Bridge Film and Video Fest
October 27 & 28, 2023
7:00PM, 2:00PM & 7:00PM

Founded in 2003 with the release of the Short Film and Video Collection, Bridge Video was originally conceived as a special project release series included in Volume 2, Number 2 of the Bridge Journal. Subsequently, Bridge has hosted numerous screenings, exhibitions, expositions and festivals over the years showcasing the work of artists such as Miranda July, David Cronenberg, Sterling Ruby, Tom Palazzolo, Jim Trainor, and numerous others.

Artist’s film and video work, especially in those categories known as “video art,” and “art house” currently have no good streaming options, and remain categories of film and video largely preserved by archives rather than shown, the Bridge Film and Video Festival micro-streaming service focuses on the intersection between them.

Inaugural Bridge Film & Video Festival Announces Initial Lineup

Bridge Video today announces the initial lineup for its inaugural Bridge Film & Video Festival. In addition, the lineup expands to include a second date for the festival, now Friday, Oct. 27 as well as the originally announced Saturday, Oct. 28 screening date. Most films will also be available for viewing anytime through subscription to Bridge Video for $25/every six months. With a few exceptions, selected film and video works will not be premiered on Bridge Video until after the festival closes. Please note that this list is subject to change.

TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE
https://filmfreeway.com/BridgeVideo/tickets

INSTALLATIONS
Video installations will be presented throughout the weekend’s programming.

Shattering the Pictures in Our Heads (U.S.)
Director: Karem Orrego
An immersive documentary experience deconstructs the “Mythic Indian” stereotype with genuine perspectives from members of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes. This multi-screen art installation combines 360˚ and traditional video formats to create a three-dimensional environment steeped in the sights, sounds, and powerful stories from the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, NV & ID. [Please note: a single-channel recording of the original installation will be presented, not the full original installation].
FRI, OCT 27, 2023

EVENING PROGRAM (7-9PM): “ENTRANCES, INTERIORS & LOST PLACES”

READINGS ARCHIVE: Literary & Poetry Film Screenings Presented in Partnership with “A Festival of Holes”
This program is presented as part of “A Festival of Holes,” a release party and event at the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago for author Stacy Hardy’s “An Archaeology of Holes,” publishing with Bridge Books Nov. 3, 2023. Screenings selections and additional programming tba. The introductory program will open to include readings by Stacy Hardy, John Berryman & others tba followed by:

Body Issues (U.S.)
Director: M. Conrad
As Jane struggles to establish a connection with her body, she gradually loses herself in a labyrinth of inner confusion.

Inbetweenness (U.S.)
Director: Mona Kasra
Inbetweenness alludes to the ambiguities of deterritorialization and of hybrid cultural identity. It navigates a destabilizing state of diasporic existence by reimagining and experiencing childhood home through digital mapping tools. Searching for traces of the past within satellite imagery, aerial photography, and 360 photography, Kasra yearns for a sense of belonging to her homeland.

McGunner05 (U.S.)
Director: Pamela Valfer
In ‘MCGUNNER05′ (2022), footage of Saddam Hussein’s US occupied palace is documented by McGunner05, a US soldier. A documentary video, played side by side on screen, creates a gutter of “doubling” or “afblau.” Through the facade of paired videos, an outward appearance emerges that reveals a less pleasant reality.

Pedestrian: Chicago Actualities of North Ave. (U.S.)
Director: Calvin Ringenbach
Archivization of North Avenue from Claremont to Damen, September 2021 – March 2022.

Through the Rift (U.S.)
Director: Mikey Peterson
The relationship between the information we retain and its imagery we mentally re-envision and reassemble, helps us conceptualize imperceptible events such as the slow moving catastrophe of climate change. Recalling Robert Jay Lifton’s concept of fragmentary awareness, we form surreal sequences from these visual thoughts in order to create our own narratives of the real events that are difficult to comprehend.

