When the frame slips, someplace between tomorrow and yesterday
a program curated for the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film, Durham, ON, Saturday, July 20th.
Using strategies unique to time based media, artists in When the frame slips, someplace between tomorrow and yesterday work in intimate ways to construct reflections of the world on a global scale. As a whole, the program points toward the complexity of our given moment, focusing on the links between the environment, the land, colonialism, war, extraction and oppression. By turning to their cameras, and using both formal and conceptual constraints, artists in the program ask us to look closer to how we engage with the land and with one another, and to consider how it is that we might look at these relationships again and anew. Each of the works in When the frame slips, someplace between tomorrow and yesterday utilize strategies unique to time based media and through structural, material and narrative means help us to imagine the future differently:
Inside a cracked foundation
The pixels blur.
In the garden
Past the full blooms.
In the sea
Time stutters and repeats.
In the backyard
A camera shakes the leaves on a tree.
Rewind.
Fast-forward again.
In a field
A fire burns.
In the desert
The sun shimmers in a barrel of water.
In the street
A red flash
When the revolution comes.
When the frame slips, someplace between tomorrow and yesterday includes works by: Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, & Ryan Ferko, Dan Browne, Terra Long, Lydia Moyer, Metrah Pashaee, and belit sağ.
Screening Order:
what remains / geriye kalanlar – belit sağ – 7.05minutes
The Forcing (no. 1) – Lydia Moyer – 9.46 minutes
Gulf – Dan Browne – 4.20 minutes
Chooka – Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko – 22 minutes
Burn Day – Metrah Pashaee – 4 minutes
350 MYA – Terra Long – 4.55 minutes
The Forcing (no. 2) – Lydia Moyer – 7 minutes
TRT approximately: 60 minutes
Descriptions (by the artist unless otherwise specified):
belit sağ (Turkish, lives & works in Amsterdam), what remains / geriye kalanlar, 2018, 7.05 minutes
what remains is constructed from images that sag shot and gathered during 2015 and 2016 in Cizre, a primarily Kurdish town in Turkey on the Syrian border, as well as found footage from all over Turkey from the same period. A focus of the work is the artist’s footage of collective Kurdish mourning practices, and looking at how images of the dead are used in these practices. sag approaches her subject both philosophically and emotionally, and is driven to find a way of making work that is theoretically rigorous and morally and ethically compassionate.
‘This video is an attempt at ‘giving the images back to the ones who gave them to us’, it aims to 'allow the ghosts to come back', and revisit the images, re-think the recent history… On the one hand video can manipulate, on the other it can heal, it can co-conspire, help you go back and forth, re-visit, refresh the memory, it can also make you re-live the violence as well, it is an earthly friend that connects you to many beings stuck between life and death, past and present.’
Lydia Moyer (USA), The Forcing (no. 1), 2015, 9.46 minutes
Part one of a series of collages that muddle the quiet detail of flora and fauna with the chaotic noise of mass upheaval, building tension through the offset of sound and image. Made in response to the turbulence of contemporary US American life, these works ask viewers to ride the waves of the capitalocene, placing climate change and the struggle for social justice side-by-side on the cosmic continuum.
Dan Browne (Canada), Gulf, 2016, 4:20 minutes
This film was shot on the north shore of Cuba looking towards the Gulf of Mexico, just months before 4.9 million barrels of oil was spilled by Deepwater Horizon between April 20-July 15, 2010. Wave patterns fill the frame, tearing apart the filmstrip itself.
Parastoo Anoushahpour (Iran), Faraz Anoushahpour (Iran), Ryan Ferko (Canada), Chooka, 2018, 21 minutes
In 1973, the Shah of Iran commissioned the construction of a paper factory in the lush northern province of Gilan. Foreign engineers from Canada and the United States were brought to develop and run the facility, bringing with them their families as well as a species of pine tree previously unknown to the region. Their stay, however, came to a sudden halt in 1979 with the Iranian revolution forcing them to flee the site overnight.
Chooka unfolds between the site of this factory and a rural family house located in a nearby village. Coinciding with the construction of the factory, this family hosted the production of Bahram Beyzaie’s film, The Stranger and The Fog. Shot in the same village, the film begins when an unconscious stranger drifts ashore in a small boat. After the revolution, Beyzaie returned to the same house to produce his film Bashu, The Little Stranger, about a young war refugee who escapes the south and ends up alone in a small northern village.
Returning to this landscape 40 years later, we meet the family again. It is summer and the grandfather of the family who hosted Beyzaie has passed away. His adult son is working at the paper factory while his grandson, between English classes, shows us the secret corners of his family’s house. Mediated through screens and photography, Chooka weaves original material with elements of archival documentary footage and fragments of Beyzaie’s cinema to explore the entangled relationship between a stranger and a host, a factory and a village, a film crew and a family, foreign trees and a landscape.
Commissioned by Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) as part of the Jacques Madvo Collection Project
Metrah Pashaee (USA), Burn Day, 2015, 4 minutes
In the peak of the day, a prairie fire begins to smolder.
Terra Long (Canada), 350 MYA, 2016, 4.55 minutes
In Terra Long's 350 MYA, a sheet whips before the camera, shaped by the same wind that forms the rigid, undulating lines of sand below it as the film conjures the continued presence of the now-vanished Rheic Ocean in the Tafilalet region of the arid Sahara Desert.
Lydia Moyer (USA) – The Forcing (no. 2), 2016, 7 minutes
Part one of a series of collages that muddle the quiet detail of flora and fauna with the chaotic noise of mass upheaval, building tension through the offset of sound and image. Made in response to the turbulence of contemporary US American life, these works ask viewers to ride the waves of the capitalocene, placing climate change and the struggle for social justice side-by-side on the cosmic continuum.