2024 SCREENINGS: Sunday

The concept of Saahil came from a very specific moment in my life that has forever been burned into my memory. I wanted to share this story with Pakistani society based on my personal lens. We usually see domestic workers as a service in the house, but we always neglect the emotion that a human holds towards someone. Employers of domestic workers tend to treat them like they are lower than them in society, but in actuality, domestic workers and the children they are taking care of build a very strong bond that may be considered as strong as a maternal relationship. All my life, I was with a caretaker more than I was with my parents. If I had to go to school, eat, or use the restroom, my caretaker was beside me. During all those instances, a strong connection was created until it was shattered by the employer’s decision to fire the caretaker on a misunderstanding. These instances impact the child and the caretaker. Breaking off relationships that have been so intimate can leave an impact on an individual forever. Through Saahil, I want to present a domestic worker as the central character of the film and set a realistic scenario that exhibits the nuanced, blatant and everyday inequality that is etched into our system to the extent where we cease to notice it. I hope for the film to show the viewer an honest and somber reflection of the privileged class through the eyes of someone who remains in the company of that world, yet is constantly reminded that they will never match up to it nor be fully embraced by it.

Remembering Blue Herons and Field Birds is a personal exploration of the way that childhood memories slowly fade over time. Four years ago I moved out of my parents house. 6 hours away from all of my friends, family, and everything that was familiar. As the years passed I felt more and more at home here and it suddenly felt strange each time I would visit my childhood home. I was forced to question what home even ment. This is a portrait of home as I remember it, changing and fading away over time.

I have made immensely vulnerable pieces about myself and my past relationships. With this intensity, I am representing myself and all of my emotions for the audience to watch, judge, and critique. With The Protagonist, I am playing a character who shares my complicated emotions but isn’t me. This means people aren’t viewing me, they are viewing a character I created. With this separation, the Protagonist gets to be as complex and emotional as she pleases, especially showing off her rage after the ending of multiple relationships with men. This emotion is reflected through a monologue she performs in an empty dark room for the men who broke her. There are multiple sides of the Protagonist as she shows a quieter side when she leaves the dark room, admiring the ocean and trying to find peace within herself. Anyone can watch the Protagonist, she doesn’t care about appealing to people. She is ruthlessly herself, becoming a whole new persona separate from me.

This is a portrait of my grandfather and the town that he has been living in for over thirty five years after immigrating from Poland. I wanted to send a love letter to the town I have grown up in and learned to love after so many years of trying to understand it. 

Grace Sinclair statement

The father-daughter dynamic in Phool Khil Jaaye draws direct symbolism from the bud of a flower transforming into a new form as it blooms. There is a push and pull between the father’s yearning to hold on to his child’s innocence and the daughter’s desire to embrace the person she has become. In a way, it is a portrait of the tenderness and tensions not commonly displayed among fathers and daughters in Indian households. 

We see the father partake in her interests and watch them learn from each other. Acts such as a hand on her shoulder as they enter a crowd, carrying her things at the market as she looks around, reassuring her with his words, all serve as reminders of his need to protect her. However, at times his intentions are misread. His attempts to take care of her are received as acts of authority and drift them apart even after any progress they made. In these times, recalling treasured memories between them comforts him.

Day by Day is an experimental film that explores the themes of trauma, family, and personal healing. Featured in this film is EMDR (Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), which is a type of therapy that helps with processing traumatic memories. Healing from traumatic experiences allows one to see life differently and no longer be constrained by pains of the past. This film is a fragmented collage of someone’s healing journey. As time continues forward, and healing frees up space, life has a whole new color. 

Naturally, I love stories. There is something about people and their stories that compels me to create. A state of consciousness driven by imagination. Making in both photography and filmmaking is a consequence of this. When I was a child, I was entranced by an Argentinian TV show called Casi Angeles. I draw lots of creative inspiration from the past, from memories and familiarity of people. I like to build upon from within, to constantly remake myself. I am a creative that thrives in pluriversality, and I know myself to be an embodied multitude of Melodies.

In Pedro’s Angel, we learn that Rita feels an overwhelming distance away from all she had known, her home and family. Navigating a strange new land while yearning for our place of origin. The duality of this conflict, the loneliness, and the loss of not only the loved ones that are left behind or that pass away but also the loss of oneself. Death and the grief it brings forth is ever present. The othering that is intrinsic to national identities, especially in complex national relationships such as those of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The cultural heritage and irremediable nostalgia of an immigrant far from her homeland. 

