting in Bruised Fruit & Underfed Flora. 

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY: Justin Rhody is a filmmaker, photographer, curator and sound artist based in Santa Fe, New  Mexico. His work has been widely exhibited internationally and he has been organizing art, film and music events for over 20 years. Rhody is a co-founder of No Name Cinema and works as the Cinema Director at the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe. He runs the Physical media label, and plays in various free-improv ensembles.

quilt frame, Anna Hogg, 7 min 17 sec

SYNOPSIS: A mother and daughter hand-wash a 100-year-old quilt in order to restore and preserve it. The quilt was made by the filmmaker’s great-grandmother, who hand-stitched together old chicken-feed bags and other leftover materials. The film serves as a documentation of the quilt's preservation, while also attempting to investigate the provenance of the material

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY: Anna Hogg is an artist and filmmaker whose work indulges in the impossible and the unknowable, exploring these fields as productive sites for play and wild flights of imagination.  Allowing truth to be unstable and knowledge to be indeterminate, her work “stays with the trouble” of subjects ranging from the archive, to the cinematic apparatus, to surveillance technology, and especially their relation to memory, knowledge, and regimes of truth. Her films have screened internationally, including Prismatic Ground Film Festival, Kasseler  DokFest, Chicago Underground Film Festival, San Diego Underground Film Festival, and Big  Sky Documentary Film Festival. She was awarded the Jury prize for Best International Work at the 2017 WNDX Festival, and nominated for the Golden Key award at the 2017 Kasseler  DokFest. In 2023, she co-directed and co-founded the inaugural event of the Odds & Ends Film Festival with Light House Studio. She holds an MFA in Film & Video from the California Institute of the Arts and now teaches Film at the University of Virginia.

Бабушка Галя и Дедушка Аркадий // Grandma Galya and Grandpa Arkadiy, Anna Kipervaser, 4 min 24 sec

SYNOPSIS: A jovial and dreamy rumination on love. On time passing. On what we collect, what we hold on to, and how we maintain connection to homeplace, to ourselves. 

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY: Anna Kipervaser is a Ukrainian-born artist whose practice engages with a range of topics including human and animal bodies, ethnicity, religion, colonialism, and environmental conservation. Her engagement with these topics is informed by a commitment to formal experimentation, DIY and alternative processes, spanning disciplines including experimental and documentary moving image works in both 16mm film and digital video. Her work has screened at festivals internationally, including at Process Experimental Film Festival,  Slamdance Film Festival, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Crossroads Film Festival,  Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International Film  Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Light Field, Antimatter, Fracto, Imagine  Science Film Festival, Prismatic Ground, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, Milwaukee  Underground Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Indie Grits Film Festival, Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogota, among others. Anna's work also screens in classrooms, galleries, museums, microcinemas,  basements, and schoolhouses! Her films are distributed by CFMDC, Alchemiya, and Canyon  Cinema. She is also a painter, printmaker, educator, curator of exhibitions, programmer of screenings.  

An Inimitable Place Called Home, Jolene Mok, 5 min 33 sec

SYNOPSIS: This work was created to reflect a constant wanderer’s overdue homecoming before yet another departure. 

The numerous possibilities of navigating Hong Kong are truly extraordinary. The film’s basic premise is to show Hong Kong’s unique cityscape visualised through land, sea, and air. For example, various mass transit vehicles traverse the city recurrently and are juxtaposed with free-flying sparrows living in their very own humble neighbourhoods. 

I am drawn to the poetry found in mundane, everyday scenes in Hong Kong. I wanted to magnify this uniqueness and beauty by using the analogue medium of black and white 16mm film. I hand-processed the film stock myself. The flaws that appeared during the film-handling process, such as the dust traces and scratch marks, are important assets that work with a beautiful poem by Hong Fu to present an orchestrated work to audiences. —Jolene Mok 

Suppose a Few Birds Fly By 

Suppose a few birds fly by 

and you see the light 

glimmering 

inside the silence is a place 

that belongs to you 

—Hong Fu 

Translated by Eleanor Goodman 

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY: Jolene Mok was born and raised in Hong Kong. An experimental artist, she takes video, film and photography as her major creative platforms. Mok earned her M.F.A. in Experimental &  Documentary Arts at Duke University in 2013. She has been exposed to an interdisciplinary learning and working environment since her undergraduate education in the School of Creative Media through her major in the Critical Inter-Media Laboratory (2003-2007). 

Mok takes both practical and theoretical components as interconnected aspects throughout her creative process. She is open and always ready to play with and incorporate emerging situations in her artistic pursuits for the generation of unexpected, meaningful outcomes. Since 2006, Mok’s works have been shown worldwide. In 2015, she was awarded the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship. Mok has been on itinerant taking part in artist residency programs from  2011 onwards, she does not base anywhere, & she is happy to go to wherever the world welcomes her to go. 

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