DIM Cinema opens its 2016 season with Ghanaian-born British artist-filmmaker John Akomfrah’s epic film about the African diaspora to postwar Britain. Conceived as a gallery piece based on Homer’s Odyssey, this retelling of Telemachus’s search for his lost father, Odysseus, grew into a feature-length cinematic work structured as a song cycle, with each musical chapter named after one of the nine muses.  Mixing archival footage with original scenes shot in Alaska, and scripted from sound clips of established works of the (mainly) Western canon, the film summons up “a mood, rather than a story, that reflects on the immigrant experience and the violence of displacement with a majestic grace" (Jason Solomons, The Observer). “Striking ... Extends, complicates, and enriches the definition of documentary. Though lofty, The Nine Muses is never grandiose, taking as its subject the primal notion of what constitutes home” (Melissa Anderson, Artforum).

Introduced by guest curator Mónica Savirón.

This program presents new experimental films and videos not yet shown in New York, in conversation with rarely seen works by avant-garde masters such as Lis Rhodes and Chantal Akerman. These artistic views have the ability to enhance our perception through symbolism, transformation, and a keen sense of creative freedom. By shifting cinematic, private, gendered, financial, and geographical priorities, what is usually absent becomes present. These works are meditations on the act of looking, visual poems in which imposed narratives get rejected or argued against. Words, forms, and depictions of any kind are broken apart to explore and expose the language of cinema. For these artists, making films is like “writing on burning paper” (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, 1967).

Close-Up and Queen Mary University London are delighted to present a cornerstone of experimental and post-humanist film, Michael Snow's La Région Centrale. Filmmaker Nicky Hamlyn will introduce the film. 

- La Région Centrale (Michael Snow, Canada, 1971, 190 min, Colour, 16mm)