Interweaving pure documentary with semi-scripted sequences, Johanna Domke and Marouan Omara’s Dreamaway follows the absurd days and fantastical nights of a group of young Egyptian workers lured from home by the promise of jobs and a freer lifestyle in Sharm El Sheikh, a popular resort town on the edge of the Red Sea. Recent terror attacks have driven the local tourism industry into the ground, yet its young workers ritualistically carry on with their jobs in the nearly deserted hotels, despite the lack of guests. Between work, they wander the empty environs dreaming of alternative lives. Preceded by CROP, Domke and Omara’s reflection on the power of images, set in the offices of Egypt’s state newspaper Al-Ahram and told from the perspective of a fictional photojournalist who missed the 2011 revolution due to a hospital stay.
The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College announces the fall programs in the screening series Whole Grain: Experiments in Film & Video. The variety of subjects explored across the season's the three programs include the relationship between text and image (September 26), the work of Tibetan-American artist Tenzin Phuntsog (October 16), and the work of the late Harry Smith (November 16).
This screening, programmed by The Machine That Kills Bad People, features Jeanne Liotta’s short film Observando el Cielo (Observing the Sky) (2007) and Annik Leroy’s In der Dämmerstunde – Berlin (From Dawn to Night – Berlin) (1980).
Jeanne Liotta’s Observando el Cielo is an exploration of the cosmos. Liotta investigates the cosmic landscape at the intersection of art, science and philosophy. Through seven years of celestial observations captured on 16mm film, she reveals a world that is mysterious and profound.
Co-curated by artist Zara Joan Miller, this evening explores several approaches by artists thinking through non-conforming bodies and their radical potentials.
The programme brings together several works by Miller, into a conversation with material made by other artists, resulting in a layered interaction between filmmakers seeking new ways to frame the rhythms of the body.
For many years Mark Street has been making small, observational films of the details and energies of public spaces in urban settings. City blocks, parking spaces and storefronts (and the people who bustle on by them) become abstractions as viewed in reflected rain or through the scratched glass of a bus stop enclosure. These city spaces identify a place but carry the mark of time, and are not divorceable from the moment of their making.
For many years, Jerome Hiler only showed his films in intimate home screenings. He occasionally presented an illustrated talk, “Cinema Before 1300,” exploring his fascination with medieval stained glass. After a presentation at the Harvard Film Archive in 2017, Haden Guest proposed creating a digital version of the slide lecture, which is screened here for the first time.
