This program is dedicated to the memories of filmmakers Jamie Hull (1970–2016) and Michael Wallin (1948–2015)

In Person: Olivia Ciummo, Zach Iannazzi, Anna Kipervaser, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Vanessa Renwick and April Simmons

presented in association with Canyon Cinema Foundation, Center for New Music, Oddball Film + Video and Shapeshifters Cinema
sponsored by LUNA, MUBI, Ninkasi Brewing and Vimeo
technical sponsor San Francisco Film Society

Full Festival Pass: [$70 general/$40 Cinematheque members] available here. 
Admission: [$10 general/$5 Cinematheque members]. Advance tickets available here.
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Films of remembrance. Missives of devotion across space and time. Flowers erupting through the cracks. The will toward life asserts itself. (Steve Polta)

SCREENING:
Silent Sister (2015) by Janie Geiser; digital video, color, sound, 6 minutes, from the maker  world premiere
An elliptical meditation on the body, illness, landscape and time. In Silent Sister, the body is turned out, invaded, examined. In the early part of the 20th Century, Los Angeles, with its warm, dry climate, was a haven for the chronically ill. Working from archival images of pre-suburban Los Angeles, medical illustrations, charts, photographs of abandoned hospitals and miniatures, Silent Sister centers on the intersection of landscape and the body; both become the location of narrative, memory, erasure, history and loss. (Janie Geiser)

Crack House (2015) by Vanessa Renwick; digital video, color, sound, 3 minutes, from the maker
Mosaic artist Jeffrey Bale, described by The New York Times as a “rock star,” transformed a former Portland crack house into a stone art paradise, an urban sanctuary and bird haven. Crack House, edited in-camera, is a cosmic burst of color and sound created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the introduction of Super-8 film. (Vanessa Renwick)

The Man from Hong Kong (2015) by Karen Yasinsky; digital video, color, sound, 7 minutes, from the maker  bay area premiere
An internalized collage film which started with the found vacation film someone gave to me many years ago. The script I recorded for the film was resistant but the photographs of Man Ray, Paul Outerbridge and the soundtracks from Bruce Lee films attached themselves. Everyone wants to touch someone. (Karen Yasinsky)

Invert And All That Is Solid (2014) by Olivia Ciummo; digital video, color, sound, 3 minutes, from the maker  bay area premiere
A retelling of words through textures, movements and sounds…

Based on the poem a heart by Ian Dreiblatt, and in collaboration, the images and sounds try to wrangle with linguistics. (Olivia Ciummo)

a heart
“dug they as fast as”
the city destroyed in a starfall of multiplicities. / we speak without lips. we count spheres of // pale blue light that float up over the ruins. number / sufficient fix indecipherable afterbirth. cubes // invert and all that is solid. boil absence and see / if it melts. let’s dig into the ground a mold of // everything we remember since it was never here / anyway, found abyss, each thing speaking // in the voice of another. and then the tape flakes. / memory’s surfaces craze. we reach our arms // into an indescribably blank space that seems / to go on forever. the city was what lived and so // we’d built a tower to dream we had bodies there. / now we aggregate in the combinatorial negation // where a park used to be. inchoate usses float / down the index. a mouth we can share. our // chances suffuse a surging amalgam light as / iridescent grammars cycle down to a unison.
—a heart (Ian Dreiblatt)

Decodings (1988) by Michael Wallin; 16mm, b&w, sound, 15 minutes, from Canyon Cinema
Michael Wallin's Decodings is a profoundly moving, allegorical search for identity from the documents of collective memory, in this case, found footage from the ’40s and ’50s. The search for self ends in aching poignancy with stills of a boy and his mother at the kitchen table, catching the moment that marks the dawning of anguish and loss; desire becomes imprinted on that which was long ago. (Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice)

Instrument (2014) by Anna Kipervaser; digital video, color, sound, 6 minutes, from the maker  bay area premiere
Connecting time and place through undiscovered empty space between hemispheres. (Anna Kipervaser)

Chromatic (2015) by Karen Johannesen; Super-8mm, color, silent, 5 minutes, from the maker  bay area premiere
Color saturated images of flowers forcefully create a sensory and optical phenomenon vibrating on the verge of explosion. (Karen Johannesen)

The Nether (2015) by April Simmons; digital video, b&w, sound, 2 minutes, from the maker  bay area premiere
Traveling one block here is equivalent to traveling eight blocks in the Overworld, therefore traveling through The Nether could function as a shortcut. However, the terrain is more complex, difficult and hazardous—navigation is treacherous and one is often alone and without a friend. (Minecraft)

Covert Ciné (2015) by Janis Crystal Lipzin; digital video, color, sound, 6 minutes, from the maker  world premiere
A reverie prompted by the sale of my father's final home on Covert Lane. (Janis Crystal Lipzin)

Old Hat (2016) by Zach Iannazzi; 16mm, color, silent, 9 minutes, from the maker  bay area premiere
Falling forward one minute, lying down the next. (Zach Iannazzi)

Vivir para Vivir/Live to Live (2015) by Laida Lertxundi; 16mm, color, sound, 11 minutes, from the maker  bay area premiere
A certain trajectory of being lost is drawn across sparsely populated mountain regions while physical processes from heartbeat to orgasm shape image, sound and color patterns until the horizon is reached. (Laida Lertxundi)

Lacrimae rerum (2014) by Jamie Hull; 16mm, color, sound, 4 minutes, from the maker U.S. premiere
I made the The Tears of Things while thinking about the quote by Rilke. The film for me was a father exploring the outer spaces and inner spaces of the daily day or days in my daughter’s everyday life; the delights and sometimes frustrations and the incongruity of those spaces. There were times when she sometimes seems elated and joyful but was somewhat displeased or forlorn on the inside. What was my role as father with a camera, filmmaker and conversely what was I experiencing in these spaces, sometimes very much absorbed in her moment and sometimes despondent and introspective, sometimes looking out into the vast expanses beyond. The use of superimposition in-camera was meant to invoke the conflict of motion and emotion... Along with the counterpuntual drone soundtrack, that we are "the tears of things" resonates with "the mortal things…” A sadness and sorrow of things passing... Like I will die, she will someday pass, but we have the chance at all these itinerant wanderings and ephemeral moments in between. There is the beauty of the child and the brutality of the world, my nihilist affirmations and my spiritual re-affirmations... our dialectal fears and the omni-experience of wonderment, a slender statement to a poetic sense of existence, and all the while knowing we are temporary guests. (Jamie Hull)

Above still taken from Instrument by Anna Kipervaser

CROSSROADS 2016 receives generous support from: Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Zellerbach Family Foundation, The Owsley Brown III Philanthropic Foundation and The Willow Foundation.

This program is dedicated to the memories of filmmakers Jamie Hull (–2016) and Michael Wallin (1948–2015).