Rita is a lot like myself. I lost Pedro too. My way to honor him was to make a film. Previously, I have worked in sci-fi and other stories that blur the line between reality and fiction. I have always felt compelled to be vocal about themes that affect the groups belonging to the various intersections that compose my identity. Being a woman, being Dominican, being an immigrant, and knowing loss.

The type of work I’m drawn to most involves exploring obscure and often uncharted subjects involving film and media history, delving into visual language achieved through moving image work. I normally express these interests through documentary films, however in this case, my subject was based less on media history and more on human experience. 

Public Access Memory was created out of my own conflict with realities of the human condition throughout time, especially in our current world. There are so many shared experiences between human beings, pains within our routines, the fragile balance of work and life, inner anxieties, and the ways we cope with the powerlessness of time slipping away from us. For this, I sought out to capture the trappings of expectations and set patterns of behavior seen on a personal and societal scale. Gray skies and high industrialization can become the only landscape we see outside our homes. A constant bombardment of global markets influencing our ideas of fulfillment, the excessive use of external stimuli to feel something outside of the fog only ends up burying our sorrows deeper, making us addicted to instant gratification and farther away from internal peace.

I had personally determined the goal of my life being the satisfaction having lived by my final moments, whenever those arrive. I conceptualized and directed Public Access Memory with this and the many people who also align themselves with this goal, despite the state of the world and our lives.

Ana Frushell statement

Tonight, Every Night is a window into the nights of an undersung group. Anyone with a passing interest can tell you: live music is thriving in the greater Boston area. Last year, there were more than one thousand concerts in and around the city. Local musicians are getting their starts in bars and basements, and larger acts are coming from all over the world to fill the Garden. But in every venue, MGM to the Sinclair, O’Brien’s to The Middle East, one element must remain the same: live music has to be somebody’s day job (or night job, as it were). In my own life, I have a creative art practice, and I also make films, documentaries, commercials, Instagram reels, and so on that are undoubtedly just work. I wanted to explore what I see as an often sugar coated truth: creative labor is still labor. Talent buyers, sound mixers, venue managers, ticket takers, bartenders and more are all vital pieces in the delicate machine that keeps the scene running. Every night, dozens ensure thousands get to have that feeling that only live music can give you. Tonight, Every Night is an experiential documentary that takes the audience to The Armory in Sommerville and puts them into the shoes of the people for whom live music is more than just a passion, it’s also a paycheck. 

In windswept//waterlogged, I investigate my complicated relationship to my parents, and the desire I feel to be complacent to ensure my safety. As the daughter of a single father, it was difficult navigating growing up without a mother; the dissolving of our family unit made everything complicated, especially what was going on inside of me at the time. Feeling less normal than ever, I became quieter and colder as I got older, choosing to hold what I feel only in my own arms, alone. 

It became comfortable. The distance I felt between myself and others faded into a sense of safety. The cold wrapped around me like a blanket, the solitude was a barrier that kept all that was dangerous away.

It’s the burning sensation you feel in your fingers when you come home after being out in the cold. It’s the pain that travels from your heart to your fingertips, the warmth of the blood returning to the appendages. 

It’s hard now. It’s painful now, but it will be worth it in the long run. 

The cold may be permanent, but warmth is all around me.

I’m heavily drawn to the world-building within films. Though the world around the characters is forgiving or challenging, it immerses the viewers in the experience. The world within Chasing Talon encapsulates a child’s playful curiosity and imagination. 

The film was inspired by a real-life experience of culture shock in a country I was born but not raised in. Feeling foreign and homesick made me realize the struggle of dual identities of being Filipino and living in the United States. My home country did not feel like home as I expected it to be. In a culture I thought I was familiar with and being surrounded by people who looked just like me, I felt very lost and lonely. However, it wasn’t until my aunt took me on a morning trip to sneak onto a restricted residential area in the mountaintops to watch the sunrise highlight the landscape and city of Baguio. I finally felt like I was in the right place. This sense of “awe” that one receives from nature is the theme I was determined to demonstrate throughout the making of my short film. 

This film is a love letter to Baguio’s landscapes that makes you feel that sense of wonderstruck. It’s an invitation for exploration through the wilderness embedded with Filipino culture.