Five films that take us into diverse worlds, persuading us to question our perceptions and to see the world more humanely. These films transform our perspectives on what constitutes identity, how we build resilience against adversities, and how we seek to heal our traumas.
Adura Baba Mi | Juliana Kasumu | 15′ Intimate recollections by the filmmaker’s father, a religious leader within the Celestial Church of Christ, and the filmmaker’s mother, his once devoted wife.
A Body Called Life | Spencer MacDonald | 15′ A self-isolated young human known delves into the hidden world of microscopic organisms, forging a tender connection with these nearly invisible creatures and developing a massive online following, as he seeks to understand his own place in the cosmos and accept the scars of his past.
Contractions | Lynne Sachs | 14′ Intimate confessions, paired with experimental choreography outside a woman’s clinic in Memphis, offer a glimpse into the end of safe and legal abortion access in the US.
Familia 💖💎 | Picho García and Gabriela Pena | 19′ With the help of his friends, Picho coordinates through WhatsApp to get a profile picture that represents him. Meanwhile, there’s a crisis on the family WhatsApp chat: the demand to be present during the dizzying loss of autonomy of his grandfather, the patriarch of the family. Between missed calls, bombardment of images, emojis and stickers, we access the digital intimacy of a young man conflicted with the expectations of others and his own.
One Night at Babes | Angelo Madsen Minax | 29′ At Babes Bar Cribbage tournaments overlap with afternoons of karaoke and nights of raucous queer dance parties. When the aging rural townsfolk of Bethel, Vermont and the younger queer leftists begin sharing the same watering hole, delicate lines of communication open, but not without some drama.
You can’t get what you want but you can get me | Samira Elagoz and Z Walsh | 13′ An intimate slideshow chronicling how two trans masculine artists fall madly in love. From their initial meeting to traveling across continents, viewers witness their intimate moments, long-distance relationship, and transformative top surgery.
Camden International Film Festival Unveils Politically Packed 2024 Lineup (EXCLUSIVE)
The 20th edition of the Camden Intl. Film Festival, kicking off Sept. 12, features a lineup full of political, hot button documentaries fresh off showings at Toronto, Venice and Telluride. The Maine-based film festival will unfold in a hybrid format, with both in-person events over a four-day period concluding Sept. 15, and online screenings available from Sept. 16 to Sept. 30 for audiences across the U.S.
A.K. Burns, Geneviève Cadieux, Ellen Cantor, Victoria Carrasco, VALIE EXPORT, Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Bettina Hoffmann, arkadi lavoie lachapelle, Ana Mendieta, Lynne Sachs, Aki Sasamoto, Luna Scales, Carolee Schneemann, Nina Vroemen
Contemporary feminism appears to be morphing significantly and is being re-examined in different circles that are exploring progressive ways to love, [1] to be, and to evolve. Emancipation has evolved from issues related to reproductive rights to ideas around relationships, procreation, family, and friendships. The sentient body is at the core of these politics, and internationally, women’s rights movements are reclaiming control over their bodies, fighting for ownership and agency as a way to achieve revolution and true feminism, and attempting to tip over [2] the patriarchy and its male gaze. Beliefs about parenthood and its impact on the self can be debated, and they challenge ideas around autonomy and independence, for example, rather than the sense of purpose that comes with motherhood, the same purpose can be found through bodily autonomy. Moreover, access to freedom and enjoyment of sexuality [3] without fear of reproductive consequences is also folded into these reflections.
Sentient | Disobedient is a screening program of videos that evoke art history and the feminist practices that have marked it. These are presented alongside contemporary video works by Québec artists. A critical focus for the program is using the body to challenge the roles and decisions imposed upon us. How do we achieve freedom? These works place feminism in search of its new wave, where politics and emotion can be embodied together through the sentient body.
