Genres: experimental

  • First Hymn to the Night – Novalis

    This is a hand-painted film whose emotionally referential shapes and colours are interwoven with words (in English) from the first “Hymn to the Night” by the late 18th century mystic poet Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg, whose pen name was Novalis. The pieces of text which I’ve used are as follows: “the universally gladdening Light…As inmost soul…it is breathed by stars…by stone…by suckling plant…multiform beast…and by (you). I turn aside to holy Night…I seek to blend with ashes, Night opens in us…infinite eyes…blessed love.” (SB)

  • Reinaldo’s Motifs

    In 1927, Reinaldo Ferreira, a well-known journalist and writer who published under the pen name ‘Repórter X’, founded the cinema production company Repórter X Film, through which he directed four films that same year. Among them we find “O Táxi no. 9297” and “Rita ou Rito?…”, where homosexuality, transvestism and drug use feature explicitly in Portuguese cinema for the first time. “Reinaldo’s Motifs” is an audiovisual essay that focuses on a series of recurrent motifs in Reinaldo Ferreira’s cinematic work. A commissioned work by the Cinemateca Portuguesa, in which I tried to play around with these recurrences, in a manner…

  • Blue Cigarette

    When filming smoke, in color, cinematographers must avoid the “blue smoke” phenomenon. “Blue Cigarette” is a direct cinema experience on 16mm film, it takes the same time of a cigarette burning and is filled with cigarette burns. The strip was tortured, scratched, punctured, erased, colored, and animated: an exploration on the volatility of the film medium, as if it was itself a cigarette and one could smoke it all the way.

  • Cleveland: The Resurrected Arcade

    “The dreaming collective…through the arcades, communes with its own insides” – Walter Benjamin. A visit to the restored arcade in post-industrial Cleveland, the piece uses architectural footage and archival audio to explore the city’s repeated efforts in urban renewal.

  • The Forms of Utility

    A short film essay analyzing a landscape shaped by religion, capital, and war. The film blurs the line between memory and history, only to reveal their cyclicity. The focus of this work is the mistreatment of the modernist architecture of Zilina, a small town in Slovakia, built by a growing Jewish minority in the 1920s and 30s and by new settlers from rural areas in the 50s and 70s. Their tastes and ideologies have been visibly projected onto the town.

  • Casted Hand

    “Casted Hand” explores the aesthetics of medicine and its relationship to the body. It can be shown as s single channel video or accompanied with the installation ‘Four Winds.’

  • horses in the year of the dog

    Twin portraits, an immediate love between new friends considering motherhood under the roof of a fierce matriarch and Cheru the dog shortly after birthing five pups. A swim, a birth, a love and a loss developed in Hibiscus and Lavender and saturated in deep blues.

  • Flash Flood

    Deep within a dream, a cataclysmic flood washes over the planet, and reveals three unique perspectives on gender and identity. The film is animated by volunteer transgender artists and animators from across the globe.

  • Fist Fight

    A frame-by-frame collage of everything imaginable. First shown in a New York production of K. Stockhausen’s Originale Track from these performances. “Breer…contemplates and manipulates ‘still’ images from his past in what is apparently a moving family album. Black-and-white photographs of his wife as a girl, of himself at his work table… are scrambled together with fragments of cartoons, a handwritten letter passing too fast to be legible, fingers, a bare foot, a mouse in a cartoon trying to turn on a lamp, and a real mouse falling through space – to isolate a few of the more striking images.” –…

  • My Fuzzy Valentine

    Put the Playboy centrefold in the hands of a Dyke and she will make her into a monster. A pulsating world of bug-eyed lesbian sasquatches and vaginal caves created from reclaimed textiles. Visual artist Allyson Mitchell’s shape-shifting materials and colors explode off the screen on hand-processed and scratched 16mm film.