Program 5
curated by Trisha Low
▴ Erica Sheu and Britany Gunderson in person ▴
Saturday, April 1, 2023 @ 5pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 67 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
pài-la̍k ē-poo (saturday afternoon)
Erica Sheu
2020 | 2 minutes | USA/Taiwan | 16mm | color | sound
A half-moon on the blue sky. A quiet offering connects the unreachable world with the physical earth. A Japanese childhood song comes in the wind. In Taiwanese, we promised Grandma that the next time we visit is Saturday afternoon. pài-la̍k ē-poo means Saturday afternoon in Taiwanese Holouē.
-ES
Unabridged Maneuver
Bruno Delgado Ramo
2022 | 18 minutes | Canada/Spain | 16mm | color | silent | North American premiere
Conceived as an investigation about the harbors’ piloting areas and the frame maneuvering with the Bolex, the film shifts between the studio’s editing table at LIFT facilities (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto) and various locations on the western shore of Lake Ontario. The word manoeuvre refers both to the material operations carried out with one’s hands and to the procedures on board when approaching a harbor. The film explores the idea of precision in both practices.
-BDR
Edwina Marlow
Curt McDowell
1974 | 12 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | sound
Executed by students at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, under the careful supervision of Curt McDowell. Guest appearance by Ainslie Pryor.
Restored by the Academy Film Archive
Natural Order
Britany Gunderson
2020 | 5 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound | US premiere
Trying to deconstruct the natural world into something more ordered, cycles of chaos are created instead.
-BG
Pump
Charles Cadkin
2022 | 5 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
On the outskirts of Chicago, community members gather to collect water at a well known water pump.
-CC
On the Various Nature of Things
Deborah Stratman
1995 | 25 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
A 24-figure exploration of the natural forces at work in the world, based on Scottish physicist Michael Faraday's 1859 Christmas lectures to the public. The film literally, metaphorically and whimsically reinterprets scientific convention to illustrate physical concepts.
Faraday felt people needed to be more aware of the everyday reality of physics and how its laws affected their simplest actions. So in the late 1850s, he addressed the English public on the subject. He arranged for a series of lectures to be held, as a tradition, on Christmas day.
As Faraday put it, "We come into this world, we live, and depart from it, without our thoughts being called specifically to consider how all this takes place." The filmmaker takes up his challenge and considers the world around her with an infectiously playful, yet sometimes dark, curiosity.
The film is an homage to Faraday's enthusiasm and his tactile approach to science. He was also a filmic forefather, having invented and experimented with one of the first kinematascopic devices. The film challenges the viewer to see beauty in the small details which surround us but go unnoticed or are taken for granted. "I say apparently," says the physicist, "for you must not imagine that, because you cannot perceive any action, none has taken place."
-DS
Erica Sheu/徐璐 makes short films, expanded cinema, and installation with celluloid film. Her work is often about diary filmmaking, cross-generational memories, history and language, collective singularity, and/or Taiwanese identity politics. Sheu holds an MFA in Film/Video at CalArts and is currently based in Los Angeles.
Bruno Delgado Ramo (Sevilla, 1991) is a filmmaker, artist-researcher and architect who explores site-specific features and incorporates them into his works on film and his screening arrangements. He devises his work as research grounded in material and spatial practice of cinema means, leading to films, spatial and live proposals and text matter. He often takes care of the projection himself. His work has been showcased at international festivals and different cultural and art programmes as Rose Bruford College or INJUVE; presented with the work of Esperanza Collado at Image Forum or Taipei Contemporary Art Center. In 2021 he and Paula Guerrero conceived the group Las Synergys, investigating the live experiences of film projection and Dj mixing. Both have also been running the initiative “kino~okno”, comprising films, screening programmes, exhibition, installation and live formats, focused on the mechanical, photochemical and optical genuine root of cinema.
A filmmaker, actor, visual artist, and writer, Curt McDowell arrived in San Francisco in the mid-1960s to attend the San Francisco Art Institute in the painting department and quickly changed course to become a filmmaker to work with George Kuchar, within a period that witnessed the Summer of Love, gay liberation, and the onset of AIDS, to which he succumbed at the age of 42. He directed over 30 films, celebrating sex as well as genre riffing and autobiographical narratives that bear the influences of Jack Smith’s lush, DIY camp aesthetic, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s explosive melodrama, and Nan Goldin’s glimpses of countercultural bohemia
“Curt, cute, controversial, and not celibate.” - George Kuchar
Britany Gunderson is a filmmaker and artist living in Milwaukee, WI. Her practice is often interdisciplinary, creating film and video work that uses material forms such as textiles, found objects, and celluloid. Her films are rooted in non-fiction and often explore themes of personal histories, love, and a longing for the truth. Gunderson received a BFA in Film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Charles Cadkin is a visual artist concerned with documenting and preserving neglected personal and local histories through topography, landscape and body. His work has screened internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Other Cinema, Moviate Underground Film Festival and ULTRAcinema. He has received funding and support from the National Film Preservation Foundation, Interbay Cinema Society and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, among other institutions. He holds a BS in Cinema and Photography from Ithaca College and resides in Chicago, IL.
Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes films and artworks that investigate power, control and belief, considering how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, sinkholes, comets, raptors, orthoptera, levitation, exodus, sisterhood and faith. She has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA (NY), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hammer Museum (LA), Witte de With (Rotterdam), PS1 (NY), Tabakalera (San Sebastian), Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), the Whitney Biennial and festivals including Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH/DOX, Oberhausen, True/False, TIFF and Rotterdam. Stratman is the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim and USA Collins Fellowships, an Alpert Award, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Award and grants from Creative Capital, Graham Foundation, and Wexner Center for the Arts. She lives in Chicago where teaches at the University of Illinois.