In this program, the act of performance frees the body towards autonomy, guided by ideas of reproductive rights, sexual freedom, passing time, sensuality, and love. The first part features a selection by artists that created a contemporary art history through video works, starting with artists like VALIE EXPORT, Carolee Schneemann, and Ana Mendieta, as well as their peers A.K. Burns, Ellen Cantor, Lynne Sachs, Aki Sasamoto, and Luna Scales. This part of the program conceptually references a few historical moments, like the censorship of performance [4] in Singapore from 1994-2004 that raised the question of ‘obscenity’ in art. This is one example of how certain parts of the world have been restricted creatively with their use of the body. The first part of this program closes with Contractions by Lynne Sachs calling our attention to the 1973 ruling of Roe v. Wade in the United States which protected abortion laws until 2023, a fact that reminds us that abortion is still illegal in many parts of the world.
Paramour [5] by Geneviève Cadieux opens the second half of the program, in which there is a division between a man and a woman. Their voices and desires are disconnected in time and space, between them and also with the viewers. This artwork is powerful because of the visual language Cadieux develops through the image. It is one of strength, vulnerability, and detachment, that deals with the complexities of relations, being, love, and sensuality. These strengths and sensibilities are reflected in the remainder of the program: Aki Sasamoto expresses a nonchalant yet energetic, powerful, and controlled performance of a passage through time while connecting with the viewer in Do Nut Diagram. In Hubba Hubba, Nadège Grebmeier Forget is idle, submissively chewing gum, and exaggeratedly performing for the camera, following an early trend of online clichés understood as beauty standards. La grève des pondeuses, by arkadi lavoie lachapelle, is a futuristic fiction that possibly reveals the true future of fertility. Bettina Hoffmann’s Mechanics of Touch is a sensitive and poetic piece about touch, evoking the familiarity and comfort of gestures, and closeness. In Surface Depth, Nina Vroemen sensualizes and reimagines the myth of Narcissus, reconnecting us to nature and queerness, and challenging the fixedness of what it means to be a body.
Finally, as a curator and former artist, feminism has always been an important part of my work. This is why I am including the video work Control, which was part of my previous practice as an artist. In this piece, I explored the presence and meaning of eroticism in everyday life, questioning what constitutes independence and pleasure as both a vision and a choice. This program will continue to evolve, with more video contributions from local and national artists in its next iteration in 2024-2025.
Curator: Victoria Carrasco
[1] See Simon(e) van Saarlos, Playing Monogamy, trans. Liz Waters (Rotterdam: Publication Studio, 2019). [2] Susan Sontag, The Double Standard of Aging, On Women (Picador, 2023), 3-39. [3] The enjoyment of sexuality is referenced in another work by Carolee Schneeman, titled Fuses (1964-67). This 30 minute experimental film depicts the artist and her partner having intercourse as equals. Fuses has been censored many times and became a controversial reference and an inspiration to filmmakers and artists. [4] This censorship came about after the artist Josef Ng performed Brother Cane (1993) where he cut a piece of his own pubic hair while performing. [5] Paramour (1998-1999) was originally presented as a video/sound installation, and will be presented in this program exceptionally as a screening.
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.
Maybe everyone has this feeling in some way. When something terrible happens in the world, we ask ourselves, “What can I do?” Sometimes, I feel hopeless and powerless and go on with my life. Other times, the despair so haunts me that I realize that I must respond in some way. I need my artistic practice to articulate how I am feeling, not so much as an act of persuasion but rather a witnessing.
In spring 2023, filmmaker Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, the head of documentary at UCLA, put out a national call to filmmakers around the country. She was searching for artists who were willing to look at the 2022 Dobbs decision that had overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion nationwide. In 21 states, women no longer had the right to end their pregnancies. Guevara-Flanagan hoped to create a collection of films which would reflect the post-Dobbs reality and its ripple effects. Specifically, she wanted to look at the impact of abortion clinic closures across the country. I was already asking myself what the role of my art-making practice might be in this heightened time of fear and chaos. Her summons to action landed in my consciousness at just the right moment.
