Thursday, March 30
4:15 p.m., FilmScene at the Chauncey (Theater 2)
REPÚBLICA, Dir. Grace Passô
The pandemic brandishes the extent of the necropolitics operating in the country, and its society goes through a crisis of ethics amidst a government which is the exact expression of colonialist power. República is a short film made at home, with a domestic structure, at the beginning of the 2020 quarantine, in downtown São Paulo, Brazil.
VAGA CARNE (DAZED FLESH), Dir. Grace Passô
A wandering voice is able to invade any matter—solid, liquid, or gaseous—and it decides for the first time to invade a woman's body. From this experience it narrates what it feels as a subject, what "it" pretends to feel, what is unfathomable in itself, what its image is to the others, and probes what a body means as a social construction.
Saturday, April 1
Director's Choice — programmed by Christopher Harris:
Director's Choice — programmed by Christopher Harris
10:15 a.m., FilmScene at the Chauncey (Theater 2)
TOWARDS THE COLONIES, Dir. Miryam Charles
When a young girl is found off the Venezuelan coast, a medical examiner will try to determine the cause of death before the body is repatriated.
NEGRUM3 (BLACKN3SS), Dir. Diego Paulino
NEGRUM3 proposes a dip in the march of black LGBT people in São Paulo. A film about blackness, queerness, and spacial aspirations of diaspora' children.
TRAVESSIA, Dir. Safira Moreira
In an intimate and poetic visual essay, Travessia searches for photographic records of black families. While exploring personal histories, the film gradually adopts a critical stance regarding the stigmatization and near absence of portrayals of black people. Finally affecting us with a tender visual counter-narrative of what remained unseen.
MANY THOUSANDS GONE, Dir. Ephraim Asili
Filmed on location in Salvador, Brazil (the last city in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw slavery) and Harlem, NY (an international stronghold of the African Diaspora), Many Thousands Gone draws parallels between a summer afternoon on the streets of the two cities. A silent version of the film was given to jazz multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee to use as an interpretive score. The final film is the combination of the images and McPhee’s real time “sight reading” of the score.
AURORA, Dir. Everlane Moraes
On the stage of a destroyed theater, we saw a play in which Elizabeth, Mercedes, and Crisalida, three black women at different stages of life, relive everything they suffered from the interpretation of their own conflicts in the form of inner monologues.
CONSPIRACY, Dir. Simone Leigh and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
Conspiracy is a collaboration between artists Simone Leigh and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich titled for the 1975 album by Jeanne Lee and inspired by the practice of burning the Vaval effigy in French Caribbean carnival. The film has been shown at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022), MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival (2023), and the Berlinale International Film Festival (2023).
Janaína Oliveira Carte Blanche
2:30 p.m., FilmScene at the Chauncey (Theater 2)
PARADISE OMEROS, Dir. Isaac Julien
Paradise Omeros delves into the fantasies and feelings of "creoleness"—the mixed language, the hybrid mental states, and the territorial transpositions that arise when one lives in multiple cultures. Using the recurrent imagery of the sea, the film sweeps the viewer into a poetic meditation on the ebb and flow of self and stranger, love and hate, war and peace, xenophobe and xenophile.
NoirBLUE – Displacements of a Dance, Dir. Ana Pi
In the African continent, Ana Pi reconnects with her origins through choreographic gestures, engaging in a space-time experiment that combines traditional and contemporary movements. In this dance of fertility and healing, new forms of movement evoke ancestry, belonging, resistance, and the sense of freedom.
MAL DI MARE (SEASICK), Dir. João Vieira Torres
Seasick is a performance-film that depicts not only the invisible, but those who can’t see. By turning the film into an intervention platform inside an exhibition, echoing a specific question, the question gradually moves beyond the limits of the exhibition and the film itself. It remains to be seen who is interested in the answer.
NÁUFRAGA, Dir. Juh Almeida
In the beat of the waves, a shipwrecked woman disembodies her memories into the sea.
4:30 p.m., FilmScene at the Chauncey (Theater 2)
CETTE MAISON (THIS HOUSE), Dir. Miryam Charles
Bridgeport, 2008. A teenage girl is found hanged in her room. While everything points to suicide, the autopsy report reveals something else. Ten years later, the director and cousin of the teenager examines the past causes and future consequences of this unsolved crime. Like an imagined biography, the film explores the relationship between the security of the living space and the violence that can jeopardize it.