2024 FILM PROGRAM

Chelsea Theater

1129 Weaver Dairy Rd Suite AB
Chapel Hill NC 27514
United States

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Friday March 1 @7PM

Program 1: Against Time

Films that follow the arc of time. Or is it a spiral? Monkey Kingdoms, political prisoners, and atom bombs. While we’re stuck here in time, we might as well watch the fireworks.

Slow Shift

Shambhavi Kaul, 2023
RT: 8:00 minutes
Langurs contemplate their world as it changes around them. In SLOW SHIFT humans, animals, music, and rock are entangled in dialogue. The film is shot in Hampi, India in the remains of a 14th century city that is also a World Heritage site in the state of Karnataka. This city, strewn with ancient ruins and massive boulders, some of the oldest in the world, is also said to be the mythic monkey kingdom of ancient lore. Currently, the site is overrun with langurs, a genus of “old world monkeys” native to the subcontinent. The film playfully interrogates various intersections between ancient and geological timescales, the real and mythic, the lived and preserved, and human and animal.

I was Born in 1988

Yasaman Baghban, 2022
RT: 8:43 minutes

A series of executions of Iranian political prisoners began in the summer of 1988, following the end of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq.

DiElectric  Drift

David Sherman, 2023
RT: 5:29 minutes

A charged meditation on impermanence and entropy explored through Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and early video art. Using hand processed 16mm film and analog video synthesis, DiElectric Drift asks what an artist is capable of creating in time, and what do monumental yet fleeting gestures ultimately mean.

Against Time

Ben Russell, 2022
RT: 23:00 minutes

Ben Russell presents two conceptions of time: a space of rapid succession and a space of simultaneity. Against Time celebrates the moment as an entity in which an infinite number of realities comes together synchronistically. (Claire Lasolle, FIDMarseille)

Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke

Tomonari Nishikawa, 2023
RT: 6:00 minutes

Fireworks were shot at a summer festival in Japan with a Super 16 format camera in order to obtain images on the optical soundtrack area on the filmstrip. The position of the photocell to read the visual information on the optical soundtrack area in a 16mm film projector is 26 frames in advance of the position of the gate to project the image. Each footage from 2 rolls of 16mm film were cut into shots of 26 frames each, and the shots were alternated from one roll to another, which would further separate the sound and visual, while producing a distinct rhythm throughout the film.

Today is a Very Special Day, some-times

Matt Whitman, 2023
RT: 09:26 minutes

I couldn’t get things right. I remember when the sound of the wind and the sound of you taking a shower could still be confused.

I Was There

Chi Jang Yin
RT: 14:09 minutes

“I Was There” is a trilogy of experimental documentary films that explores the problem of radiation, our society’s fading collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the unresolved debate between ethics and science. These series concern the immediate effects of weaponized nuclear technology, as invisible poison, on the human body.