On Monday, October 25, Migrating Forms will present two programs of jury selections at BAMcinématek.

Tickets are on sale now and can be purchased online here.

6:50pm
Erie (2010, 81 min)
dir. Kevin Jerome Everson
Best Long Form Work

“Everson rejects the role of cultural explainer in his work, opting instead to place the burden of understanding on the audience and its own labor. In this way, he has carved a place for himself outside both the typical expectations of documentary and the conventions of representational fiction, attempting to work from the materials of the worlds he encounters to create something else.” — Ed Halter, Artforum

Erie consists of a series of single take shots in and around communities near Lake Erie. The scenes relate to a Black migration in the USA, contemporary conditions, folks concentrating on the task at hand, theater and famous art objects. The subject matter is the gestures or tasks caused by certain conditions in the lives of working class African Americans and other people of African descent. The conditions are usually physical, social-economic circumstances or weather. Instead of standard realism I favor a strategy that abstracts everyday actions and statements into theatrical gestures, in which archival footage is re-edited or re-staged, real people perform fictional scenarios based on their own lives and historical observations intermesh with contemporary narratives. The films suggest the relentlessness of everyday life—along with its beauty—but also present oblique metaphors for art-making. — Kevin Jerome Everson

9:30pm
Shorts Program
Jury selected shorts

Bethlehem (2009, 8 min)
Dir. Peggy Ahwesh
Working through my archive of accumulated video footage, I pretended it was found footage from anonymous sources. What began as a tribute to Bruce Conner of the period of Valse Triste and Take the 5:10 to Dreamland, with their deliberate pace and bittersweet memory of home, ended as a dedication to my father as I wound my way through miscellany with distance and another aim. — Peggy Ahwesh

Prim Limit (2009, 32 min)
Dir. eteam
If second lives have grown into the landscape of social network space and avatars engage a full range of human emotions and experience, it follows that they would eventually encounter existential questions. eteam’s Prim Limit traces this fascinating unexpected trajectory. A plot of land is purchased in the online 3-D Second Life network and a simple question is asked: Where do discarded 3D objects go and can we build a dumpster to accommodate them? To find out eteam set aside a year to let this virtual land use problem unfold and what is captured in Prim Limit is the lived experience of avatars managing and recording this dumpster. This is a very contemporary Existentialist tale that is more about Wasteland than Waste, and all the very human emotions this terminal condition evokes. — Will Pappenheimer

It’s Cool, I’m Good (2010, 35 min)
Dir. Stanya Kahn
In It’s Cool, I’m Good, Kahn resumes her familiar place in front of the camera, this time bandaged and injured, a protagonist who is at once selfless and narcissistic, verbose and elusive, vulnerable and manipulative. Paralleling the way in which jokes compress and expand meaning, Kahn organizes the narratives along the lines of a psycho-emotional unpacking, creating small arcs in place of grand ones.

Caroline Golum As (2010, 9 min)
Dir. Andrew Lampert
Caroline Golum auditions to play the filmmaker’s great great great great great aunt in late 1700s Siberia.

54 Days This Winter 36 Days This Spring For 18 Minutes (2009, 16 min)
Dir. Dani Leventhal
Dani gathered material for 9 minutes each day, then condensed it down to this 16 minute video montage of impressions which has a cumulative effect, accessed and read differently depending on the mental connections the viewer makes. It is presented as short scenes: documentation of the quotidian, on-camera monologues, and performative or expressive shots that are constructed. The material, while mostly generated as a diary, is heterogeneous enough to include just about any kind of footage. — Video Data Bank