FILM PROGRAM
123 East Franklin Street
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27514
United States
Friday March 31 @7PM
Program 3: Dream of Splendor
If the screen were a hill we could climb, or a curtain we could part, maybe we could sneak out of this place. A program of films that propose that the closest we can get to real life is through the rendering of it. Memories with watermarks and dreams of splendor found in a souvenir shop half way around the world.
Blue Room
Merete Mueller, 2022
RT: 12:00 minutes
In two prisons in the Pacific Northwest, incarcerated participants in a mental health experiment watch nature videos on loop, prompting them to reflect on isolation and the wilderness.
Hors Titre
Wiame Haddad, 2022
RT: 4 minutes
One October evening in Paris, 1961. A man leaves his room to join a peaceful march for Algerian independence. A photograph reconstitutes the offscreen dimension of the event using fragments of a daily life in suspended time.
Lockdown Dreamscape
Nicolas Gebbe, 2022
RT: 7 minutes
When spending a lot of time at home in isolation, the walls begin to move. The sense of time fades, the days pass quietly, everything seems to repeat itself endlessly. Spaces, conversations, visual impressions and sounds merge and make everything seem like a long dream.
Max
Felix Carlson, 2021
RT: 2:30 minutes
Max is Felix Carlson’s memory of the family dog. They met as pups and shared a long life together. When Max suffered a serious seizure, Felix began assembling this film as an act of mourning. Max lived two more years, happily and medicated, before he finally returned to the heavenly lap of Felix’s grandparents – Felisa and Felix Aroy – on Feb 10th, 2022.
Because the sky is blue
Wenhua Shi, 2022
RT: 03:24 minutes
A short tribute to my hometown Wuhan, China. All source footage is from my childhood friends’ social media 15-second video feed. Muybridge captured the galloping horse one hundred forty years ago in a brief 12 frames. The duration of contemporary social media video clips is similar to Muybridge’s brevity.
Now I’m in the Kitchen
Yana Pan, 2022
RT: 5 minutes
I refused to cook for a long time. Growing up, watching my mom struggle as a housewife made me label cooking as a domestic activity that seemed lonely, frustrating, tedious. As I grew older, I started cooking more. The same pot, the same recipe, the same smell, connected my mother and I.
The Hollow
Jean-Jacques Martinod and Bretta C. Walker, 2022
RT: 14:37 minutes
A hermit lives in solitude within the dense, misty forests of Southern Appalachia and the infernal fires of a glass foundry. Here the phenomenological lines between real and imaginal realms blur as a cosmic flame continues to swell.
Lavoro Macchinine
Alexis Grey Hildreth and Ora Cogan, 2021
RT: 03:29 minutes
The living word produced by Lavoro Macchinine is propelled and propagated by a hunger for, and the digestion of, Il Gatopardo‘s diegetic space. It longs to hide within it; to become part of it.
A Meditation on Nature in the Absence of an Eclipse
Crystal Z Campbell, 2021
RT: 08:12 minutes
Running like water, an eclipse streams glimpses of irreversible
consequence.
Dream of Splendor
Getong Wang, 2022
RT: 08:17 minutes
Dream of Splendor synthesizes footage from the 1962 Hong Kong film The Magnificent Concubine with footage of a souvenir store located in Chicago Chinatown to create a mysterious and at times melancholy exploration of the Chinatown chronotope.
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