China Not China
Richard Touhy
14 min., 16mm, 2018, Australia/Taiwan/Hong Kong

Hong Kong 20 years since handover; halfway through the “one country, two systems” transition. Taiwan, once imperial China, once Formosa, now ROC on the edge of the PRC. Multiple exposures distort space and place creating a sense of impermanence and transition, of two states somewhere between China and not China.

A Study of Fly
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu
13 min., 16mm, 2018, USA

The fly in this film can be approached as a living being, a metaphor for human desire to reach beyond, and a state that demonstrates the capacity to move between the realms of life and death. Employing artifacts from hand-processing, A Study of Fly is a reflection on the relationship between insect, human, environment, and the universe.

24(Twenty-Four) Burned Eyelashes
Tetsuya Maruyama
2 min., Digital, 2018, Brazil/Japan

In school, we learn to remember to live, but in life, we learn to forget to enrich living.
Frozen from the film-propaganda, Let the student study (1962), by Jean Manzon, made against the student movement in the pre-coup-d’etat context, a frame is photocopied, stretched and submerged in the cave of time.

Absent Referent
Riikka Gröndahl
10 min., Digital, 2018, Finland/Sweden

Absent Referent explores the ways images of medical violence and care are being looked at and talked about by a variety of people. Some people turn their heads away and some watch without a blink.

The Air of the Earth in Your Lungs
Ross Meckfessel
11 min., 16mm, 2018, USA/Japan

Drones and GoPros survey the land while users roam digital forests, oceans, and lakes. Those clouds look compressed. That tree looks pixelated. A landscape film for the 21st century.

Never Never Land
Michael Fleming
9 min., 35mm > Digital, 2018, the Netherlands/USA

A brutal, stunning exploration of society’s obsession with physical perfection, and the need to control and shape our bodies in the pursuit of fantasy.

Sir Bailey
Matthew Ripplinger
8 min., 16mm > Digital, 2018, Canada

A portrait of the filmmaker’s best friend. The film depicts Sir Bailey’s existential journey during his last day of life and is symbolized by process cinema techniques such as homemade photographic emulsion, contact printing, and reticulation.

James R. Thompson Center
Ellery Chalmers
5 min., 16mm > Digital, 2018, USA

Erected in 1985, the Thompson Center was received with public disdain and engineering complications, leaving it the “upside down toilet.” Using mechanical failures of 16mm film cameras, the building is abstracted and stretched into new narrative forms of mysterious dimensions: the ghostly vessel of a failed conceptual and material execution.

Las Breas
Laura Kraning and Blue Kraning
12 min., Digital, 2019, COUNTRY?

At three tar pits–within the city, valley, and the sea–remains of ancient organisms seep to the surface, evoking past and future extinctions.

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Tags: Blue Kraning, Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, Chicago, Ellery Chalmers, Laura Kraning, Logan Square, Matthew Ripplinger, Michael Fleming, Richard Touhy, Riikka Gröndahl, Ross Meckfessel, Shorts 4: The Treachery of Images, Tetsuya Maruyama, The Logan Theatre