FALL 2020 MASSART CINÉ CULTURE SCREENINGS
LINA RODRIGUEZ
Señoritas and Aquí y Allá
Dec. 08 2020
Virtual Event
LINA RODRIGUEZ is a Colombian/Canadian filmmaker. She has written, directed and produced six short films and two feature films which have been showcased in many festivals and cultural venues including the Locarno Film Festival,Toronto International Film Festival,Vancouver International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Sala Leopoldo Lugones and Tabakalera – Centro Internacional de Cultura Contemporánea.
Lina Rodriguez. Still from Señoritas, 2014, courtesy of the artist.
SEÑORITAS | Señoritas is a subtle, contemplative and deeply intimate examination of the way one young woman navigates the daunting terrain of sex, desire and identity.
AQUÍ Y ALLÁ | A poetic reflection on family as an emotional system that operates across generations, Aquí y Allá focuses on the passing of time, the possibilities of remembering and the construction of space as an ongoing historical and subjective process. Weaving fragments of private and public spaces, gestures, voices and phrases, the film creates an intimate audiovisual site of personal and collective memory that reflects on the complexity of family dynamics between Rodriguez’s grandparents, her father and his siblings during their time together in Chipaque, a small town near Bogotá. A type of cognitive map that works as a family portrait, the film juxtaposes colour 16mm, B&W mini-DV footage and photos from the filmmaker’s family archive with an impressionistic sound design and a diaristic use of text to illustrate the impossibility of looking at the past as a fixed, solid and understandable dimension.
JOÃO PEDRO RODRIGUES
The Ornithologist
Dec. 01 2020
Virtual Event
JOÃO PEDRO RODRIGUES is a Portuguese filmmaker based in Lisbon. When he was 8 years old, his father gave him a pair of binoculars and he decided to become an ornithologist. He began by studying Biology but gave it up and graduated from the Lisbon Film School, in 1993.
He directed five features: O Fantasma (2000), Odete (2005), To Die Like A Man (2009), The Last Time I Saw Macao (2012) – co-directed with João Rui Guerra da Mata, his lifetime partner – and The Ornithologist (2016, Silver Leopard for Best Director – Locarno IFF). He has also directed several shorts, some with Guerra da Mata, which they like to call their “Asian films.”
Since 2013, he has been developing work for museums and galleries. He is regularly invited to teach and mentor film students and young directors around the world.
He always travels with his binoculars, to foray into nature and watch birds.
João Pedro Rodrigues. Still from The Ornithologist, 2016, courtesy of the artist.
DARREN COLE
Nov. 24 2020
Virtual Event
DARREN ALEXANDER COLE was nominated and featured on the cover of Art New England Magazine’s 2019 New Emerging Artists Series. As a Director of Photography, Cole completed a music video for the Violent Femmes’ “I’m Nothing” featuring Stefan Janoski which premiered at the MKE Film Festival in 2019. Cole was also a contributor in the camera department on the film Markie in Milwaukee by Matt Kliegman which earned an Honorable Mention for the Grand Jury Award at SlamDance in 2019. Cole has produced four films in the past three years for director Nora Jaenicke with Proof still in festival circulation. The quartet of stories (“Joyce“, “Whales“, “Between Seconds“, and “Proof”) have been the recipient of over 40 international awards.
Most recently, Cole collaborated with Mindpool Live and was Co-Producer for Streaming Outta Fenway starring Boston’s own Dropkick Murphys and a Double Play with Bruce Springsteen which reached 9 million viewers globally. The show raised $750,000 for multiple charities during the wake of Covid-19 this past spring. It was also the first ever musical performance to be live-streamed from a major U.S. stadium without a live audience to conform with covid-19 regulations.
As a Visiting Assistant Professor at MassArt, Cole researches the intersection of art and technology as a tool for communication that promotes equity and social justice.
Darren Cole. Still courtesy of the artist.
