Film Categories: Aging

  • Brain Heart Lungs

    A meditation on the end of life. Brain Heart Lungs is a visual music film set to an original score by the composer-animator. In an era of electronic imaging, transplants, and implants, much has changed in the contemporary view of our physical selves. Brain Heart Lungs delves under the skin, beyond race, religion, and gender into the world of organs and their contemporary meanings.

  • Luna e Santur

    “Originally commissioned as a short for Ben Coonley’s My First 3D Part 2 at Microscope Gallery, I expanded this project into what it currently is: hooded figures, violent passion, and stroboscopic tenderness brought on by a paranormal encounter I had in the summer of 2015.” –JGS ‘‘A visually assaultive threnody for losses never fully revealed and composed for monstrous times, LUNA E SANTUR mingles sex and death with the supernatural and subnaturalistic.’-Colin Beckett “Moon and sun are elliptically and stroboscopically conjured in Joshua Gen Solondz’s cloistered yet operatic Luna e Santur. In milky, hand-processed images, hooded figures recalling Magritte’s The Lovers enact a…

  • Tear Jerker

    Elliot can’t cry and he needs to. He’s recently been dumped by his ex- girlfriend, who has decided she wants to exclusively date “real” men. His mother is descending deeper and deeper into the progression of her Alzheimer’s disease. And the testosterone he takes regularly seems to have made his body forget how to grieve. “Tear Jerker” is a portrait of a transgender guy faced with difficult life circumstances trying to find new ways to express old and familiar feelings.

  • Last Vestiges

    Aging stripper Eddy isn’t the superstar he once was. The patrons are bored with him, his lap dance regulars are blowing him off, and he’s coping with it all by self-medicating with drugs and booze. During a night of harsh rejections, Eddy notices an elderly man staring at him from across the club. Desperate for attention and money, Eddy offers the man a dance. But once the two are alone in a private booth, things take an unexpected turn.

  • My Father, Francis

    My Father, Francis: a father and daughter collaborate. A comment on kinship, diasporic labour, devotion and the factory as a site of creativity.

  • Silvia in the Waves / Silvia dans les vagues

    Noa struggles to honor the identity of his recently deceased parent while his mother tries to uphold the appearance of a conventional family. Grief and fantasy entwine to reveal the complex relationship between history and erasure, identity and memory.

  • Doing and undoing: poems from within #1 radiotherapy

    It deals with interventions that I had made with my mother during her cancer treatment. The film is part of large project dealing with my mother’s cancer healing process. Hacer y Deshacer: Poems from Within (2019) is an interactive video installation. Most of the video sequences show Gelis’s mother undressing, one strand of yarn at a time, sometimes in Panama’s Casco Viejo (historic district), sometimes in the turbulent waters of the Pacific. Using her mother’s body, she tells the story of a cancer survivor, the story of countless others. Gelis invites us into the healing process: the viewer can change…

  • Heimat

    The short film “Heimat” is one story from ten stories in “Three Borders.” It is the story of the filmmaker’s father about migration and homeland. “Three Borders” is a 55-minute found-footage film reminiscent of Chris Marker’s “La Jetée” (1962). It consists of family photos of the artist and of other anonymous found (family) photos. In the style of Magic Realism, the video narrates anecdotes from the families of Alisa Berger’s Jewish father and her North Korean mother. They address the overcoming or the construction of inner and outer borders which span three generations.

  • Fiori Della Mia Vita (flowers of my life)

    Fiori Della Mia Vita is a memorial to lost love that is based on the true love story of my mentor Gianpaolo Barbieri and his partner Evar, who died a quarter of century ago. GPB + EVAR

  • Dear Grandpa

    Using my grandfather’s old eight-millimetre film camera, I explore the deteriorating relationship I had with my grandfather during his final days after being diagnosed with cancer.