Now a year later, our Abortion Clinic Film Collective has become a diverse group of six filmmakers. Using our own visual style, we recount the story of various clinics in states where a woman no longer has the right to an abortion. We observe and listen to activists, daughters, parents, teachers and medical providers from Arizona, Kentucky, North Dakota and Tennessee. Each of us investigates the myriad ways that women’s personal and professional lives have been affected by this seismic change in the American legal system. I’ve found a sense of solidarity and hope with these artists.
I traveled back to my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, to begin the work on Contractions, my contribution to the collective. While I haven’t lived in Memphis for many years, my cousin Laura Goodman, a longtime activist in the local reproductive justice community, was able to help me get started. With her personal contacts and enthusiasm, we gathered a group of 14 Memphis activists – mostly women, but also a few male allies – to perform in front of the camera. From the first moment that we reached out to potential participants in the film, I made it clear that their presence would probably be different from any film they had seen before: there would be no faces on the screen.
If you don’t live in one of the 21 states where antipathy toward abortion rights is at the level of vitriol, it might be difficult for you to imagine what it’s really like to advocate for a woman’s right to choose in the state of Tennessee. Being in this film could pose risks to your reputation – affecting such vital aspects of your life as your job, your place in your religious community, and certainly your political future. If you need an untarnished name in town, you would probably not opt to be in this film. Promising everyone that their face would not appear in the finished film was liberating – for my “cast,” and for me. I am an experimental filmmaker, so beginning a project with these basic constraints actually gave me the artistic freedom to transform what appeared to be a documentary impulse into a choreographed, physically precise performance. I came to our set with drawings for each visual scene and asked all of the women to wear patient gowns. In this way, their presence on screen became stark, uniform, distinct only by the way that they carried their bodies and wore their hair.
I decided to bring New York cinematographer Sean Hanley, a dear friend and collaborator I’ve worked with for over a decade on my films Your Day is My Night (2013), Tip of My Tongue (2017), The Washing Society (2018) and Swerve (2022), with me to Memphis to shoot the film. As part of our preparation for the film, we looked at the work of artist, musician and choreographer Meredith Monk, specifically her astonishingly moving 1981 performance-based experimental documentary Ellis Island. In this film, Monk captures a haunting sense of place and trauma. I wanted to work with Sean in a similar way, using austere, dance-like gestures, a sharp attention to the confinement of the film frame, and a sense of a collective whole in which the singular becomes subsumed by the power of the group. I followed a taut dramaturgical impulse, directing my performers in a way that made them find strength in their shared experience. I was relieved to discover that asking each participant to wear a medical gown as their “costume” and only showing the backs of their heads released them from a self-consciousness that often comes with acting for the camera. Since I had chosen a parking lot outside a very well-known but now shuttered women’s health clinic, our location was simple but highly contested. We needed to work efficiently and very quickly, so I made storyboard drawings I could quickly show to Sean. Through his lens, we tried to evoke a dystopic, yet elegiac, feeling of anguish and collective pain.
On the morning of production, Emily Berisso, a co-producer in our support team, without telling me or anyone else on the crew, summoned 14 volunteer marshals and a paramedic to look out for our well-being during the shoot. These days, gathering together with kindred spirits to make a movie about abortion rights puts everyone involved in a precarious and, dare I say, vulnerable position. In retrospect, I do think it was wise to have an experienced, dedicated security team on call – sitting inside their cars, behind building windows, waiting for something they might deem “threatening” to happen. Luckily, it never did.
