CUT COPY SPHINX is a surreal, sculptural short art-film about metaphysics, myth, and destruction. A feminist twist on the classical myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx, CUT COPY SPHINX recasts the sphinx as the uncanny hero who endures 'cuts' across time. Shot en plein aire on a miniature prop-set with real materials like a Dewalt drill, a gallon of honey, and imagery of an often-copied 18th century garden sphinx, CUT COPY SPHINX is a conceptual art-film syncing philosophy, feminism, and image theory. The film is hand-made; directed, edited, scored, and performed by Texas artist, Virginia Lee Montgomery.
Truth or Dare
7:45
Alex Morelli
In the forests of North Carolina lurks an unsolved mystery.
Ada Kaleh
14:00
Helena Wittmann
An indeterminate location, summer. The inhabitants of a shared apartment ask themselves where they might live. They imagine countries, communities, and places. Time passes and nothing can change that — neither human action nor objects and their states. At some point, they all drift into a deep sleep.
Ojo Malcriado / Punky Eye
14:16
Luis Arnias
Ojo Malcriado/Punky Eye is structured as a series a vignettes including portraits of friends and reinterpretations of personal memories. This accumulation of small gestures with surrealist tendencies generates a funny riddle that sometimes bleeds into the sublime. This film has an internal logic similar to a poem that rebels against the alphabet but is devoted to the image the words conjure. Ojo Malcriado is a gift to my family and friends. It is a gift to light and cinema that has been given so much to me.
Land Rearranged
6:09
Jasper Lee
Unearthed debris used as relics in a geomantic incantation. A lyrical contemplation of winter’s ghosts.
Vever (for Barbara)
12:00
Deborah Stratman
A cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to power structures they’re inherently part of. The film grew out of abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Shot at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip Hammer took to Guatemala in 1975, and laced through with Deren’s reflections of failure, encounter and initiation in 1950s Haiti.
A vever is a symbolic drawing used in Haitian Voodoo to invoke a Loa, or god.
Sometimes we’re just a horse for the spirits of our ancestor filmmaking sisters to ride.
China Not China
14:00
Richard Tuohy
Hong Kong marked 20 years since its hand over; half way through the planned 40 year 'one country, two systems' transition. Taiwan, once imperial China, once Formosa, now ROC on the edge of the PRC. Multiple exposures of street scenes distort space and place creating a fluid sense of impermanence and transition, of two states somewhere between China and not China.
Eastern District Terminal
10:35
Michael Gitlin
Eastern District Terminal documents a particular lost time and place: the Brooklyn waterfront after the end of its use as an industrial and shipping site, but before it became the front lawn for the shiny apartment towers to come. In that in-between moment, the space functioned as a “temporary autonomous zone.” Shot using a homemade 3D rig, the film wanders and pans through the zone and, along the way, encounters three of its denizens.
