“The Songs of Ghosts Seep Through the Cracks in the Drywall”
January 12th, 2022
Due to the current wave of COVID is preventing an in-person January program, we are collaborating with Kino Quarantine – a filmmakers’ discussion group that started virtually during the pandemic specifically to keep the community going throughout lockdown.
This screening brings together four voices in cinema who live between two worlds – one of their own communities that pits subjects against an unbroken continuation of colonialism vs the technocratic utopia commodified on their surrounding digital screens.
Together they share a yearning for a way to concretize, memorialize, or archive deeply universal human experiences like love, lineage and horror despite the dense network of constraints imposed upon our modes of expression via borders, technological access, historical erasures, municipal development initiatives, extractive industries, and late capitalist internet hijinks.
PROGRAM
SIDE A: “The Song of Ghosts”
MOUNTAIN LODGE
dir. Jordan Wong, 2020, 7:51, video
The candle, the myth, the legend. Mountain Lodge. A horny desktop film about a candle.
GOLDEN JUBILEE
Suneil Sanzgiri, 2020, 19 min, 16mm & video
What is liberation when so much has already been taken? Who has come for more? GOLDEN JUBILEE, the third film in a series of works about memory, diaspora and decoloniality, takes as its starting point scenes of the filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India, created using the same technologies of surveillance that mining companies use to map locations for iron ore in the region. A tool for extraction and exploitation becomes a method for preservation.
SIDE B: “The Cracks in the Drywall”
RUMI & HIS ROSES
dir. Navid Sinaki, 2021, 6 min, video
Using love letters tucked in bootleg DVD menus, a gay Iranian recounts his first relationship, and its end.
HOME VIDEO (MADE IN THAI TOWN)
dir. Sompot Chidgasornpongse, 2010, 19:34 min, video.
The act of recording and its product become a cultural medium. This film explores the relationship between deteriorating records, and the disappearance of societal and personal memories. Documenting new memories from a new home, while recollecting old and familiar ones before they fade away.
FILMMAKERS
JORDAN WONG
Jordan Wong is a Chinese-American experimental animator and nonfiction filmmaker driven by emotional honesty, and analog processes. He received a BFA in Film/Animation/Video at RISD in 2014, and an MFA in Experimental Animation at CalArts in 2020.
His films have screened internationally, including DOK Leipzig, NewFest, Animafest Zagreb, Japan Media Arts Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where he was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker for the film MOM’S CLOTHES.
SUNEIL SANZGIRI
Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. His work spans experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, and contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture and diaspora in relation to structural violence. Sanzgiri’s work has been screened extensively at festivals and galleries internationally, and has won awards at BlackStar Film Fest, Open City Documentary Festival, and Images Festival.
Sanzgiri was a 2016 resident of the SOMA program in Mexico City, a Flaherty NYC co-programmer in 2020 – 2021, a resident of the Pioneer Works Studio Residency in Spring 2021, and will be a MacDowell Fellow in winter 2021. Sanzgiri is currently working on his first feature-length work, focusing on the bonds of solidarity that developed out of resistance to the Portuguese empire between India and Africa.
NAVID SINAKI
Navid Sinaki is an experimental filmmaker and artist whose works have screened at museums and art houses around the world, including Slamdance, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Lincoln Center, British Film Institute, REDCAT, and Cineteca Nacional in Mexico. He is based in Los Angeles and is currently a professor at UCLA Extension.
SOMPOT CHIDGASORNPONGSE (BOAT)
Boat’s films explore the possibility of representing everyday life in a creative, critical, and thought-provoking way. They’ve screened at international film festivals around the world, such as Oberhausen, Rotterdam, Viennale, Visions du Réel, Indielisboa, Signes de Nuit, etc. He’s a Berlinale Talents, and Talents Tokyo alumnus. His first feature documentary, RAILWAY SLEEPERS had its world premiere in Documentary Competition at Busan International Film Festival, and later at Berlinale, True/False, Sheffield, Melbourne IFF, RIDM, TIDF, and many other festivals worldwide. Sompot has worked closely with Apichatpong Weerasethakul as an assistant director in films, including TROPICAL MALADY, SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY, and most recently MEMORIA. Sompot is based in Bangkok, and is currently working on his new feature film.
ABOUT KINO QUARANTINE
KINO QUARANTINE ran for 42 iterations throughout the first two years of the pandemic as a zoom clubhouse for filmmaker friends to share films and media they found interesting. We would pass the baton each week between us to create programs and share equally in discussing what we watched. The special thing that evolved organically in this group was the sharing of a unique safe space in which we felt free to discuss films in full range from critique to praise, free of the concerns of clout, backlash, or ladder climbing. It’s heady stuff, but we keep it pretty light.