Dual Stream Live was a performance-based presentation that allowed the viewer to experience a selection of short works created by Cole with an additional 360-degree behind the scenes camera view. This was a first-hand look into the lived experiences of the artists. We seek to bring raw, conceptual commentary on society, culture, race, and politics to spark further discussion about our communities. Featuring: live performances by Milkshaw Benedict, Darby, Steven Julien-Stewart, and friends.
PEGGY AHWESH
Nov. 17 2020
Virtual Event
PEGGY AHWESH is a Brooklyn based media artist whose work has traversed a variety of technologies and styles in an inquiry into feminism, cultural identity and genre. She has been included in 3 Whitney Biennial Exhibitions (1991, 1995, 2002) and is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Ahwesh received the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in 2000.
Ahwesh is Professor Emeritus of Film & Electronic Arts, Bard College. Her teaching specialities include: video production, history of media and technology and media archival practices. She has taught in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) and in the al Quds-Bard Partnership at al Quds University, West Bank, Palestine.
Ahwesh is represented by Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, New York.
Peggy Ahwesh. Still from The Blackest Sea, 2016, courtesy of the artist.
ANTHONY BANUA-SIMON
Cane Fire
Nov. 10 2020
Virtual Event
ANTHONY BANUA-SIMON | Anthony Banua-Simon is a documentary filmmaker and editor. His films have screened at venues such as the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA PS1, as well as the websites MUBI, Filmmaker Magazine, and Hyperallergic. In 2014, his short about the workers of the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, NY, Third Shift, won best documentary at the Brooklyn Film Festival. Anthony attended The Evergreen State College and was a fellow at the UnionDocs Collaborative Studio Program. He’s currently a member of the volunteer-run Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, NY.
Anthony Banua-Simon. Still from Cane Fire, 2020, courtesy of the artist.
CANE FIRE examines the past and present of the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi, interweaving four generations of family history, numerous Hollywood productions, and troves of found footage to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the economic and cultural forces that have cast indigenous and working-class residents as “extras” in their own story.
KOTA EZAWA
Oct. 27 2020
Virtual Event
KOTA EZAWA (b. 1969 in Cologne, Germany) lives and works in Oakland, CA. Ezawa’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Baltimore Museum of Art; SITE Santa Fe; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Hayward Gallery Project Space, London, UK; and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Ezawa participated in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and Shanghai Biennale 2004. He received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2003; a SECA Art Award in 2006 and a Eureka Fellowship in 2010.
His work is included in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; and Whitney Museum of American Art.
Kota Ezawa. Still from National Anthem, 2019, courtesy of the Artist.
JANNE HÖLTERMANN
Oct. 20 2020
Virtual Event
JANNE HÖLTERMANN is a video artist originally from Germany. Her work has been shown at ICA Philadelphia, Deutscher Künstlerbund Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Basel, NURTUREart Brooklyn, WPA Washington, and MICA Baltimore, C.A.R. Zollverein Essen, Matadero de Legazpi Madrid and Museum of Fine Arts Bremen. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo (NY), Flux Factory (NYC), received travel grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), was a Visiting Artist at Wesleyan University (CT), and participated in the Bronx Museum’s AIM program (NYC). Most recently Her videos have received support from Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein (FFHSH) and Outpost Artists Resources (NYC). She graduated from Muthesius Academy Kiel, Germany and from Massachusetts College of Art and Design Boston.
Janne works in video, animation and photography. She observes how technology and capitalism abstract and restructure movement, space and time. Recent works examine the flight paths of airplanes, the rhythm of container ships, and robots in automated warehouses.
Janne Höltermann. Still from TEU, 2018, courtesy of the artist.
JENNI OLSON
Oct. 13 2020
Virtual Event
JENNI OLSON is an independent filmmaker and writer based in Berkeley, California and is one of the world’s leading experts on LGBT cinema history. Her work as an experimental filmmaker and her expansive personal collection of LGBTQ film prints and memorabilia has recently been acquired by The Harvard Film Archive. Her reflection on the last 30 years of LGBT film history, in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, is forthcoming in 2021. Jenni’s work as a film historian includes The Queer Movie Poster Book (Chronicle Books, 2005) and her film criticism has appeared in numerous publications including Filmmaker Magazine, The Advocate and Logo TV’s NewNowNext. Jenni is a former co-director of the San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival, the oldest and largest queer film festival on the planet. She holds a BA in Film Studies from the University of Minnesota and is currently an independent consultant in marketing and digital film distribution. A 2018 MacDowell Fellow, Jenni is now in development on her third feature-length essay film, The Quiet World and an essayistic memoir of the same name.
