Film Categories: Essay

  • Manifestarsi

    The film investigates within the microscopic dimension the material component of billboards posted in Milan. The author, through a peculiar perspective – achieved with a unique optic – goes beyond the limits of vision, inviting us to fall into the alienating but enveloping physical structure beyond the mythical surface of the images. The cinematic result is an atmosphere that is not abstract but informal. Where the material reflects a visual condition devoid of perspective references on which to base metaphysical foundations: here the process suspends the essence.

  • V.

    All the paperback novels I remember.

  • Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung)

    Inspired by San Francisco’s first Chinese American female physician, this film envisions the euphoria and despair of Margaret Chung and her insatiable desire for women and celebrity through her forays into drugs, sapphic surgeries, and queer flights of fancy. Image description: A black-and-white archival image toned warm purple, showing a woman dancing with arms raised to the side and skirt flared out in a circle.

  • 1000 Brazils of Truth

    Filmmakers Sheena Rossiter and Sandro Silva perform a spoken word song that’s dedicated to São Paulo, a megacity full of paradoxes. Through archive footage they filmed between 2011 and 2017, Sheena and Sandro show the highs and lows of a country that goes from being an emerging market, economic powerhouse, to one on the brink of collapse. By the time the filmmakers decide to leave Brazil in 2017, it is a country in the midst of a seemingly never-ending political corruption scandal and the worst economic recession in over eight decades. But, despite the shortcomings, Sheena and Sandro still miss…

  • Before

    With intricate hand-printed 16 mm footage, Before is a dark ode to the possibility and impossibility of love. It reflects on time, inner worlds and soft landings we find in desolate moments in life.

  • Evidence of Wind

    The filmmaker impulsively starts capturing the image and sound of wind. He realizes the only way to capture the wind is to show, instead, trees in motion. The limitation becomes the motif for philosophical contemplation of how we understand the nature of truth that can be learned from something else than the truth itself. The assemblage of the meditative narration, electronic music and the images of swaying trees, leads the journey through a paradoxical, yet thought-provoking experience. The enduring time reveals the moments of reflecting on our belief in the world in a time of uncertainty.

  • Avanti!

    “Avanti!” is inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s writings: as an idealistic young man, a romantic, a father, and a revolutionary. Throughout the work I explore themes of translation and research. What happens in the shift from detached researcher to impassioned participant? “Avanti!” considers what we lose when we reduce a person to only their thinking, when we abstract them from their lives. Image description: Blurry black-and-white close-up of a person’s face, yelling or laughing (?), with eyes closed and open mouth.

  • fuck

    A short solo film made in quarantine, “fuck” is part silent meditation, part protest, part magic spell for a better world.

  • Another Europe

    An essay film rooted in experimental cinema and queer storytelling. A female narrator (fellow artist Kathi Hofer) provides the voice over for this film, making it a reflection on my life and my journey through Europe from 2019-2020. Associative spaces unfold. A train of thoughts. The boundaries between factual and memories become a blur. How much of my personal story can be read more globally? Visual portraits of Europe’s faraway places away from typical tourist hot spots provide the mise en scène for this film. Landscapes in transition, pictures of movement, visually resembling the long journeys I have undertaken using…

  • The world is blue at its edges

    “What could I tell you about the world I live in?” Addressing her unborn child, the narrator tries to find answers partly through claustrophobic pictures interwoven with intimate notes on a pregnancy in times of a pandemic. Based on a childhood memory, this experimental short film spans from the Cold War Iron Curtain, to the so-called “refugee crisis,” and the renewed closing of borders during COVID-19. Textures of walls closing in blur with pixelated maps, creating a subjective portrait of a new reality and its digital image-world. // “Iris Blauensteiner’s and Christine Moderbacher’s ‘The world is blue at its edges’…