An aerial survey of the filmmaker’s place of origin, "Scenes from the Periphery" is a frame intensive search for home, place and direction. Edited in camera on Super 8, changing position two frames at a time, the movements of lines and masses offer a renewed look at this once lost but now rediscovered locale in a continuing quest for a sense of provenance.
Amusement Ride
6:00
Tomonari Nishikawa
Shot with a telephoto lens from inside a cabin of Cosmo Clock 21, a Ferris wheel at an amusement park in Yokohama, Japan. The distorted image shows the structure of the Ferris wheel, focusing on the intermittent vertical movement, which resembles the movement of a film at the gate of a film projector or camera.
Standing Forward Full
05:38
Alee Peoples
A helter skelter is an amusement ride with a spiral slide built around a tower. Like this film, an exorcism attempt of an unrequited desire, itʼs either moving too fast or at a complete standstill. Disorienting but exciting.
Memoirs
10:00
Aaron Zeghers
"There is history behind it and the history becomes the story and the story becomes the pattern and the pattern becomes rigidity." It's stories that we tell ourselves that make us, create and destroy us, immortalize and misrepresent us, damn us. Through three successive generations, reflections of reality are dusted off, and presented as remaining fragments, archived via digital and analog processes. Fleeting thoughts on familial history, narrative traditions, human perception and "the story" from known and unknown sources. Here for now, gone later.
Tartamudeo
03:35
Dave Rodriguez
T A R T A M U D E O--a Spanish word for "stutter"--traces the connections between language, trauma, and cultural memory in a Cuban-American family. Assembled from archival fragments--home movies, educational films about stuttering, anti-Communist propaganda--and refracted through methods of analog and digital synthesis, the work explores a shared loss of language between two generations--one spurned by violent revolution, the other by speech impediment.
The Air of the Earth in Your Lungs
11:00
Ross Meckfessel
Drones and GoPros survey the land while users roam digital forests, oceans, and lakes. Those clouds look compressed. That tree looks pixelated. A landscape film for the 21st century.
Gutai
06:00
Wenhua Shi
Wenhua took on a radical use of single frame image capture and examines his strange and familiar hometown in China, which he has been away from for nearly two decades. The film title comes from postwar Japanese avant garde artist group Gu-Tai. The kanji ( Chinese) used to write 'gu' means tool, measure, or a way of doing something, while 'tai' means body. The film is the result of intense looking and seeing what might not be there.
Bitter with a Shy Taste of Sweetness
08:47
Saif Alsaegh
Bitter with a Shy Taste of Sweetness contrasts the fragmented past of the filmmaker growing up in Baghdad with his surreal California present. Through poetic writing and jarring visuals, the film creates a calm and cruel sense of memory and landscape.
Orbit
06:49
Tess Martin
Spinning drawings guide us along the flow of energy through our planet, and let us ponder our place in the natural cycle.
Slow Volumes
04:40
Mike Gibisser
A motion study of passing time. Shot using a hand-built camera, 35mm film is drawn past a thin vertical aperture, organizing the image temporally. Familiar objects dissolve into abstract lines unless in motion past the lens, their shape determined not by their physical features but in the speed of their movement.
A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message
12:00
Rhea Storr
Celebration is protest at Leeds West Indian Carnival. A look at forms of authority, 'A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message' asks who is really performing. Following Mama Dread's, a troupe whose carnival theme is Caribbean immigration to the UK, we are asked to consider the visibility of black bodies, particularly in rural spaces.
BLICK
02:42
Jonathan Furnell
BLICK is an environmental lament, in the vein of black metal. An angry planet filled with beauty and terror will destroy us.
Camera Sick
14:20
Jeremy Moss
Grain size criteria. Pixels in space. The earth spins while bodies and cameras wind and rotate on its surface. Sand particles infest recording devices scratching unravelling celluloid. The camera and its operator transform from seers to ecstatic performers.
