old and new friends

PROGRAM

Looking back, there are many friends we have made throughout these nine past editions of (S8). Every edition is a constellation in this galaxy that we have been building, inhabited by a series of filmmakers who we admire and appreciate. And who, aside from living in this galaxy through their work, do so through the memory of the days we have spent together in A Coruña. Through this program, we want to stay in touch with these filmmakers, in a sort of correspondence in which their new films will function as missives that let us know how these old and beloved friends are doing. Thus, we receive the works in progress by Naomi Uman, who accompanied us in the 2012 edition, just like Janie Geiser, who came alongside Lewis Klahr for the program dedicated to collage in animation, “El nuevo monstruo”, and who also formed part of the edition of “Objetos y apariciones” in 2017. Malena Szlam sends us her extraordinary Altiplano, after visiting us in 2014 via the program brought by Media City. Jodie Mack (who sang tirelessly beneath the rain in A Coruña in 2014) returns once again to our screens with her boundless imagination, from which we also received news in 2016 and 2018. A large number of those “new impressionists” of 2016 will accompany us: Stephen Broomer (who returned in 2017 with his Potamkin) and Jacques Perconte, along with Dan Browne and Robert Todd, who visited us in that same edition via their films. The same edition in which we dedicated a spotlight to the combative Saul Levine, who sends us, this time, a new film of his Light Licks. We thus find a space in which to continue viewing the work of filmmakers who we do not forget after their departure, and who already form a part of who we are.

Furthermore, the (S8) galaxy continues to expand, not only via the new retrospectives and spotlights, but rather through these other new friends, brilliant asteroids that we want to welcome into our system. This is how Jeannette Muñoz has arrived to us and is here to stay, with her continual work in progress, Puchuncaví, and a film conference so that we can become acquainted with her past work. Stefano Canapa arrives with his visual and sound experiments, which extend, as well, to Desbordamientos with their performance, Wavelength. And finally, Valentina Alvarado and Bruno Delgado Ramo, wielding super 8 cameras, making way for a future in which we hope to be able to follow in their steps.

LIGHT LICKS: PARDES: COUNTING FLOWERS ON THE WALL

Saul Levine, EE. UU., 2018, super 8 a 16mm, 12 min.
Light Licks are a series of films I began in 1999. The films are made frame by frame, often by flooding the camera with enough light to spill beyond the gate into the frame left unexposed. Light Licks are ecstatic flicker films inspired by jazz and mystic visionary practice, and extend my interest in the ways film can be a medium of visual improvisation. This new instalment once again evokes the legendary garden of Persian paradise, Pardes, in a film brimming with tender flowers, colours and light.
CHANCES DE LUZ

Valentina Alvarado, Venezuela, Spain, 2017, super 8 video, 4 min.
We’ve heard a lot lately about the power outage in Venezuela. Valentina Alvarado, forging opportunity from scarcity, began capturing with her camera these “chances of light” during the blackouts in her native Maracaibo in a delicate piece between light and darkness, the chance of luminous rebellion in small format.
FLUORESCENT GIRL

Janie Geiser, USA, 2019, video, 2 min.
Reviving an imagined past, making ghosts emerge before our eyes. This is what Geiser does in her startling pieces. On this occasion, the image of a girl found in a photography book (Tailor’s Apprentice, by Paul Strand) emerging from the lights and sounds among reflections serves as baseline.
MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH

Robert Todd, USA, 2017, 16mm, 13 min.
Robert Todd left this world not long ago (almost as a prelude to a long list of filmmakers who have, sadly, passed away recently), leaving behind him an incredible legacy which includes this piece about questions of life and death. With his characteristic use of light, time and the camera, which makes the world emerge before our eyes, Todd threshes the layers of life one by one.
UNA PELÍCULA EN COLOR

Bruno Delgado Ramo, Spain, Belgium, 2019, super 8, 31 min.
Drawing from Xavier de Maistre’s book, A Journey around my Room, Bruno Delgado decides to make a film without leaving his room, where he is often filmer and filmed, and where the room is a room and also a camera. The books, the clothes, a piece of fruit, the light, the sky through various objects, the camera, the room. Everything in a continual reflection on framing, medium (the possibilities of the film camera) and the very universe contained in just a few square metres of floor, and in the tiny millimetres of super 8 film.

LEÓN EN LEÓN

Naomi Uman, Mexico, Canada, work in progress, 16mm video, 3 min.
A yet-unfinished work about a dog and a city, namesakes who encounter one another.
BUM BUMBUM

Naomi Uman, Mexico, work in progress, 16mm video, 3 min.
A film that makes fun of the end of the world.
PUCHUNCAVÍ

Jeanette Muñoz, Chile, 2019, 16mm, 12 min.
Puchuncavi is a collection of scenes and film fragments created in a “chosen place”, which slowly build, over the years, the portrait of a place. A coastal village in Chile, which in ancient times was a stop on the route of the Inca and today is a port for fishing cargo.
FOUNTAINS OF PARIS

Stephen Broomer, Canada, 2018, 16mm video, 9 min.
In a game of superimpositions and colours, almost like stained glass or Tiffany lamps, the water of the fountains of Paris enter into play in this film, which begins to imagine, taking inspiration from the street photography of Jacques Madvo in Paris in 1961. A haven of peace and colour after the restlessness of Potamkin.
HOARDERS WITHOUT BORDERS 1.0

Jodie Mack, USA, 2018, 16mm video, 5 min.
Mary Johnson’s generous mineral collection, full of beautiful rarities, enters into a new physical and cinematic state at the hands (which are, in this case, ghostly) of Jodie Mack. Natural science passed through a supernatural halo of animation and Mack’s incomparable understanding of cinema.
ALTIPLANO

Malena Szlam, Chile, Argentina, Canadá, 2018, 35mm, 16 min.
Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara and Calchaquí-Diaguita in northern Chile and northwest Argentina, Altiplano takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts and coloured lakes. Coupled with a natural soundscape generated from infrasound recordings of volcanoes, geysers, blue whales and more, the film reveals an ancient land standing witness to all that is, was and will be.
LINES OF FORCE

Dan Browne, Canada, 2018, video, 2 min.
With his unique use of light, superimpositions and colour, Dan Browne lays bare the hidden lines of force in the city, invisible electricized threads that seem to feed the frenzy of the city with their static charge.
OR / OR, HAWICK, MAY 18

Jacques Perconte, Francia, 2018, vídeo, 10 min.
Above the Teviot River in Scotland, the filmmaker saw a colour in the sky like in the paintings of Gustav Klimt. He translates his amazement into fluid patterns of a digitally decomposed scene, all the way to its radical ending when the variously coloured grids again dissolve into Klimt’s golden colour.
THE SOUND DRIFTS

Stefano Canapa, France, 2019, 35mm, 8 min.
Optic soundtracks take the frame in this film, in hypnotic white lines on black. Between op art, cinematic art, flicker film and visual and sound experimentation, Canapa creates this piece using sound from his previous film, Jérôme Noetinger, in which he films a performance of the French sound artist.