In this video, natural imagery unfolds into a surreal cycle of destruction, death, and rebirth. The fragmented footage, taken from three coastlines in the United States, is edited into new forms – accentuating nature’s close interplay with itself and us. The soundtrack, taken from the ambient sound of the source footage, is manipulated and layered with synth drones – reinforcing the intense and uncanny relationship between memory and reality. By dramatizing these natural moments a light is cast on our environmental impact and the overall power, horror, and beauty of nature itself.

White Noise (U.S.)
Director: Soyeon Jung
“White Noise” is an abstraction of the social and political concerns currently reverberating throughout the United States. A video that travels through an anonymous American landscape is juxtaposed with the increasingly chaotic sounds of newscasts and punditry. The banal time and space of everyday life take on an ominous atmosphere as the radio gives voice to a stream of issues pulling at our social fabric, while the image of the landscape fragments and falls out of sync with itself, transforming what was once familiar into a threatening experience.
SAT, OCT 28, 2023
DAYTIME PROGRAM (2-5PM): “NATURAL EXPANSES”

Multiple Bodies
Produced in partnership with Indiana University Bloomington’s Sidney and Lois Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design,“Multiple Bodies” is a special programming category of Bridge Video showcasing digital art student works. Curated by Bridge with faculty members Megan Young, Janna Ahrndt and Christine Snyder Bruening.

“Multiple Bodies” delves into the shifting and overlapping conceptions of the body within contexts of technological and social change. It touches on the fleshy exchanges and entangled relations between digital bodies, more-than-human bodies, and unstable bodies while considering individual and collective influences on body politics. Ranging from experimental self portraiture to sensory explorations, these collaboratively developed video artworks embrace plurality as a feature within our speculative dreaming.

C-19 (Greece)
Director: Philippos Kappa
In a year under the COVID-19 pandemic and in a year of self-isolation self-reflection and introspection, and in a year of understanding how fragile are the systems that society is currently built upon I produce a Video work as a metaphorical social examination of the current situation under the pandemic. The sound of the piece is a medical sound recorder of the lungs of a COVID-19 patient when he is breathing in a hospital, the visual part in slow motion is a group of people that have collapse one over the other and try to breathe, escape and survive under the pressure that one receives from the other. This work investigates and explores the relationship between the individual and the group’s behaviour, how they exist coexist and interact.

Do you ever watch your own Instagram stories and get jealous of yourself? (U.S.)
Director: Elisabeth Smolarz
Do you ever watch your own (2022) is a video exploring social media’s commodification of the social contract and the utilization of envy and jealousy as the foundation of user engagement. Working with two influencers, I explore how the language of photography is used as a neoliberal tool and how content production and consumption facilitate a multi-million dollar data collection industry. The video weaves snapshots of influencer “Murs” instructing us on how to be an influencer, and “Walesca,” performing a manifesto of ethics for future influencers (for an Instagram story,) along with disembodied AI-generated voices reciting a text explaining the emotions of envy jealously in the context of social media engagement, resulting in a cumulative reflection on how social media’s promise to connect the world has backfired into self-perpetuating echo chambers where every user’s action is monetized.

City’s Full (U.S.)
Director: Tyler Baron
TW: Suicide, self-harm

Log Line: A young woman wakes up from her own suicide and has to host a dinner party for her manipulative husband, but no one can see her wounds – at least, not yet.

Giulia’s in trouble. Ten minutes ago she was dead, having gotten in her bathtub and opened her wrists. So she’s surprised to suddenly be putting on her face for another night of entertaining Thomas’s dinner guests. Is this real? A dream? She’s not sure. She feels normal (i.e. bad, but dealing with it) and she looks normal (except for the gashes on her wrists). Yeah, the situation was a little overwhelming at first – she tried calling her mom, but then Thomas started badgering her. You’d think he’d be worried to see his wife/ghostwriter with open veins, but he doesn’t see the wounds at all. And when the guests arrive, they can’t see them either (well, one of them might). So Giulia knows she won’t say anything, she can’t imagine that kind of attention. Her secret.

