Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of October 25th

Top Picks for Art Online Week of October 25th

Home Truths: Films About Housing Rights, Displacement, And The Meaning of Home

Anthology Film Archives / online film series

ends October 31, 2020 / streaming / free-$10

Inspired by the recent COVID-19 induced housing crisis, this series "highlights a variety of films past and present that have dramatized the plight of those who wage a daily battle for safe and secure housing, that have unveiled the structural and economic forces that render that struggle so difficult, and that have chronicled the efforts of activists to make change." The lineup features a huge array of styles and filmmakers, including two from Nick Broomfield, Sidney Sokhona's Nationalité: Immigré (1975) and master of non-brevity, Frederick Wiseman with his 1997, 195 minute opus Public Housing. Streaming for free via Vimeo, thanks to Lux, The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000, Patrick Keiller) is one not to miss. The film takes the documentary scaffold (interviews, archival footage, B-roll) and layers a sense of fiction through an unidentified narrator (Tilda Swinton!) recording their covert project to explore the British housing predicament. The film moves through many neighborhoods and issues, a journey that manages to make one feel as if they are one with the curious speaker, observing habitats & cultures while quietly living among them.  

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Electric Lit Virtual Salon: Magical Feminism w/Elissa Washuta + Marie-Helene Bertino

Electric Lit / online editorial discussion via crowdcast

October 26, 2020 / 6pm ET / $10

Magic. I'm not sure what this has in store but I do tend to trust the Executive Director of Electric Lit Halimah Marcus who will be leading this discussion about magic's role in fiction literature as it pertains to subverting expectations, processing trauma and more. Elissa Washuta, member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, a nonfiction writer, an NEA fellow & Creative Capital Creative grantee and Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Parakeet (which, FYI, is on my to-read list!), and an O Henry & Pushcart Prize winner, will discuss "how magic works in practice and as a rhetorical device in fiction." Personally, I'm intrigued by this movement away from the term "magical realism" and into a different realm, one that, instead, seems to identify and uphold the realness in magic. 

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Trailermania

Greg Hamilton / facebook live screening

October 27, 2020/ 9:30pm CT / free

Deep from the basement of a house in Portland, Oregon, Greg Hamilton leads you on a tour of vintage horror, sci-fi and other strange & unusual 16mm film trailers. Greg is a cineaste, filmmaker (whose short film Thou Shall Not Tailgate introduced me to the wonders of Rev. Linville, a Pacific Northwest wacko with a heart of both diamonds & coal), a writer and so much more bringing you into his home to help you remember the smell of celluloid, the heat of the projector, and the communal audience experience of film lovers-- however remote we may be. As Greg points out on the FB invite, "Part entertainment, part cinema education, TRAILERMANIA is a must for movie fans and is full of rarities and old favorites." So pop your popcorn, turn out the lights and be bathed in the oddities and beauty of film trailers glowing from Greg's screen through your own. 

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Unorthodocs.

The Wexner Center for the Arts / online film festival 

October 25- 29, 2020 / streaming, consult schedule (some geoblocking) / sliding scale, donation suggested

Unorthodocs. is an annual series of creative non-fiction filmmaking brought to you by the Ohio-based Wexner Center for the Arts. This year, the lineup is available online (with some ticket limitations, check site for listings) and will also feature a conversation between each filmmaker and an equally as impressive member of the film community-- critics, filmmakers, film scholars etc. Karim Aïnouz's Nardjes A (2020), which screened at Berlin and Visions Du Reel, centers on a day in the life of an Algerian protestor, a conversation follows the screening between the director and filmmaker/cinematographer/bombastic dresser Kirsten Johnston (Dick Johnson Is Dead, 2020). Other films in the series include Cecilia Aldarondo's Landfall (2020), David Osit's Mayor (2020) and Ephraim Asili's The Inheritance (2020) (which I will finally get to see)! The sliding scale ticket price is a thoughtful gift-- support this Midwest beacon of culture if you can! 

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The University & The Prison

Pozen Family Center for Human Rights + Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, University of Chicago / zoom panel

October 30, 2020 / 12-1:30pm CT / free w/eventbrite registration

For work, I watch a lot of films and the prison industrial complex is a topic I constantly confront in the nonfiction universe. After years of watching these films, I continue to wonder: is anything improving? Are any of these films doing much beyond shining a spotlight or educating on the problem? This panel seems to wonder the same: is all of the scholarship coming out of universities on mass incarceration making any real change to the systems they are studying? This panel will look at the possibilities for change and the challenges that universities face in doing the work of dismantling this broken system. Speakers include Matt Epperson (Director, Smart Decareration Project) Gina Fedock (Asst. Prof. School of Social Service Administration), Michelle Jones (Scholar, Artist, Activist, PhD Student, NYU), Alis Kim (Director of Human Rights Practice, Pozen Center Human Rights Lab) and Reuben Miller (author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration).

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Please send recs for upcoming weeks to: donnak3[at]gmail[dot]com