A boat trip with friends round Manhattan, shot in single-frame mode.

NO SYNOPSIS

Hour by hour the ancient face of repeated Beings changes, and hour by hour, Thinking, we get older. Everything passes, unknown, and the knower Who remains knows he knows not. But nothing, Aware or unaware, returns. Equals, therefore, of what isn’t our equal, Let us preserve, in the heat we remember, The flame of the spent hour. Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa)

A series of executions of Iranian political prisoners began in the summer of 1988, following the end of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. For nearly three decades, I have been preoccupied with the coincidence of this massacre and my birth in August 1988. The prisoners had no specific graves and were all buried in mass graves, and the most significant mass grave was called Khavaran. The mothers of these prisoners are a symbol of resistance and freedom, and they are called the mother of Khavaran. This film is an experimental documentary and a personal essay based on these events.

My first 16mm, Sightreading, was shot in August 2022 in Minneapolis and Chicago. It uses images from three sources: black mattes held in front of the sky near my parents’ house which were filmed and edited in-camera to a metronome; my friends drinking wine and discussing The Bachelor in their Chicago apartment; and details of a Breughel painting filmed from a television.” -NC

A roll and a half made to delight in color and the presence of friends. Steps toward learning to read in the dark.

Eternal recurrence and wisdom undone. The end or the beginning. Who are we that we. One and the same are the shadow cast and its cause. A hypnotic journey through the seven valleys on the way to reach the abode of the Simurgh.

When is it time to retreat and when is it time to stop and face the challenge? Do you prefer to spin in old patterns or is it better to accept and embrace change?

Waving hello to the filming cameraperson, the subjects through this very gesture, are also providing a future viewer with the acknowledgment of a constant good-bye to a fleeting moment. Yet when the film is projected and the captured gesture is seen, it's as if the subjects are saying hello again from the past. This film is an homage to the artist's father, the man behind the camera in these personal family archives.

Tlaloc (Lines Drawn in Water) is a handmade cameraless 16mm film of materiality and transformation; an enigmatic otherworld where hues of water evolve into prismatic blooms. Tlaloc is the deity of waters, rain, lightning, and growth in the Aztec pantheon. This film explores the membrane of film itself - a moving skin marked by fluid, punctured by light. The protean soundtrack was entirely composed with contact microphones to capture handmade surface markings and gestures. The motion picture was made with direct animation, scratching, hand-painting, and contact-printing techniques.

A travelog through the familiar and unfamiliar terrain of digital landscapes. Pairing 16mm footage of computer desktop backgrounds with soundscapes of sites of technological extraction - precious metal mining, smelting foundries, microprocessing plants, and data farms - Bliss.jpg excavates and examines the geological and geographical sites that produce our virtual worlds.

The sequence of repetitive images creates a hypnotic atmosphere that calls into the flow of emotional introspection and internal questions about the human mind, identity and memory. This memory, is partial. We discover that a part of ourselves (like our memory) is outside of us.

A forbidding soundtrack of horns and distorted noise sets the scene for Ross Meckfessel’s Spark from a Falling Star, where shots of grocery store parking lots and dimly lit suburban roads breed atmospheres of low-level menace. At the other extreme, smooth digital renderings promise a shiny, spectral

Dedicated to Gerald O'Grady. This work was made possible by a Bicentennial Grant by the N.E.A. and the N.Y. State Council on the Arts. "This film, rather than being 'structural,' is 'narrative like.' We feel as if we are on some sort of journey, where we never know/predict what is to 'happen' next. It is engaging, like a novel full of surprises. The 'narrative' feeling is like a soap opera, which just keeps twisting and turning, with no apparent resolution intended (but there _is_ a closure on the purely formal level), as opposed to say _Miami Vice_ wherein the dramatic line moves towards and achieves a weekly resolution. This work prefigures a long series of 30 min. chapters in a 'Light Novel,' PASSARE, which I am presently working on (which could finally reach 40 hours in total length before I die). Aside from a recurrent red, white and blue phrase, there is no repetition in the film (repetition conventionally provides structural order)." - P.S.