The Fall '06 Archives: Episode Five aired on Wednesday November 1st 2006

The Juarez Mothers
Zulma Aguiar is an Electronic Artist originally from Calexico,California in search of "the truth" behind the Ciudad Juarez femicides. She discovers that the only reality she cared about in the end was the stories of the mothers of the femicide victims. Zulma interviewed as many mothers as she could with all of her own personal resources and the support of her university, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and traveled to Juarez several times to meet face to face with the realities of the feminine ground zero. The mothers explain the story one more time and makes the point that in the end the reason why these women are being killed and left to die is simply because they are poor. In the faces of the mothers is where corruption and negligence is expressed with pain and sorrow for their own loss.

Filmmaker Bio:
Zulma Aguiar is a video artist, podcasting blogger, interactive installation artist, feminist, border artist, human rights activist and a Chicana from Calexico, California whose expertise lies mainly with video, she learns about misogyny, global conflict, separation, border cultures, diasporas and the love hate relationship between all adjacent societies living near, or around political boundaries. She is living in New York City.

ChicanaFeliz.com














rendez-vous
More than 200,000 Koreans have been adopted internationally. Thousands of these adoptees return to Korea every year to search for biological kin. This is one woman's experience of meeting her birth mother. Conflating the story of familial reunion with the trajectory of an illicit affair, Rendez-vous presents an intimate glimpse into a widespread transnational phenomenon.

Filmmaker Bio:
M. Weimer is a videomaker and artist currently living in Los Angeles and New York. She has screened and exhibited her work in South Korea, Europe, and the U.S.














What the Water Saw
The video explores a mystery at the depths of the sea. The film is structured to mimic the ocean’s moods, creating a varied psychological space for the viewer. Equally important, the visual construction of the film moves between form and formlessness. This play between form (appearance) and formlessness (withdrawal) echoes both the ocean’s tides, and the idea of light and dark, or creation and destruction (death).

Filmmaker Bio:
Vanessa Woods graduated with a BA in art history and visual arts, cum laude from Barnard College. Her artwork and films have been exhibited internationally and she has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship for Film, a Film Arts Foundation Personal Works Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute’s prestigious MFA Film Fellowship, where she is currently pursuing her MFA degree. Woods has produced five short films that have been screened internationally including the Centre International d’Art in France, The Anthology Film Archives in New York, and the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley. Woods is currently working on three new films, including a feature-length documentary titled Mimita, which follows the lives of a family of women raising their adopted child in Bronx, New York.

www.vanessawoods.com














Our Hope
In the villages of western Kenya, AIDS has robbed hundreds of thousands of children of their parents. Who's caring for them? Tumaini Letu (Our Hope) follows the lives, struggles, and indomitable spirit of three women left to care for these orphans. Rasoa Kivairu is raising ten grandchildren. Anna Khautu is a single mother of five. And Anna Aredo has taken in four nephews. With limited resources but great resolve, they must overcome many challenges to ensure these children have a chance at a better future.

Filmmaker Bio:
Natalie Halpern is a new filmmaker with a passion for documentaries that capture the immeasurable capacity of the human spirit and the vulnerabilities of children living in poverty, and examine other critical social issues confronting our world. Previously Halpern was a television news reporter/bureau chief, as well as a radio producer focusing on coverage of Latin America and Eastern Europe. Born in Hollywood, California, but raised in Miami, Florida, her love of film was nurtured by her mother who took her to a movie almost every week from the age of four. Halpern received a B.S. in Journalism and a B.A. in Political Science from Boston University. In 2005, she completed a documentary film program at the Maine International Television and Film Workshops. Tumaini Letu is her second film. She currently lives in Arlington, Virginia.














WORLD PREMIERE!!!
Go Global
What happens when consumerism starts close to home and travels over distant lands only to come back to haunt us?


Filmmaker Bio:
Branda Miller is an Artist, educator and activist who has been working with independent media since the 1970s. Her experimentation with media arts is integrally linked with community organizing. In her collaborative work with groups around the country, Miller involves participants in varied aspects of production so they take control of their own representation. The tapes produced in her youth empowerment workshops focus on issues such as teenage pregnancy, dropping out, crime, prison, drugs, and AIDS, offering a realistic yet upbeat treatment of what growing up in America is like today. Over the past 20 years, Branda has developed a portfolio of intriguing, award-winning works, examining topics in areas such as environmentalism, consumerism, social behavior and cyber culture.

rpi.edu/~milleb/
















Self Study Course
Self Study Course is an experimental self portrait of the filmmaker's journey into the subconscious. Through a narrative voice of society, that manifests itself in the form of a self hypnosis recording, she explores the contradictions between self ridicule and self appreciation.

Filmmaker Bio:
Diana Arce is an experimental filmmaker, installation and performance artist currently residing in Berlin Germany. Born in Anchorage Alaska, and raised all over the United States, much of Diana’s work deals with themes of internationalism, culture, politics, and space.

visualosmosis.com















Passing> 13 things about Nella Larsen
Most people have never heard of Nella Larsen, a mixed-race Harlem Renaissance writer, whose career was brilliant but tragically brief. Recently, an increasing amount of scholarly attention has been given to Larsen's work yet there exists a frustrating lack of visual documentation on her life. This video essay/experimental short montages the few existing archival photographs of the writer with contemporaneous found footage. It attempts to introduce this groundbreaking writer to new audiences while reimagining the life of a mysterious woman whose life mirrored her art in its liminality.

Filmmaker Bio:
M. Weimer is a videomaker and artist currently living in Los Angeles and New York. She has screened and exhibited her work in South Korea, Europe, and the U.S.














52 Bis
Filmed at my grandmother’s house in Paris, France 52 Bis leads the viewer through a house of memories, empty rooms, photographs that have been left behind and one light illuminating and obscuring what’s inside. The continual shift between the positive and negative image serve to exploit the idea of presence and absence, or alternately the internal and external. The negative images become the bones of the house, or the bones of memory within its continually shifting spaces.

Filmmaker Bio:
Vanessa Woods graduated with a BA in art history and visual arts, cum laude from Barnard College. Her artwork and films have been exhibited internationally and she has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship for Film, a Film Arts Foundation Personal Works Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute’s prestigious MFA Film Fellowship, where she is currently pursuing her MFA degree. Woods has produced five short films that have been screened internationally including the Centre International d’Art in France, The Anthology Film Archives in New York, and the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley. Woods is currently working on three new films, including a feature-length documentary titled Mimita, which follows the lives of a family of women raising their adopted child in Bronx, New York.
www.vanessawoods.com