Jenni Olson. Still from The Royal Road, 2015, courtesy of the artist.
THE ROYAL ROAD | A profoundly personal cinematic essay set against a contemplative backdrop of 16mm urban California landscapes, Jenni Olson’s The Royal Road offers up a primer on nostalgia, the pursuit of unavailable women, butch identity and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo alongside a primer on the Spanish colonization of California and the Mexican American War — also featuring a voiceover cameo by Tony Kushner.
YOUNG JOO LEE
Oct. 06, 2020
Virtual Event
YOUNG JOO LEE is a visual artist from South Korea. Her work deals with personal narratives about her experiences of being an immigrant in Europe and the US, a woman, and a cultural nomad. In her recent moving image works, these personal narratives interweave with the current and historical narratives in order to investigate the issues of cultural colonialism, alienation, and assimilation processes.
Young holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University and an MFA in Film from the Academy of Fine Arts Städelschule Frankfurt. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Animation at the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. She was a College Fellow in Media Practice at Harvard University (2018-20), a Fulbright Scholar in Film & Digital Media (2015-18) and a recipient of DAAD artist scholarship (2010-12). Her work has been exhibited in national and international institutions and film/video festivals.
Young Joo Lee. Still from Black Snow, 2019, courtesy of the artist.
DEBORAH STRATMAN
Sep. 29, 2020
Virtual Event
DEBORAH STRATMAN makes films and artworks that investigate power, control and belief, considering how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, sinkholes, comets, raptors, orthoptera, levitation, exodus, mineral evolution, sisterhood and faith. She has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA (NY), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hammer Museum (LA), Witte de With (Rotterdam), PS1 (NY), Tabakalera (San Sebastian), Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), Yerba Buena Center (SF), MCA (Chicago), Whitney Biennial (NY) and has done site-specific projects with venues including the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Temporary Services, Hallwalls, Mercer Union and Ballroom Marfa.
Stratman’s films have been featured widely at festivals and conferences including Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, Oberhausen, True/False, TIFF, Locarno, Rotterdam, the Flaherty and Docs Kingdom. She is the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim and USA Collins Fellowships, an Alpert Award, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Award and grants from Creative Capital, Graham Foundation, Harpo Foundation and Wexner Center for the Arts. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois
Deborah Stratman. Still from The Illinois Parables, 2016, courtesy of the artist.
KEVIN JEROME EVERSON
Sep. 22, 2020
Virtual Event
KEVIN JEROME EVERSON was born and raised in Mansfield Ohio. He has a MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. He is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville Virginia. He has made nine feature length films and over one-hundred and sixty short films including Tonsler Park (2017), The Island of Saint Matthews (2013), Erie (2010), Quality Control (2011), Ten Five in the Grass (2012), Ears, Nose and Throat (2016), Spicebush (2005), Stone (2013), Pictures From Dorothy (2004), Century (2013), Fe26 (2014), Sound That 20014), Sugarcoated Arsenic (2013) with Claudrena Harold, Emergency Needs (2007) and the eight-hour long film Park Lanes (2015). He also has two DVD box sets of his films called Broad Daylight and Other Times and I Really Hear Something: Quality Control and Other Films with a catalog distributed by Video Data Bank.
Everson’s films and artwork have been widely shown at venues including Sundance Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Smithsonian Museum of African-American History in Washington D.C., The Tate Modern in London, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York and Centre Pompidou in Paris. The films were streamed on multiple platform sites including Made in America: Cinema of Kevin Jerome Everson on MUBI. The work has also been recognized through awards and fellowships such as Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alpert Award, a Heinz Award, a Creative Capital Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, an American Academy in Rome Prize and an American Academy in Berlin Prize.
