Contraband Cinema

3/18: Atlanta Film Festival Experimental Films
hosted by Contraband Cinema

$10. At 7 Stages - Black Box @ 9:30pm

Contraband Cinema hosts the Atlanta Film Festival Experimental Shorts program.

Tickets available here.

America, America (12min) - Georg Koszulinski

One America is Dvorak's, from his American String Quartet No. 12, composed in 1893. The other is mine, culled from found images of the America born from the moving image. Combined, the portrait spans three centuries.

Fratello 69 (7min) - Matteo Giovanelli

772, a calf, remember the last days of his brother, 69

28.IV.81 (Descending Figures) (4min) - Christopher Harris

Descending Figures is an improvised double projection film edited in-camera that documents a set of twice-daily performances of Behold the Lamb Passion Drama at The Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, Florida.This film is a film of two 16mm prints to be projected simultaneously in synch side by side.

Ceibas: Epilogue - The Well of Representation (8min) - Evan Meaney

In part a remake of Hollis Frampton’ s Gloria! (1979), in part a repurposing of hacked, 16-bit video game technology; The Well of Representation asks us to reconsider our fear of the liminal. Following the convergent narratives of several voices, ranging from the linearly historical to the cybernetically personal, we come to understand the journey ahead: searching from interface to interface, knowing that whatever home we find will be a collaborative compromise. One where we might live beyond our representations and finally come to say what we mean.-- Evan Meaney

Green Eye (10min) - Walter Ungerer

How the universe evolved, and how humans developed are questions that arise with our awareness of life on the planet. There seems always to be much conjecture about it, but no clear answers. Mystery and wonder are pervasive. This film stems from my thoughts about it. As the images I created evolved into continuous sequences, it pursued a direction hitherto unknown by me until it was a film, and finished. Does the eye at the beginning represent the all seeing eye? Is it the nucleus around which the universe swirls, or is it simply just an eye?

In Between Shadows (6min) - Tianran Duan

As we normally understand, architectures are physical structures created by human beings, and their appearances are combination of geometrical shapes, which seem to be cold and rigid. While the sunshine casts on buildings, either on walls, stairs or floors, shadows will appear and form infinite space and mysterious structures, a combination of memories, subconsciousness and past time.When you look at the beautiful shadows, silent and in harmony, you can go beyond and read the infinite space through them.

Londoners (11min) - Joseph Ernst

LONDONERS is a vintage film about modern day London. Shot entirely on a 100 year old wooden hand-cranked 35mm camera, LONDONERS documents modern day London as never seen before. It shows the city as a community: a piece of contemporary history about what its like to live in London today. In an era obsessed with digital technology, by an increasingly camera-sceptic public, LONDONERS features thousands of people interacting directly with the camera, as was always the case in times gone by.

Matters of Bioluminescence (7min) - Robbie Land

Experiments committing bioluminescent materials to 16mm film, including, but not limited to, fireflies and glowing mushrooms.

Pop (3min) - Rachel Moore

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Retrocognition (18min) - Eric Patrick

Retrocognition is simultaneously a filmic archeology and a social critique. The film re-contextualizes found assets and animated techniques into a decaying narrative that critiques the meme of the “nuclear family” found in sitcoms. By exploiting the lingering residue of found assets and spectator expectations of animations, cartoons, and sitcoms, 'Retrocognition' discovers unconscious intent and cultural bias in its treatment of the nuclear family. Whether the pop-culture myth of the family is found in 'Ozzie and Harriot' in the 1950s or a soccer mom in the 1990s, the traditional family is still put forth in US society as an ultimate goal. The soundtrack for the film was composed first by collaging together bits of performances from early radio dramas. The soundbites were juxtaposed to reveal unexpected dialogue that borders on the schizophrenic. Because of these collisions, the timbre and emotion of the voices are fluid—jumping between elation, fear, rage, passion, detachment and melancholia. Visually, 'Retrocognition' is animated in a mixed media style, with the main characters constructed from animated photographs of real humans, and the sets and props constructed from a collage of photographs and mixed media. The photographs are cut up and collaged in a way that mirrors the cut up and found nature of the audio track. This approach leads to an unsettling experience of watching something that has the aesthetic of vintage media sitcoms, yet appears and sounds like it has been hacked to pieces and put back together to reveal a dark alternative to the initial intent.

A Million Statues (5min) - Daniel Dietzel

A Million Statues is a love letter, a requiem and a testament to cinema at the edge of the death of film. It is a film that attempts to express the beauty of a fraction of a moment in time that cinema, or the moving image, so effortlessly captures. EE Cumming’s poem suggests that art can never quite capture the beauty of reality but A Million Statues sidesteps this question by going outside of reality and time to capture the feeling of fraction. A kiss could occur at any moment in a relationship but the image of the kiss evokes the beginning, the moment when possibility is equal to the infinite and nothing outside of the act exists.

#PostModem (15min) - Jillian Mayer & Lucas Leyva

#PostModem is a comedic satirical sci-fi pop-musical based on the theories of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists. It's the story of two Miami girls and how they deal with the technological singularity. If 'My Life to Live' was Godard's experiment in structuring a film like an essay, think of the structure of #PostModem as a series of cinematic tweets around a theme, or hashtag if you will.

I Am (5min) - Kathryn Brillhart

Within every human, a dormant potential force exists awakened, waiting for release. The higher our self-awareness, the further up the spine our force will travel; changing our spiritual energy and ultimately who we are. This is called kundalini rising. It can be intentionally triggered when a person is on a spiritual journey desiring these experiences so that they might reach higher consciousness. However, for many people, the kundalini rising is triggered unexpectedly. The experience can make the inner journey toward self-awareness physically unbearable leaving the spiritually unguided potentially more confused than they were before their inner force began to rise. I AM (2012) is an experimental short that explores the kundalini rising through dance.