8.18.2009

Tuesday October 13th 2009 Women Behind the Lens: A Night of Women's Film

Women Behind the Lens: A Night of Women's Film @ Anthology Film Archives
(32 Second Avenue New York, NY 10003)
Tuesday, October 13th 2009 from 6:15-8:30pm

http://newfilmmakers.com/NewFilmmakers%20Schedule%200910.htm






*still from Kim Hall's film "Uprush"


6:15pm
Eye Am
Experimental, narrative and documentary shorts made by women that deconstruct the notion of Self and Other.
Featuring the works of Naomi White, Oriana Fox, Alana Kakoyiannis, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Kim Hall, and Nait Gamez.

Curated by Victoria Kereszi
Victoria Kereszi is a photographer, filmmaker and educator living in Troy, NY. Her work celebrates the ways women represent the Self from breaking out of the margins.

See below for full program and filmmaker bios:

"The Difference" (2009) 3:36 minutes
A meditation on the experience of existing in two places inspired by Andre Aciman’s essay “Pensione Eolo.”

Bio:
Alana Kakoyiannis is a filmmaker based in New York City and Nicosia, Cyprus. Her work ranges from interview-based documentary to abstract, image-dominated experimentalism. She has worked independently to produce several short films that have been broadcast nationally and screened internationally, including Current TV, The Anthology Film Archives and the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival. Her most recent film “Cosmopolis” garnered the Grand Jury Prize for Best International Documentary in the Migr@tions Online Festival held by Radio Canada International. Originally from Pennsylvania, she earned her M.F.A from Hunter College, CUNY in Integrated Media Arts and her B.A. in Communications from Denison University. In her professional experience, she has worked with various networks including MTV, NBC and CBS as well as regional film production companies in Greece and Cyprus.
*****
"Baroness" 3:00
The Baroness Elsa von Freytag Lorignhoven (1874-1927) was a gender-bending, poetess, artist and fashionista, creating costumes from found objects including birdcages for hats, postage stamps for beauty marks, spoons for earrings and soup cans for a brassiere. She was written about by both Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams who said he drank “pure water from her spirit.” The photographer Bernice Abbott said “The Baroness was like Jesus Christ and Shakespeare all rolled intone!”

Elsa's defiance in the wake of extreme hostility for being an artist, a rebel, a woman, and a German ex-patriot during WWI, coupled with her commitment to making art, is fascinating to me. Her will to survive is permanently linked to her art. She is as relevant now as she was in 1915 and her work continues to influence artists, writers and thinkers. My sister Molly and I read everything we could to discover more about this courageous, charismatic, resourceful, penniless Baroness. Molly wrote a song about her and we used my photographic recreations of her life in the video. The video uses the surrealist genre’s playful layering of imagery to tell several stories at once to bring Elsa - and all that she has inspired - into life.

Bio:
Naomi White grew up in Los Angeles, California before moving to New York in 1998 to pursue an MFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts. Since graduating in 2000 she has worked as a video editor, interactive producer and photographer while continuing to create and exhibit artwork. Last year Naomi exhibited The Liberator, a series of photographs, videos and installation pieces based on the work of Rene Magritte, in collaboration with the crochet-artist Olek (read the review here). Her photographs were also featured in a group show About Face: Portraiture Now curated by Paddy Johnson. This year she published a two volume book of photographs The Peggy Rice Collection of Little Red Riding Hoods and was featured in an artist series about SVA Alumni by filmmaker Hillman Curtis. Naomi is currently working on a photographic portrait series about people in Los Angeles called Driving In The Sun. She lives with her husband in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. www.naomiwhite.com
*****
"Uprush" (2009) 7:00
When Rosie returns home to discover some troubling news about her older sister, swimming with her best friend and two boys becomes the scariest thing in the world.

