Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA presentsAll That You Can’t Leave BehindThursday, November 14, 2019, 7:00pmAt MOCA Grand Avenue, Ahmanson Theater, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles CA 90012

Darol Olu Kae, Sara Suarez, and ariella tai in person!Los Angeles Premieres!

All That You Can’t Leave Behind is a program of films that mix the personal and the political, using montage, memory, and archives not only as filmic strategies, but as tools of historical intervention. Taking its name from Ufuoma Essi’s deeply sensorial video collage, this program gestures to the fissures within the historical record and the radical potential of documenting and witnessing.

INFO  213/621-1745 or [email protected] $15 general admission, $8 students with IDFREE for MOCA & Los Angeles Filmforum members; must present current membership card to claim free tickets.

Tickets available in advance at https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4428107

Screening:

- Giverny I (Négresse Impériale), Ja’Tovia Gary, 2017

Digital video, color/sound, 6 minutes

This filmic collage, shot on location in Claude Monet's garden in Giverny, France, aims to examine the precarious nature of Black women’s bodily integrity, the ethics of care as resistance work, and how class position shapes the contours of violence. Set against the backdrop of the West's continued global imperialist campaigns and its historical artistic canon, this experimental video features a mélange of HD video, archival footage, and analog animation to assert an oppositional gaze in the re-telling of modern history.

- cavity, ariella tai, 2019

Digital video, color/sound, 5 minutes

Los Angeles Premiere!

cavity is a video that considers revenge.  Sourcing and manipulating images and audio from popular and cult media, cavity seeks to treat black women’s narrative and performance as malleable- containing possibilities for agency, alternate readings and resolutions.  What would it look like to fight back against those who dispose of us?  What would it look like to enjoy it?

- All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Ufuoma Essi, 2019

Digital video, color/sound, 14 minutes 25 seconds

Los Angeles Premiere!

All That You Can’t Leave is an experimental appropriated video archive film that explores the relationship between black women’s collective experience with music, history and the act of reclamation.

- A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message, Rhea Storr, 2018

Super 16mm converted to digital video, color/sound, 12 minutes

Los Angeles Premiere!

Celebration is protest at Leeds West Indian Carnival. A look at forms of authority, A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message asks who is really performing. Following Mama Dread's, a troupe whose carnival theme is Caribbean immigration to the UK, we are asked to consider the visibility of black bodies, particularly in rural spaces.

- i ran from it and was still in it, Darol Olu Kae, 2019

Digital video, color/sound, 11 minutes 40 seconds

i ran from it and was still in it is a deeply personal reflection on the fugitive dimensions of history, filiation, and memory. The linkages that exist between black expressivity and modalities of survival grounds its particular focus. Wrestling with the quiet grief of his father’s death, Kae steeps his film in both familiar and obscure personal materials: primarily home movie footage of the artist and his two children, who were preparing to relocate to the east coast at the time of the filming. These somberly beautiful images are interspersed between online clips from a variety of sources (classic films, music videos, popular radio interviews, historical documentaries, found YouTube footage, etc.). Taken together, this dreamlike collage of seemingly independent sounds, images and ideas produce a montage of feelings—a mediated snapshot of emotions—that work at the microscopic level to illuminate the profound sense of sorrow, joy, and love that is bound up with the pained experience of separation and familial loss.

- Watermarks, Sara Suarez, 2018

Digital video, color/sound, 14 minutes

An experimental documentary about Richmond, Virginia, where Confederate monuments obscure the buried traumas of the slave trade along the James River. The river becomes a line to trace a history that remains invisible. Detailed landscapes, hand-developed 16mm film, and unconventional sound design unearth a buried world, as the film questions how the past has been recorded or suppressed.

Organized by Jheanelle Brown and Madison Brookshire

Biographies:

Darol Olu Kae is a filmmaker and artist from and based in Los Angeles whose artistic practice is concerned with the reverberations of collective memory and time in cinema. His work is committed to exploring the possibilities and complexities of a black film aesthetic.

Sara Suarez is an independent filmmaker working in Los Angeles, making documentary, nonfiction and experimental films that study American history, spirituality, and our environment. Suarez tends to use analog film, field recordings, dance-based expression, and intense, unconventional sound design. Suarez is interested in the physiological and emotional effects of sound, both as an aspect of the environment and as part of sonic composition and recently developed two courses for CalArts based on this research. Suarez’s most recent film, Watermarks, studies how confederate monuments conceal invisible histories in the Virginia landscapes; it premiered at Slamdance 2019.

ariella tai is a video artist, film scholar, and independent programmer from Queens, New York.  They are interested in the materiality of black bodies and black performance as vernaculars which subvert, interrupt or defy the diegetic cohesiveness of narrative.  They currently re-appropriate, glitch and video process existing media in attempts to rupture and reconstruct considerations of black queer spectatorship.  They are one half of “the first and the last,”  a fellowship, workshop and screening series supporting and celebrating the work of black women and femmes in film, video and new media art.

Acknowledgements:

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA furthers MOCA’s mission to question and adapt to the changing definitions of art and to care for the urgency of contemporary expression with bimonthly screenings of film and video organized and co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum—the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, video, documentary, and animation.

Education Programs at MOCA, including Contemporary Art Start and Sunday Studio, and the MOCA Teen Program, are generously supported by The Hearst Foundations, Banc of California, MOCA Projects Council, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, The Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation, Edison International, Joseph Drown Foundation, The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation, Satterberg Foundation, Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, Michael Asher Foundation, The Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, The Rhonda S. Zinner Foundation, The Winnick Family Foundation, and? Pazia Bermudez-Silverman.

For more on Los Angeles Filmforum, visit lafilmforum.org, or email [email protected].

For more information on The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, visit moca.org.

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Contact us at [email protected].

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Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation. 2019 is our 44th year.

Memberships available, $70 single, $115 dual, or $50 single student

Contact us at [email protected].

Find us online at http://lafilmforum.org.

Become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @LosAngFilmforum!