For the soundtrack of Contractions, I interviewed two women in my cousin Laura’s home the day after our production. Dr. Kimberly Looney is an obstetrician gynecologist who had years of experience performing abortions prior to the changes in the local laws. Until the fall of 2022, she was the Medical Director for Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi. The other woman, “Jane” – who uses this familiar pseudonym to protect herself and her network of advocates – drives pregnant women who want abortions on a nine-hour round trip, across two states to Carbondale, Illinois, where they are able to obtain the services they feel they need. Together, Dr. Looney and Jane bear witness to a troubled time in which women are losing their ability to control what happens to their own bodies. In addition to the two women’s voices, I recorded with our performers in Easley Studio, one of Memphis’ renowned rock & roll sound studios, which was offered to us free of charge. Standing in front of some of the best microphones the industry has to offer, each participant sang, hummed or simply verbally articulated their anguish over the situation they watch each and every day in the state of Tennessee and elsewhere around the country. Mixed in unison by Kevin T. Allen, their voices form an aural chorus that registers somatically in the soundtrack of the film, and is also available as a separate four-minute audio-only piece titled We Continue to Speak. By working with filmmaker Anthony Svatek on the editing, I tried to construct a rigorous formal engagement between these sounds and the images from the hot summer day in Memphis.
So what is the story of a 12-minute film like Contractions beyond its inception and production? What is the journey for a short art film that speaks to a vital, controversial issue of the day? The film had its U.S. premiere in March 2024 at the True / False Film Festival and is now playing at festivals around the world. Perhaps more significant for its place in the dialogue is the fact that The New York Times’ OpDocs series is streaming the film to a worldwide audience here. Issues around a woman’s constitutional right to control her own body can be reflected upon and maybe even discussed at home, in the office, in a car, on the beach, or wherever people stream content these days.
Making Contractions has already given me the chance to spend time with others in the reproductive justice movement. Through the film, I have engaged with people in the medical field, underground activists with a commitment to acts of nonviolent civil-disobedience film artists, and deeply committed volunteers. The experience of making Contractions has changed me. I am only beginning to discover how the film and our collective efforts will be experienced by audiences. I will smile if these moments of witnessing – whether in the theater or the living room – bring about introspection and recalibration.
Lynne Sachs (far left)with Dr. Looney, producers Emily Berisso and Laura Goodman and performers in her film Contractions at a screening in Memphis in May 2024.
Tennessee Abortion Clinic Workers Speak Out About the State’s Near-Total Ban
In Memphis, a doctor and a volunteer driver contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic two years after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
I remember the hollowing sensation I felt on June 24, 2022, the day that the Supreme Court deemed that abortion was not a protected right under the U.S. Constitution. Everyone — on both sides of this debate — knew that women’s lives across the country were going to be drastically transformed. Since then, a lot of attention has been paid to the most heart-wrenching cases, but this decision affects all women’s bodily autonomy across the country.
I returned to my hometown, Memphis, to make a short film outside a building that once offered abortion services. In Tennessee abortion is banned, with no exception for rape and very limited medical exceptions that are being debated in state court.
I interviewed Dr. Kimberly Looney, an obstetrician-gynecologist and former medical officer for Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi, and a volunteer driver who had served as a patient escort for decades. The volunteer, whose name has been withheld to protect her privacy, now drives patients nine hours round trip to Carbondale, Ill., where they are able to have legal and safe abortions.
These women offer distinct perspectives on this radical transformation in American society. Together they speak to a time in U.S. history when women are wondering if they have been relegated to the status of second-class citizens. As Dr. Looney puts it in the film, “You basically, as a physician, had to start counseling your patients from a legal perspective and not a medical perspective.”
Media archives, a frozen prawn, skipping school, a women‘s clinic in Memphis, Tennessee, a greenhouse, and a lavish dinner among mothers are the settings for the women and girls of this program. They should all have the basic right to make decisions about their own behavior and their bodies, including the right to an abortion. This is not always the case, as we will see, especially when legal restrictions, patriarchal systems, or social stigma are at play. (mm)
Olhar de Cinema – Curitiba IFF began its activities as an independent film festival. Since 2012, the festival has attracted more than 200,000 people to movie theaters, 30,000 people watching movies online and exhibited more than 1,000 films from all over the world.
In 2020, it completed its ninth edition with the screening of more than 78 films, enabling online access for more than 30,000 people to these works.
After nine years of experiments, risks and accurate shots, Olhar de Cinema is already part of the cultural scene of independent cinema in Paraná, Brazil and around the world.
