New Jersey Film Festival screening
Conjoined – Charly and Eriel Santagado (Metuchen, New Jersey)
Conjoined is a narrative duet inspired by the chronic exploitation of conjoined twins, especially in relation to the world of entertainment. Two dancers wear one large skirt, exploring maximal physicality within this limitation. 2023; 14 min.
All of Us – Charlotte Griffin (Irvine, California)
Dancers across identities coexist within a common screen space transforming repetition into a parable of the human experience. An accumulation of domestic objects surrounds seated duets as the narrator Gus Solomons jr and dancer Corey Scott-Gilbert frame, disrupt, and propel the montage. The cyclical lyricism illuminates the collective experience of “alone, together” that occurred during prolonged COVID isolation. 2023; 7 min.
Walls Running – Charlotte Griffin (Irvine, California)
Walls Running is an experimental screendance and part of a series of short "Impromptus" commissioned by Debra Noble, Director of Dance Repertory at California State University, Fullerton. Director Charlotte Griffin collaborated with visual effects designer Jaime Cano and artist Michelle Oosterbaan to immerse the dancers within layered abstract worlds with original music by composer/percussionist Aaron Chavez and harpist Natalia Yates. During the height of the COVID pandemic stay at home orders, the dancers assembled do-it-yourself green screen kits to capture their solo performances in isolation. Their dancing was collaged into shared 2D and 2.5D digital space playing with the push and pull of dimensional elasticity, kinetic exchange, and organic textures. Highly crafted, yet spontaneously felt, this series of impromptus brought many artists together during a time of prolonged separation. 2023; 2 min.
Unspooling Wind – Jessy Dong (Brooklyn, New York)
Unspooling Wind is a visually stunning and thought-provoking short film that invites viewers to join three ensembles - The Amiable, The Spiritual, and The Willful - on a journey of self-discovery. Through the guidance of The Medium and a ritualistic exploration of traditional Chinese kite flying and Japanese Butoh dance, the characters confront questions about their true selves and the meaning of their predetermined parts. Their journey reveilles that the answers they seek lie within themselves and creates a spiritual awakening for the viewers. The concepts of good and bad become irrelevant to help the viewers discern the importance of HOW we choose to approach ourselves and our internal beings. Unspooling Wind is a beautiful and artistic exploration of the universal human quest for self-knowledge and understanding, utilizing a unique movement-based narrative to deliver its message. 2023; 10 min.
Rooted – Charly Wenzel (Brooklyn, New York)
Our modern day lives can make us feel disconnected from our environment and even from ourselves. Rooted is an experimental dance film exploring the healing and grounding powers of nature. 2023; 5 min.
ywnhx – Nate Dorr (Brooklyn, New York)
We have intervened in the landscape, reshaped and fragmented it. Yet it outlasts us. Along the tide-swept shores and marshlands of a once-major city, people have gone but the artifacts of their era linger: rusted vehicles, heaped tires, crushed cement and glass. Old structures fall. Mechanical observation systems glitch. Wildlife roams these derelict lands anew. In the absence of human perception linear progressions falter and time moves in loops and skips, unpredictable. And over geologic time, even our most impervious creations will degrade and cease to exist. ywnhx hovers in a temporal uncertainty which is told from beyond us yet amidst our physical memory, shot on New York City shores marked by human activity but abandoned even in advance of their inevitable inundation due to climate change. We are here yet not here, already come and gone, outlived by junked cars and microplastics, under the alarm cries of foxes and fragmentary birdcalls. Composed of documentary footage and sound painstakingly processed to pry apart the assurances of recorded time -- nearly all images here were created by scanning and reconstructing video footage on a flatbed scanner as a diy slit scan -- ywnhx considers the legacy of our species from the vantage of an ambiguous post-Anthropocene. 2023; 5 min.
Sign Action Space - Mersolis Schöne (Vienna, Austria)
Sign Action Space is a short experimental film about the musical actions of the hands of the Vienna Improvisers Orchestra. Led by Michael Fischer, who conducts the orchestra on an ad hoc basis using a vocabulary of hand signs, the orchestra creates unique compositions in the moment. The film explores the relationship between musical hand movements, sound, and space, deconstructing and condensing the orchestral communication process in graphic close-ups that focus on the hands of the conductor and the musicians. Using 14 cameras and various layering, animation, and stylization methods, the film aims to delve into the fascinating world of the ephemeral communication process that results in the creation of momentary compositions. 2023; 12 min.
Sea of Shadows - Hüseyin Mert Erverdi (Istanbul, Turkey)
Sea of Shadows is a tribute to the transient nature of life, captured through the dance of waves. It delves deep into the microcosm of these waves; each shot, an intimate meditation, captures the waves crashing, flowing, and splashing - mirroring the undulating rhythm of life and death, joy and sorrow, beginnings and ends. In its visual verse, the film personifies the sea as a paradox: the bearer of life and harbinger of death. It paints a portrait of the passing of my mother, who was claimed by the sea two decades ago, while also chronicling my journey through loss, grief, acceptance and ultimately, reconciliation. 2023; 3 min.
