Conversations at the Edge: blue mantle by Rebecca Meyers
Thursday, October 20, 18h
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 N. State, Chicago, IL, USA
Rebecca Meyers in person!
In her nimble, intimately-observed films, Cambridge-based filmmaker Rebecca Meyers illuminates the uncanny and exquisite in the everyday. lions and tigers and bears (2006) seeks out urban wildlife–from spiders and pigeons to bronze lions and chrome-plated jaguars; night side (2008) captures a wintry twilight of street lamp halos and solitary animals. Shot along the Massachusetts coast, Meyers’ latest film is a haunting ode to the sea. Combining historical accounts of ocean travel and disaster with images of its vast, roiling expanse, blue mantle (2010) meditates on humanity’s attempts to conquer the deep and reflects on its role as a metaphor and passageway to the unknown. This evening, Meyers presents these and a selection of earlier works, including glow in the dark (2002) and things we want to see (2004). Rebecca Meyers, 2002- 2010, USA, 16mm, ca. 65 min plus discussion.
Rebecca Meyers (b. 1976, New York City) is a filmmaker and programmer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her films have screened internationally at festivals and in curated exhibitions such as Media City, Windsor, ON, Canada, and Detroit, MI; Images Festival, Toronto, Canada; New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde, New York, NY; Festival Les Inattendus, Lyon, France; the London International Film Festival, London, England; “Bringing to Light” at the San Francisco Cinematheque, San Francisco, CA; and “White Shadows: Stories and Polar Visions” at the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy. For three years she served as Co-Programmer of Chicago’s Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival and has curated film programs for the Chicago Underground Film Festival, the Massachusetts College of Art Film Society, Brooklyn’s Light Industry and the Harvard Film Archive, where she acted as Archive Coordinator. She is currently Director of Film Programs at ArtsEmerson at Emerson College and Associate Director of Studio7Arts in Cambridge. Rebecca holds an MFA from the University of Iowa in Film/Video Production.