Crop is an astounding video piece about a state-owned newspaper building in the center of Kairo. Filmed in 2012 shortly after the Arabic revolution in Egypt, the video represents an interesting, historic moment in time, and it is at the same time a reflection on image making and image representation in times of political changes regardless of local bounds or temporality.

Set at the press house of Al Ahram (the Pyramids), a conservative newspaper that has been the national official press organ since President Nasser, the viewer is guided to explore the rooms of the house from the top down, following its hierarchy of places, literally from the representative offices down to the cellars with printing machines and packaging of newspaper bundles. While the camera unfolds step by step the complexities of a building, a photo-journalist talks about the beginnings of photo reportage in Egypt. He tells us he missed the revolution staying at the hospital. He speaks about the restrictions photo journalism has had to face from its beginning both from a conservative islamic society, and a regime controlling every publication. At first the journalist seem to be one person, but that is a fiction. His narration actually is a composition of 19 statements of different interviewed journalists, whose opinions differ in complex ways. The sound track of the film is comprised of two separate layers: the ambient sound that goes along with the passage of places that we follow inside the building, and on the other side the voice-over of the interviewed journalist. This voice-over creates a real contrapuntal montage in the sense of Eisenstein's statement on sound film, whereas the ambient sound creates a poetic flow of images, a narrative of space.

Helen Hill’s vibrant, humorous, handcrafted works use diverse techniques including puppets, cel and stop-motion animation, live action, painting and drawing. Her filmmaking combines a playful sense of participation and community with a clear-eyed recognition of the somber rhythms of death and rebirth. Film prints (courtesy of Harvard Film Archive) include Mouseholes (1999), Madame Winger Makes a Film (2001) and The Florestine Collection (2011) – completed posthumously by her husband, Paul Gailiunas.

Join Experimental Response Cinema and the Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz for this very special evening, curated by Jason Cortlund & Julia Halperin (Now, Forager)!

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