Everson is represented by Picture Palace Pictures New York and Andrew Kreps Gallery New York.
Kevin Jerome Everson. Still from Brown Thrasher, 2020, courtesy of the artist.
SHEVAUN MIZRAHI
Sep. 15, 2020
Virtual Event
SHEVAUN MIZRAHI is a Turkish-American documentary filmmaker, named one of Filmmaker Magazine‘s 25 New Faces of Film in 2015. She received a Jury Special Mention Award at the 2017 Locarno Film Festival for her film Distant Constellation, as well as a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Distant Constellation, described by Vadim Rizov of Filmmaker Magazine as “a bracingly rigorous and visceral experience,” was shot in an Instabul retirement home, and explores themes of aging and memory. Nominated for a 2018 Independent Spirit Award, the film was produced by Deniz Buga and Shelly Grizim.
Shevaun Mizrahi. Still from Distant Constellation, 2018, courtesy of the artist.
SPRING 2020 MASSART CINÉ CULTURE SCREENINGS
RODRIGO REYES
Lupe Under the Sun
Apr. 21 2020
Virtual Event
RODRIGO REYES | Rodrigo Reyes is an award-winning, Mexican-American filmmaker whose work has screened in nearly 50 film festivals around the world, including the LA Film Festival, Guadalajara International Film Festival and Documentary Fortnight at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, garnering rave reviews in the New York Times, Variety and other media outlets, as well as multiple awards. Named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine, in 2016 he was chosen as a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow at MacDowell Colony and in 2017 he was selected for the National Mediamaker Fellowship by the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC). His work has received the support of Tribeca Film Institute, Sundance Institute, California Humanities Council Film Independent, IFP Narrative and Documentary Labs, and the Mexican Film Institute. In 2017, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Lupe Under the Sun is his first narrative feature.
Rodrigo Reyes. Still from Lupe Under the Sun, 2016, courtesy of the artist.
LUPE UNDER THE SUN | Long estranged from his family in Mexico, migrant laborer Lupe finds relief from the backbreaking work of harvesting peaches in California’s Central Valley through beer-drenched camaraderie and a quiet love affair with fellow immigrant Gloria. Soon the stability of his daily routine begins to crack under the weight of a life scarred with regret and missed opportunities, as he tries to do everything he can to go home one last time before it is too late.
In this, his first narrative feature, director Rodrigo Reyes plays with the limits between fiction and documentary, working with non-professional actors, real Mexican farmworkers living in the heart of California, to tell a moving drama about the nostalgia and heartbreak that live on the margins of the American Dream.
CECILIA BARRIONUEVO
Festival Bridges: Connecting Filmmakers and Audiences
Feb. 04 2020
MassArt Design and Media Center
CECILIA BARRIONUEVO | (Córdoba, Argentina, 1975). Cecilia is the Artistic Director of the Mar del Plata International Film Festival where she has been a programmer since 2010. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Communication from Universidad de Córdoba and a Master’s in Documentary Filmmaking from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In 2013 she received the Leo Dratfield Professional Development Fellowship to participate in the Flaherty Film Seminar, NY.
She is co-programer with Carlos A. Gutiérrez, for Neighboring Scenes: New Latin American Cinema at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City, guest curator in DocumentaMadrid (Spain) and she has collaborated as a guest programmer for other festivals, institutions and museums in Uruguay, Spain, Argentina and USA.
She’s co-editor of the “Las Naves Cine” collection dedicated to cinema and she has contributed with film reviews and essays in several cultural publications, magazines and books. She has edited the books “El tiempo detenido”, by Scott Foundas and “Film Comment, una antología”.
She has been a jury member in numerous international film festivals such as Jeonju Film Festival, Valdivia International Film Festival, Malaga Film Festival, Doclisboa International Film Festival, as well as leading workshops, seminars and talks in Harvard Film Archive, Talent Press Buenos Aires, Locarno Industry Academy International Sao Paulo, and Tabakalera Spain.
John Smith. Still from Dad Stick, 2013.