This month Early Monthly Segments is delighted to be presenting three films that are distinguished by their political and critical resonance while exhibiting a profound, poetic and unique handling of the materials and form of film. In Light Reading Lis Rhodes uses a series of still photographs to suggest a mystery, or perhaps more accurately to explore the tropes of the language of mystery. Layering images and text both still and moving, and playing with repetition and image registration and measurement Light Reading is as much about the characteristics of film and photography and who is the subject and/or the object of such as the story it skirts. Similarly layered and elliptical A Cold Draft functions as a multifaceted poetic reportage of the experience of those left behind in the trickle down dystopia of the 1980s UK. The voice of a single narrator comes to embody a chorus of defeated subjects surviving perpetual oppression. Susan Oxtoby’s All Flesh Is Grass revolves around the exploration of the ruin of a 19th century shopping arcade in Buffalo NY, combined with footage of spaces, friends, children and characters in Toronto and in New York City.

For this ninth edition, in collaboration with the Collectif Jeune Cinema, Mex-Parismental, unveils a cinema of creative filmmakers of the young generation from Mexico and Latin America. This annual event is an unique opportunity to stay informed about the most contemporary experimental cinema and video from Mexico to the Southern Cone. Mex-Parismental will take place this year on Tuesday, April 29 at Point Ephemere to highlight this cinematographic production. The Artists, filmmakers and videographers represented in this edition, offer us a beautiful journey regardless of clichés and establish an intercultural encounter, far from the political and social dictates of their country of origin.
Curated by Angelica Cuevas Portilla

Unconscious Archives transverses noise core and vision spectacle bringing together expanded cinema and sonic propositions from London and afar. Re-launching in 2014, UA is back with a spectacular lineup that’s sure to be an explosive jaunt around your subconscious and physical being. Mattin is back in London after a prolonged exodus to unleash his intense, reflexive ideology on our unsuspecting selves. Makino Takashi experiments on us with his special brand of corporeal cinema. And Pant will deliver us into the unknown combining blues, projection arts and dance in a free-form musical folk tale.

Carte blanche to Kim Knowles (Black Box, Edinburgh International Film Festival)

In a post-screening discussion at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2013, veteran experimental filmmaker Michael Snow referred to the contemporary technological moment in terms of ‘mediums eating mediums’. The current state of analogue obsolescence might indeed be conceived in the context of consumption – one medium rendered obsolete by another, and framed by the wider drive towards (capitalist) progress and commodity culture. But thinking about the relationship between different mediums does not necessarily mean replacement (a negative formulation) but coexistence. In this sense, exploring the field of hybrid practice allows us to reflect on notions of medium-specificity, looking at ways in which different media may enter into a dialogue with each other. It offers a way out of the either/or polarisation that often surrounds the debate about analogue and digital technologies, and shows how the merging or alternating of mediums and formats widens the cinematic palette. This programme brings together films that approach the theme of hybridisation or coexistence in different ways, often explicitly staging the question of obsolescence in creative terms, and foregrounding cinema as a constantly shifting mode of perception.