Bio:
Originally from Santa Cruz, CA, Kim Hall made her first documentary about low rider bicycle builders when she was 16 years old. Since then she’s worked variously as a director, cinematographer, and editor on award winning films in New York, Mexico, Texas and Canada. Her most recent film, UPRUSH, screened at the 2009 SXSW and Cinevegas film festivals. She is currently pursuing her MFA in film production at the University of Texas, Austin where she’s been nominated for a full Eastman Scholarship. www.kimhallfilms.com

*****
"Intermittent Delight" (2006) 4:20
INTERMITTENT DELIGHT explores the sexist mores of textile production in Ghana in parallel with a mid-1960s commercial aimed to instruct women on the how-to-decorate your-1960s refrigerator. The soundtrack pulls the images together with traditional Afrobeats and field recordings.

Bio:
Akosua Adoma Owusu is a conceptual installation artist and an independent film director. She has worked on production teams for HBO Films including the Sundance critically acclaimed documentary, Good Hair (2008) Executive Produced by Chris Rock. Owusu is a recent MFA graduate at California Institute of the Arts in Fine Art and Film and Video. She received her BA in Studio Art & Media Studies at the University of Virginia, during which she participated in the Distinguished Majors in Studio Art Program and was honored the first UVA Alumni Art Award. She is also an alumnus of the Berlinale Talent Campus for the Berlin International Film festival in 2008.

Her film, ME BRONI BA (my white baby), a lyrical portrait of hair salons in Kumasi, Ghana premiered at the Museum of Modern Art Documentary Fortnight and Visions du Reel Nyon International Film Festival. It won 2nd prize Best Documentary Short at the 2008 Athens International Film Festival and was officially selected in competition at prestigious film festivals including AFI/Discovery Channel SilverDocs, San Francisco, and London Film Festival among many others. Owusu, though the first baby born in Northern Virginia January 1, 1984, is of Ghanaian descent. She currently lives and works in Washington D.C.
*****
“All My Life” (2007) 20:00
Part coming-of-age story, part personal mythology. In it I recreate dance scenes from films such as Dirty Dancing, Grease, and Saturday
Night Fever with myself as the heroine. A soundtrack based on a positive affirmation self-help tape and autobiographical anecdotes tells
the story of the evolution of my choice of love objects. Through identification and embodiment I give depth to the most superficial of
characters, and I become the star of my own Hollywood movie.

Bio:
Oriana Fox is an American artist based in London. She received her BFA in Painting from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000 and went on to obtain a Masters in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in London. Since graduating in 2003 she has shown her video and performance work to acclaim in the UK, Europe and the US. In 2007 she was an artist-in-residence at Triangle France located in Marseille. Fox works primarily in video and performance, using parody and appropriation to tackle subjects such as the self-representation of women and cinema’s role as mythmaker. www.orianafox.com
*****
"Love, Sadie"
(s16mm / rt 12:07)
- A nuanced & impressionistic look at isolation and adolescence.

Bio:
Naiti Gámez is a filmmaker willing to call anywhere "with a flexible approach to language" home. Her latest film, Love, Sadie, was awarded a Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund Grant (Austin Film Society) and was a semi-finalist at the 2008 Student Academy Awards. As a cinematographer, her film credits have screened at dozens of festivals worldwide, including Clermont-Ferrand, Tribeca, SXSW, Festival du Cinema de Paris, Woodstock Film Festival, Hampton's International Film Festival, Festival de Cine Internacional de Barcelona and Taos Talking Pictures. Her film and TV credits have aired on television networks such as Showtime, MTV/MTV2, & tuTV. Naiti has also worked at non-profit organizations in the U.S. and abroad. As a youth-media educator, she's collaborated with young people to produce videos about social issues that affect them. She holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Smith College, and an M.F.A. in Film Production (Cinematography concentration) from the University of Texas at Austin. www.marielita.net
*****














7:15pm (including Q&A with Filmmakers)

"Chaos/Peace"
The work in this bill explores the various ways we process the chaos within that can stem from personal relationships, societal pressure and global concerns with different approaches ranging from the conceptual to the completely absurd.

Artists include: Marianna Ellenberg, Hyung Sung, Liz Haley, Julie Perini, Cat Tyc, Victoria Fu, Virginia Valdes & Kitty Green.

Curated by Cat Tyc
Cat Tyc is a video artist/director whose work has screened in a variety of places like the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Camac d’ Art in Paris, PDX Fest in Portland, the Kassel Experimental & Documentary Film Festival in Kassel, Germany and the High Energy Constructs gallery in Los Angeles.