Join us for a virtual film series curated by Rail Film Editor Dan Sullivan, graciously supported by the Blue Rider Group.
In this screening
Note: Once you register, you’ll receive video links and passwords for all of the screenings between Monday, December 28 — Friday, January 1. These are not live events through Zoom.
Monday, December 28
📽 King of Sanwi (Akosua Adoma Owusu, 2020, 7 mins) The spiritual sequel to her previous film _Pelourinho, They Don’t Really Care About Us_ (2019) finds Akosua Adoma Owusu deftly, absorbingly synthesizing direct animation and archival footage from the Jackson 5’s 1974 visit to Dakar and Michael’s 1992 crowning as an Ivorian king to meditate on the pop icon’s relationship to Africa.
Tuesday, December 29
📽 Field Resistance (Emily Drummer, 2019, 16 mins) Something like a science-fiction documentary, Emily J. Drummer’s _Field Resistance_ uses the subject of eco-devastation in Iowa as a springboard to conjure the eternal antagonism between humanity and nature and the increasingly blurry line between our fraught, fragile present and the prophesied dystopia to come.
Wednesday, December 30
📽 The Isolated (Jay Giampietro, 2020, 15 mins) Jay Giampietro’s latest ranks among the best artworks to tackle Life in the Time of Covid-19 to date, with the filmmaker exercising his singular eye for street-level surreality as he takes in a locked-down NYC while meeting periodically with a friend, a lonely eccentric anxiously yearning for human connection.
Thursday, December 31
📽 Point and Line to Plane (Sofia Bohdanowicz, 2020, 17 mins) Sofia Bohdanowicz continues her rich, ongoing collaboration with the actor/filmmaker Deragh Campbell in this alluring narrative work, following a young woman from museum in a foreign city to museum in a foreign city as she recalls a friend by way of the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint.
Friday, January 1
📽 Drills (Sarah Friedland, 2020, 17 mins) The link between performance and the everyday anxieties of our age is a prevalent subject in the work of Sarah Friedland, and her latest, _Drills_, is no exception, a mesmerizing dance film that locates its choreography within the physical movements of preparatory exercises (including active shooter drills and corporate meditation guides).
Questions? Send an email to [email protected]
From all of us at the Brooklyn Rail, we wish everyone a safe and joyful holiday season!We’d like to thank our friends at the Blue Rider Group for graciously sponsoring our events this week!
Akosua Adoma Owusu
Born 1984, Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker whose films address a collision of identities, where the African immigrant located in America has a triple consciousness. Named by IndieWire as one of the 6 pre-eminent Avant-Garde Female Filmmakers Who Redefined Cinema, she has exhibited worldwide, including at the Centre Pompidou, Berlinale, Rotterdam, Locarno, Toronto, New Directors/New Films (NY), and London (BFI). She was a featured artist of the 56th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar programmed by renowned film curator and critic Dennis Lim. Her film Kwaku Ananse won the 2013 Africa Movie Academy Award. Her latest film White Afro won the Medien Patent Verwaltung AG Prize at the 2019 Locarno Film Festival. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Fowler Museum at UCLA. She has received fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Westridge Foundation, Creative Capital, the MacDowell Colony, the Camargo Foundation, the Goethe-Institut Salvador-Bahia and most recently from the Residency Program at the Villa Sträuli in Winterthur. Currently, she divides her time between Ghana and New York, where she works as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Emily Drummer (b. 1990) is a filmmaker who uses immersive research as a starting point to investigate the dynamic between technology and the natural world. She received her MFA in Film and Video Production from the University of Iowa and her BA from Hampshire College. She is a Princess Grace Film Honoraria recipient and a Flaherty Film Seminar fellow. Drummer’s work has been showcased by venues including Art of the Real at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Black Box at Edinburgh International Film Festival, London Short Film Festival, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, and Camden International Film Festival. An article about her work was recently published in the Brooklyn Rail.
Jay Giampietro is a writer, director, actor and musician whose short films have played the New York Film Festival, the Maryland Film Festival, BAMcinemaFest, Montclair Film Festival, Sidewalk Film Festival and Rotterdam Film Festival. His short films Unpresidented and Quarterbacks were both selected as Vimeo Staff Picks. Most recently, his short film The Isolated premiered at the 58th New York Film Festival in October 2020. His street photography capturing the eccentric denizens of New York City has been praised by The Village Voice, British GQ, and The Guardian. He was selected for the New York Film Festival’s 2016 Artist Academy.
Sofia Bohdanowicz is an award-winning filmmaker from Toronto, she is the founder of the production company MAISON DU BONHEUR. She has had retrospectives of her work screened at BAFICI, The Seattle Northwest Film Forum, Cinemateca de Bogotà, DocLisboa and Festival du nouveau cinéma. In 2017, the Toronto Film Critics Association awarded her the Jay Scott Prize and in 2018 she was nominated for the Rogers Prize for Best Canadian Film for her documentary Maison du bonheur. Her third feature film, MS Slavic 7, graced the cover of Cinema Scope (and the Argentinian newspaper Página/12), premiered at the Berlinale and was featured at the Harvard Film Archive. Bohdanowicz is an MFA graduate of York University’s Film Production program, an alumni of Berlinale Talents as well as the TIFF Talent Accelerator. She is currently in development on her fourth feature film titled A Portrait which won the Kodak and Silverway Award during FIDMarseille’s co-production lab.
Sarah Friedland is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Her work has been screened, installed, and performed across film, art, and dance venues including New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Ann Arbor Film Festival, BAMcinématek, Performa19 Biennial, La MaMa Galleria, Sharjah Art Foundation, MAM Rio, Wassaic Project, the American Dance Festival and Dixon Place, among many others. She is currently finishing the AIM Emerging Artist Fellowship at The Bronx Museum.
Dan Sullivan is an Assistant Programmer for Film at Lincoln Center and the Editor of the film section of the Brooklyn Rail. He is a contributor to Film Comment, Cinema Scope, and other publications. At FLC he has organized or co-organized retrospectives of Raúl Ruiz, David Lynch, Jacques Rivette, Germaine Dulac, Pedro Costa, Jane Birkin, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, among others, and various film series including “Going Steadi: 40 Years of Steadicam” (2017), “Heathcliff, It’s Me: Adapting Wuthering Heights” (2017), and “Make My Day: American Movies in the Age of Reagan” (2019, with J. Hoberman). He has also served as a programmer for NYFF and is currently a member of the New Directors/New Films selection committee.
