Best Short Documentary Jury Award: Contractions
Mimesis Documentary Festival
Sunday, August 18, 2024 1:00pm
Boedecker Cinema
https://mimesis.eventive.org/schedule/6695d04d31c517005dea881d
Program: In Our Hands
Acts of digging into the ground and into the past deconstruct vulnerabilities, unheralded work, and systems of care. Behind everyday labor we find partial prints etched in the pavement, on abandoned sites, or in recorded images; a palimpsest of existence and action to be deciphered by generations to come.
El itinerante
Tiff Rekem
Patients file in and out of a public health clinic in a former Mayan town in rural Yucatán. A young doctor, who has just arrived there on temporary assignment, sends voice messages to his girlfriend.
Contractions
Lynne Sachs
What happens when women and other who gestate no longer have control of their bodies? In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion in the United States. “Contractions” takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We listen to an obstetrician and a reproductive rights activist who movingly lay out these vital issues. We watch 14 women and their male allies who witness and perform with their backs to the camera. In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they “speak” with the full force of their collective presence.
Couple More Shovels for a Few More Levs
Pauline Shongov
This project features a group of workers at an archaeological site in the Sub-Balkan region of eastern Bulgaria. Their confessions to the camera explore the conditions of contemporary life as the country, shaped by over thirty years of lethargic political transition, transitions from the lev currency to the euro.
Set Pieces
Bentley Brown, Ibrahim Mursal
Seaside fireworks, a march to the US-Iran game, and Souk Waqif festivities all make up a series of vignettes from the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Meanwhile, an attendee ponders the event’s significance amid a shifting of the world’s centers of power.
Heterotopia
Nikola Nikolic
The coexistence of two mutually exclusive fictional entities.