FALL 2019 MASSART CINÉ CULTURE SCREENINGS
NICOLÁS PEREDA
Nov. 26 2019
MassArt Design and Media Center
NICOLÁS PEREDA | Born in Mexico City, Pereda (b.1982) received his MA in film directing from York University of Canada in 2007. He is most known for his films Perpetuum Mobile (2009) Juntos/Together (2009) and Verano de Goliat/ Summer of Goliath (2010). He has presented his films in most major international film festivals including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, and Toronto, as well as in galleries and museums like the Guggenheim, the MOMA, the Reina Sofía and the National Museum of Modern Art. In 2010 he was awarded with the PremioOrizzonti at the Venice Film Festival.
GENEVIEVE YUE
Nov. 12 2019
MassArt Design and Media Center
GENEVIEVE YUE | Genevieve Yue is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School, where she teaches film history, media theory, experimental film, moving image art and directs the Screen Studies Program. She has published essays and criticism in October, Grey Room, Art-Agenda, and Film Comment.
SANDRA GIBSON & LUIS RECODER
Nov. 05 2019
MassArt Design and Media Center
SANDRA GIBSON & LUIS RECODER | Collaborating artists Sandra Gibson (b. 1968, Portland, OR) and Luis Recoder (b. 1971, San Francisco, CA) have been exhibiting their expanded cinema installations and projection performances since 2000. Their works are in the permanent collections of major art museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, and Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany. Artist awards and commissions include the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy, National Endowment for the Art’s U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, and Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Mad. Sq. Art in New York. Lecturing appointments include both long and short-term teaching residencies in the media departments of the University of Colorado Boulder, Denison University in Ohio, and California Institute for the Arts. They are currently featured artists and research associates of RESET THE APPARATUS! A Survey of the Photographic and the Filmic in Contemporary Art, hosted by the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. Gibson + Recoder live and work in New York.
MAGGIE LEE
Mommy
Oct. 22 2019
MassArt Design and Media Center
MAGGIE LEE | Maggie Lee (b.1987, New Jersey, USA) studied at Pratt Institute and currently lives and works in New York City. She has exhibited internationally at spaces including Real Fine Arts, Whitney Museum, Greene Naftali, Lomex, 356 Mission, Arcadia Missa, Edouard Montassut, White Columns, and upcoming group exhibition with Musée d’art Moderne.
It’s through her documentary film Mommy (2015) that Lee provides a portrait of her mother before and after her unexpected death. Via a collective of family home-videos, found footage and her own extensive documentation of her time returned back to her mother’s suburban home in New Jersey, Lee builds an 18 chapter stream of consciousness that is at once deeply personal, perceptive and punk.
PEDRO COSTA
Casa de Lava
Oct. 08 2019
MassArt Design and Media Center
PEDRO COSTA | After he studied History at the University of Lisbon, Costa (b. Lisbon, Portugal 1958) then worked as an assistant to Portugese artists Jorge Silva Melo, Vítor Gonçalves A Girl In Summer (1984) and João Botelho. His debut at the age of 30 was with Blood (1989), revealing Costa’s soon to be signature unconventional construction and execution of narrative.
Once Blood was completed, the director made way to Cape Verde with intentions to recreate Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943).
CASA DE LAVA | As a reflection on his country’s colonial legacy Costa’s Casa de Lava (1994) abandons its original narrative for the improvisation provided by the acting in the islands people and the circumstances of the location. At the end of filming, the islanders entrusted him with gifts and messages for their families back in Lisbon. This led the director to Fontainhas, a neighborhood with a history steeped in the same colonial legacy that he set out to understand.
UTE AURAND
Oct. 01 2019
MassArt Design and Media Center
UTE AURAND | Ute Aurand was born in Frankfurt/Main in 1957 and grew up in Berlin. Between 1979-1985, she studied filmmaking at the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb). Since 1985 she is producing her own films.
Ute Aurand’s films are personal diaries, portraits of the people around her. The presence, now past, this urge to re-present with careful camera-eye attention is ever apparent in her work. The breath of pure cinema in these films with their focus as miniatures of time, images assembled over days to weeks to years. Their focus on duration and compression, reveling in gestures and appearances of the moment stay true to Aurands aesthetic. Described by the artist as “poems of light”, a description she once used to characterize the work of filmmakers that inspired her.
SOFIA BOHDANOWICZ & DERAGH CAMPBELL
Never Eat Alone and additional shorts
Sep. 17 2019
MassArt Design and Media Center
SOFIA BOHDANOWICZ | Sofia Bohdanowicz is an award-winning filmmaker from Toronto, she is the founder of the production company MAISON DU BONHEUR. She has had retrospectives of her work screened at BAFICI, The Seattle Northwest Film Forum, Cinemateca de Bogotá, DocLisboa and Festival du nouveau cinéma. In 2017, the Toronto Film Critics Association awarded her the Jay Scott Prize and in 2018 she was nominated for the Rogers Prize for Best Canadian Film for her documentary Maison du bonheur. Her third feature film, MS Slavic 7, graced the cover of Cinema Scope (and the Argentinian newspaper Página/12), premiered at the Berlinale and was featured at the Harvard Film Archive. Bohdanowicz is an MFA graduate of York University’s Film Production program, an alumni of Berlinale Talents as well as the TIFF Talent Accelerator. She is currently in development on her fourth feature film titled A Portrait which won the Kodak and Silverway Award during FIDMarseille’s co-production lab.