Nope. Sylvia, the guest who might see the wounds? Her nouveau riche husband has dragged her to enough of these kinds of parties that she knows something is going on. Guilia can’t hide her secrets well when someone is actually looking for them. Secret #1 is that Thomas may be a successful poet, but Guilia’s been writing all the poems. And once the lid is blown on that, it’s only a matter of time before Giulia finally reveals secret #2 about her suicide. She announces it to the party, upon which they can all suddenly see her bleeding wrists. But at that point, she’s got a carving knife stuck in Thomas’s stomach, and it seems a little late for making amends.

MOVEMENT MATTERS: Dance Film Screenings

?!%$&*#@$^*()}!@#|%>? (Singapore)
Directors: Clare Chong & Sonia Kwek
Two bodies emerge, one of flesh and one of metal. Both are cautious of, yet compelled towards each other. This evolves into a game of hide and seek.

“Can you see me now?”
“Can you see you now?”

Can friendship truly form, or will we always be stuck in a limbo of a human vs machine narrative? ?!%$&*#@$^*()}!@#|%>? is a cry to connect, to be seen by each other, to come together.

Eurydice – “An oper’aparima” (France)
Director: Camille My Giang
Spiritual beliefs from the Great Pacific argue that dance practices have the ability to forge a passage between the tangible and the intangible world — between the land of the living and the land of the passed.

Ancient Greek mythology portrays a similar talent. After being robbed by death, Orpheus manages to charm the gods into granting him the impossible: a passage to Tartarus — the land of the dead.

Secrets in Strawberry Frosting (U.S.)
Director: Natalia de Miguel Annoni
For this work, I wanted to play with surrealism and planimetric composition. The piece is inspired by the dynamics of friendships between young women and Queer people. Unlike the relationships between men that tend to revolve around an activity, the relationships between young women and Queer folk tend to encompass more feelings. The sharing of secrets and moments in our lives, good or bad. These relationships lend themselves to be more intense, special, and beautiful.

Us In Octaves (U.S.)
Director: Alex Mastoon
In a hyper color summer nightmare, two lovers are haunted by their last act of love: saying goodbye. Us In Octaves is an official two part narrative music video for veteran producer Caural and told through an all Womxn & Non-Binary cast.

Autoritratto all’Inferno / Self-portrait in Hell (Canada)
Director: Federica Foglia
This hybrid piece is a collage created assembling both analog and digital material. Several layers of 8mm films merge to create a camera-less self-portrait of the filmmaker. The first layer is an 8mm orphan film (found footage) from the 1970s of a woman dancing.

The second layer is an 8mm found footage film that has been buried in earth for some months. While being covered in earth, the film emulsion has been eaten by the bacterias in the ground, plus some bacterias from yeast and sugar. This technique was originally used by the Schmelzdahin group in Germany. After several weeks in soil, the film gets extracted, rinsed, and scanned via a 4K digital scanner.

The third layer is an 8mm home movie that has been first decayed in soil, using the aforementioned technique, then hand-painted with ink.

EVENING PROGRAM (7-9PM): “THE NEXT & NECESSARY REVOLUTIONS”

Bitter September (Greece)
Director: Sophia Farantatou
After the assassination of the Greek-American LGBTQ activist, Zak Kostopoulos, his childhood friend Sophia Farantatou, returns to Greece and finds herself stuck in a dead end. The video of the assassination shot from a passer by, plays on replay in all the national TV channels. Between the media storytelling and her own archive footage from her friend, Sophia has no choice but to isolate and reflect on the meaning of memory. Only time can give her the space to grief and face the absence of her friend.

The Cedars (U.S.)
Director: Boris Tsessarsky
A multi-media artist takes the viewer on a “tour” of Dallas’s marginal suburbs, seeking out hidden treasures amongst the city’s architectural ruins and “trash.”

Driving Force (U.S.)
Director: Joanie Wind
Driving Force journeys through the banality of ecocide, circling metaphorical parallels in the capitalist treatment of nature, workers, and women. The gray protagonist ponders impending cataclysm and whether or not to have children.

Giti Jan (Iran)
Director: Shayan Shahverdi
A young girl who is fighting with her problems.

The Knife & the Heart (U.S.)
Director: Jake Gonnella
Tape of unknown origin, appearing to depict a dramatized sequence of “phases” in time and space that both tell the story of a woman’s past and explore the end of our universe, intertwining the two with dark surrealist imagery. Not Recommended.