The event aims to highlight and celebrate independent cinema made around the world through the official selection of films with inventive, engaging and thematic commitment, ranging from addressing contemporary concerns about the daily micro universe of relationships, to interpretations and positions on politics and world economy. Films that venture into new forms of cinematographic language, which are open to experimentalism and which, nevertheless, have a great potential for communicating with the audience.
Amidst these requirements, it is possible to compose a program of great thematic and aesthetic diversity, which does not reject genres, formats and durations. A universe composed of approximately 90 films per year, Olhar de Cinema always seeks to value Brazilian and Paraná cinema as well, by digging up what is most precious and urgent in these cinematographies, ensuring special care when programming such works.
The festival seeks to compose shows that mix Brazilian and foreign films, enabling dialogue and exchange between all these universes. Alongside the shows that make up the event’s official selection, the festival also sheds light and pays tribute to masters of world independent cinema, restored classic films and also new directors who, even with a short filmography, already have a strong artistic identity.
With this proposal, the programming carried out by Olhar de Cinema has the vast majority of selected films that are still unpublished in Brazil. In this way, the event is intended not only to provide the public with unique cinematographic experiences, but also to encourage reflection on the language and history of cinema. We thank everyone who made this story possible, who are part of our present and contribute to making the event’s future even more vivid.
Film Description: In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court granted several states the authority to revoke women’s right to autonomy over their bodies, resulting in 21 states, including Tennessee, criminalizing abortion. In Memphis, Tennessee, Lynne Sachs draws upon her decades of experience in producing feminist counter-images to orchestrate a performance involving 14 women and some of their partners. Together, they evoke invisible visibilities and silenced discourses in front of an abortion clinic whose operations were halted following this decision. (C.A.)
CONTRACTIONS Lynne Sachs, USA, 2024, 12′ International Premiere
“A couple of years after the annulment of the ruling known as Roe v. Wade, which, since 1973, guaranteed the right to abortion in the United States, weeds are growing on the walls of an empty clinic in Memphis, Tennessee. In this abandoned setting, a group of women, some holding hands with their companions, seem to recreate a kind of off-screen abortion: the entrance and exit of the clinic. We do not see their faces, but the sound guides us: in the voices of two women we hear the testimonies of those who once exercised a right, now lost.” – Karina Solórzano
In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion. Contractions takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We hear from an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive justice activist. We watch 14 women who witness and perform abortions 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.
Film followed by a special audio piece: WE CONTINUE TO SPEAK (Lynne Sachs, 4 min. 33 Sec., audio, 2024 ). Filmmaker Lynne Sachs records the participants and producers of her film Contractions as they vocalize their reactions to the reduction of women’s bodily autonomy in the United States.
Denial
Paul Moakley, Daniel Lombroso. On the eve of Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection bid, he captivated his supporters with a narrative that led to widespread denial, diverting attention from those upholding our country’s ethics and election laws. This distraction allowed conspiracy theories to overshadow essential facts, culminating in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. As the 2022 midterm election approached, civil servant Chairman Bill Gates of Maricopa County was instrumental in determining the vote and delivering results for the largest voting district in a swing state that could sway a national election.
Hold the Line
Daniel Lombroso. When the largest Protestant organization in the U.S. decides to purge women in leadership positions, one prominent female pastor fights back.
I Am The Immaculate Conception
Frank Eli Martin
In 1985, the Irish village of Ballinspittle witnessed a mass visionary experience at the local grotto, where worshippers claimed to see the statue of Mary move. Nearly forty years later, only a few local devotees remain, including the statue’s caretaker Patrick Joseph Simms. I Am The Immaculate Conception documents the mystical landscape of rural Irish Catholicism and delves into a darker undercurrent beneath its surface.
Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr
Kimberly Reed. After Zooey Zephyr’s expulsion from the Montana House of Representatives for defending transgender medical care, she made a nearby bench her “office.” Director Kimberly Reed’s intimate camera transforms this shocking political moment into a portrait of trans and queer joy.