NEVER EAT ALONE | An elderly widow (Joan Benac) starts to wonder what happened to a would-be lover from her past who appeared with her in a live televised drama in the 1950s. After discovering the show in CBC’s archive, her granddaughter Audrey (Deragh Campbell) attempts to try and track the man down. Mixing reality with fictional stagings, Never Eat Alone is a hybrid meditation on memory and aging that takes a frank and tender look at late life loneliness and the poignancy of solitude.
SPRING 2019 MASSART CINÉ CULTURE SCREENINGS
ANOCHA SUWICHAKORNPONG
Thai Currents
Apr. 16 2019
MassArt Design and Media Center
ANOCHA SUWICHAKORNPONG | Anocha Suwichakornpong is a filmmaker whose work is informed by the socio-political history of Thailand. Her films have been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York; TIFF Cinematheque, Toronto; Cinema Moderne, Montreal; and Olhar De Cinema, Brazil. Mundane History, her first feature, won numerous awards including the Tiger Award at Rotterdam. An allegory for the current political situation in Thailand, the film focuses on the relationship between a father and his paraplegic son. Her third feature, Krabi 2562, co-directed with British filmmaker Ben Rivers, explores a town in southern Thailand. The film also premiered at Locarno and is currently touring the festival circuit.
Anocha received her MFA from Columbia University, with her thesis film, Graceland, becoming the first Thai short film to be officially selected by Cannes Film Festival. In 2017, together with Visra Vichit-Vadakan and Aditya Assarat, she founded Purin Pictures, an initiative to support Southeast Asian cinema. Currently, Anocha is a visiting lecturer at the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.
THAI CURRENTS | The MassArt Film/Video Screening Series MassArt Ciné-Culture presented New Currents: by Thai Filmmakers. Short works by Thai filmmakers was presented by Anocha Suwichakornpong, Thai independent film director, screenwriter, and producer.
CHARLOTTE PRYCE
Mar. 05 2019
MassArt Design and Media Center
CHARLOTTE PRYCE | Charlotte Pryce has been making films and optical objects since 1986 and her works have screened throughout the world. She has taught experimental film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Academy of Art (San Francisco), Kent Institute of Design (Canterbury, England), and is currently a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles). She is a graduate of the Slade School of Art, University College London (BFA) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA). In 2013 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association honored her with the Douglass Edwards Award for best experimental cinema achievement. In 2019, she was honored with career retrospectives at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Bozar (Brussels), Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the [S8] Mostra de Cinema Periferico.
PWDRE SER | The film depicts an encounter with a mysterious, luminous, electrical substance. Inspired equally by medieval accounts of visionary experiences and by 19th century photography of the invisible, Pwdre Ser joins Kirlian photography with hand-processed images. Pwdre Ser is the Welsh name for a mythical substance that has been observed by many since the 1400’s.
ROBERT BEAVERS
Feb. 26 2019
MassArt Design and Media Center
ROBERT BEAVERS | Born in Brookline Massachusetts in 1949, Robert Beavers attended school in Weymouth (MA), then Boston Latin School and Deerfield Academy before meeting the filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos and making his first 16mm film in New York City in 1966. This film was shown at the Fourth International Experimental Film Competition in Knokke-le-Zoute (Belgium) the following year. By that time Beavers had re-located to Europe with Markopoulos, and over the next decades he made films in Greece, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy.
Between 1980 and 1986 he joined Markopoulos in preparing the annual Temenos film screenings in Lyssarea, Greece. In the 1990s he re-edited the sound tracks for nearly all of his films and created the Temenos Inc. and Association to support the Archive that Markopoulos had envisioned. In the past few years there have been film retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, Pacific Film Archive and Austrian Filmmuseum. He lives with the filmmaker, Ute Aurand in Berlin and Massachusetts and continues to film in 16mm.
JOANA PIMENTA
Feb. 05 2019
MassArt Design and Media Center
JOANA PIMENTA | Joana Pimenta is a filmmaker and writer from Portugal who lives and works in Lisbon, the U.S. and Brazil. Her latest film, An Aviation Field, premiered in the International Competition at the 69th Locarno Film Festival, was screened in the Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, CPH:Dox, Rencontres Internationales Paris – Berlin, Valdivia, Lima, Mar del Plata, Edinburgh, among others, and received the Jury Award for Best Film in Competition at Zinebi ’58. Her previous work, The Figures Carved Into the Knife by the Sap of the Banana Trees, received the Jury Award for Best Film in Competition at Indielisboa and the Tom Berman Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and was screened at the Toronto, New York, Jihlava, Taipei, VideoEx, and Syros film festivals, among many other venues.
Her work in video installation was exhibited at the Festival Temps d’Images, National Art Gallery, Harvard Art Museums, Solar – Cinematic Art Gallery, Fundacion Botin, Galeria da Boavista, The Pipe Factory, and Casa Niemeyer, among others. As a cinematographer, she was the Director of Photography for the feature Once it was Brasília, which premiered in the 70th Locarno International Film Festival in 2017 where it received a Special Mention, and for which she received the award for Best Director of Photography at the 50th Festival of Brasília. She is currently co-directing two films with the Brazilian director Adirley Queirós, the short fiction film Rádio Coração and the feature fiction film Dry Ground Burning.
Joana received a PhD in Film and Visual Studies and Critical Media Practice from the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She previously taught at Harvard and Rutgers universities, and she is currently a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard, where she teaches Documentary Fictions and Introduction to Nonfiction Videomaking. She is a fellow at the Film Study Center and the Sensory Ethnography Lab.