The Life & Death of a Mosquito (U.S.)
Director: Walter Smits
A boy gives a presentation on the life and death of a mosquito. What else can we remember? This video is a love letter to the things we will stop remembering, to childhood, AND to conversations that don’t matter. This video was once a love letter to someone who doesn’t much matter anymore. It is a love letter to walks in the woods, water’s-edge flowers, and moss covered logs. It’s a love letter to my fear of memory loss to which I don’t sign my name.

The Microcosm (U.K.)
Director: Joe Ingham
London, 1966. Homosexuality between men is still criminalised. Women don’t fare any better. A woman who is exposed as a lesbian can expect to lose her job, her lodgings, her family. It is a tough, dangerous and nerve-wracking existence.

But in one subterranean corner of Chelsea, society’s rules don’t apply. The Gateways club offers a safe haven for women to dance, express themselves and love who they want. Or does it?

Maureen Duffy published “The Microcosm” in 1966, turning her probing gaze to London’s first and infamous lesbian hang out. In this searingly honest work, based on her own experience, Maureen examines if this gay bar, and those like it, really offers the freedom its patrons crave.

Fifty-six years later Maureen’s words are brought vividly to life by two-time Oscar winner Glenda Jackson. Glenda, along with director Joe Ingham, draw striking parallels between the past and the present and explore the uncomfortable paradox that exists within queer spaces.

One Drift & We All Go Home (U.S.)
Director: Thom Hilton
Kenai, Alaska. July 1998. Commercial fishing has been closed for nine days. Dozens of workers have lost nearly an entire year’s income waiting for regulations to lift … all while a nearby tourist spot teems with joyfully unregulated sportfishermen.

Re-Record (Ukraine)
Director: Kyrylo Zemlyanyi
A family celebrates the birthday of their son. After a warm greeting, their usual feast takes place.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (U.S.)
Directors: Pamela Falkenberg, Jack Cochran
Our process in making this film from Wallace Steven’s famous poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” now in the public domain, was to capture the startling images his words evoked for us using whatever crazy means necessary, and to manipulate those images in unexpected and visually poetic ways. What we hope to achieve is something like what Stevens lauded in translations of his poems in foreign languages, where what mattered to him was carrying “the poems forward without regard to the words.” Williams seems generally skeptical about literary exegesis of his work. Regarding the collection including “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Stevens commented that the poems were “not meant to be a collection of epigrams or of ideas, but of sensations.” Later, writing about a different poem (“Fabliau of Florida”), but perhaps also apropos for “Blackbirds,” he insists, “it is not the sense … that counts, because It does not have a great deal of sense; it is the feeling of the words and the reaction and images that the words create.” We hope we have created a flight of fancy with our adaptation of “Blackbirds,” a nonsense that carries Stevens’ poem forward in a new way.

Unnamed (Iran)
Director: Iranmehr Salimi
Zainab is a successful girl who supports her family financially, but considers herself a boy in spirit, and now she has decided to undergo gender transition, but in addition to her family’s opposition and the society’s inappropriate view of this issue, she has more difficulties There is something more important to come. she, who played in the country’s national volleyball team for a while and is now in the Bartar league, if she does this, she will be removed from professional volleyball forever due to her short stature compared to men, and not only will she lose her professional future, but also her livelihood and her family who are under her care will be in trouble.

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Tags: Alex Mastoon, Boris Tsessarsky, Bridge Film and Video Fest, Calvin Ringenbach, Camille My Giang, Chicago, Clare Chong & Sonia Kwek, Elisabeth Smolarz, Federica Foglia, Iranmehr Salimi, Jack Cochran, Jake Gonnella, Joanie Wind, Joe Ingham, Karem Orrego, Kyrylo Zemlyanyi, M. Conrad, Mikey Peterson, Mona Kasra, Natalia de Miguel Annoni, Pamela Falkenberg, Pamela Valfer, Philippos Kappa, Shayan Shahverdi, SITE/less, Sophia Farantatou, Soyeon Jung, Thom Hilton, Tyler Baron, Walter Smits, West Town