SFCINEMATHEQUE

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a moment west (2020) by Noah Rosenberg

CROSSROADS 2021 — program 1
tendrils on a plane
Livestream (with live filmmaker intros!) Friday, September 17 at 7 pm PDT. Watch the livestream here.
Program online September 17–October 21
facebook event here
program community partner: Shapeshifters Cinema

CROSSROADS 2021 opens with lyrics and devotional poems to cities, communities and the North American continent (with all its contentions, contradictions, failures and promise). Conflicted films of wander embodying psychogeographic drift through urban space, across expansive landscape, across borders and across generations. Expressions of isolation, introspection and the experience of the questing flâneur contrast with the urgencies of collective action, public expression and community solidarity as played out across the seasons of tumultuous 2020.

SCREENING: Primavera (2020) by Adrian Garcia Gomez; digital video, color, sound, 5 minutes. Pilgrimage (2020) by Anthony Buchanan; digital video, b&w, silent, 12 minutes. Blue Distance (2021) by Devin Jie Allen; digital video, color, sound, 7 minutes. Parenthesis (2021) by Vasilios Papaioannu; digital video, color, sound, 5 minutes. Rehearsal (2020) by Talena Sanders; digital video, color, silent, 3 minutes. June July (2021) by Kevin Jerome Everson (livestream only); digital video, b&w, sound, 5 minutes. life, like water, flows to greater bodies (2020) by Takahiro Suzuki; digital video, color, sound, 6 minutes. Tres bocetos de casa (2020) by Azucena Losana; Super 8mm/16mm screened as digital video, color, sound, 6 minutes. a moment west (2020) by Noah Rosenberg; Super 8mm screened as digital video, color, sound,16 minutes.
TRT: 65 minutes


Primavera (2020) by Adrian Garcia Gomez

Primavera is a frenetic experimental animation that documents the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests as they intersect in springtime Brooklyn. Shot during isolation on a phone, the video explores the effects of imposed distance on touch and intimacy, the proximity of an invisible virus and invisible deaths and the revolt against the racist, corrupt systems that commodify, exploit and render their most vulnerable citizens disposable. The video also parallels the current uprisings with the queer liberation movement which began as a riot at Stonewall and was led in large part by trans people of color who still experience violence at disproportionate rates. (Adrian Garcia Gomez)

Pilgrimage (2020) by Anthony Buchanan

A devotional love poem, a City Symphony. In 2011, Craig Baldwin drew me a map of the city of San Francisco. Over the years, the city became my spiritual home, and Craig became my mentor. In 2015 I rediscovered the map and decided to literalize it. For six months I walked the streets of San Francisco with a Bolex, clicking off frames, simulating the map, enacting every single circle, mark, straight line, etc… Part performance, part love letter, the film is a celebration of the City of my dreams. For Craig Baldwin (Anthony Buchanan)

Blue Distance (2021) by Devin Jie Allen

Occupying gaps in memory and history, Blue Distance serves as a personal and poetic intervention into the filmmaker’s familial immigration story. The film places in communion the mythic powers of cinema and the production of personal and cultural histories. Underpinning these tensions is the immigratory reality of occupying stolen land while trying to secure one’s own actualization. (Devin Jie Allen)

Parenthesis (2021) by Vasilios Papaioannu

The increasingly louder breathing of the sea, becomes the stage for the past and the future to perform. (Vasilios Papaioannu)

Rehearsal (2020) by Talena Sanders

Intimate moments of preparation for performances—for audiences and the everyday. (Talena Sanders)

June July (2021) by Kevin Jerome Everson

June July are represented with peonies and the year 2020. (Kevin Jerome Everson)

life, like water, flows to greater bodies (2020) by Takahiro Suzuki

Using footage gathered over the last decade, the work is a mediation on nature and greater perspective. Through the images and soundtrack, modern society’s chaos of stresses in control and information give way to the natural rhythm of the surrounding culture—an exhalation toward a power in collective cohabitation. (Takahiro Suzuki)

Tres bocetos de casa (2020) by Azucena Losana

A series of studies filmed in 8mm and 16mm about how self-exile develops a familiar and foreign perception about home. (Azucena Losana)

a moment west (2020) by Noah Rosenberg

A film based on living and traveling through the Western US. (Noah Rosenberg)


Adrian Garcia Gomez (US) is an interdisciplinary artist working in film/video, photography and illustration.  His artwork, which is largely autobiographical and often performative, explores the intersections of race, immigration, gender, spirituality and sexuality.  His short experimental films, photographs and drawings have exhibited around the world.  He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

Anthony Buchanan (US) is a San Francisco-based filmmaker, curator, internationally published film scholar and Bay Area subcultural historian. He has lectured on topics ranging from “Esoterics in Experimental Film” to “Found Footage, Derrida and the Trace” to “The History of Experimental Film in SF” and has contributed to multiple academic publications. A regular on the Other Cinema calendar, his films have screened from San Francisco to Chicago to Mexico and beyond. Founder of Denver-based microcinema “Cinema Contra” and Bay Area-based “Magic Lantern,” Buchanan has been hosting and organizing experimental film programs for 15 years.

Devin Jie Allen (US) is a filmmaker based in San Francisco, California. His films situate themselves within personal and cultural histories. 

Vasilios Papaioannu (Greece/Italy) is a filmmaker, photographer and mixed media artist currently based in Washington DC. In his work Papaioannu explores the fleeting dreamscapes of reality using noise, movement and disturbance. He hybridizes different modes of filmmaking, unifying variegated media, primarily 16mm film, digital video and archival footage. Papaioannu holds an MA in Communication, Text Semiotics and Cinema from the University of Siena in Italy and an MFA in Film and Cinematography from Syracuse University in New York. Papaioannu is currently an Assistant Professor at the Cathy Hughes School of Communications, Department of Media, Journalism and Film at Howard University. 

Talena Sanders (US): I am an artist and filmmaker who creates experimental documentary films that reflect the wild complexity and strange poetry of lived experience. Expanding and challenging mainstream documentary conventions is at the center of my work. I like gaps and mystery and opening up more questions than giving easy answers. Sometimes my work is about my own experiences, sometimes it’s about artists and people I admire—trailblazing women and queer people. My work is collage-like, weaving together materials from many different sources and angles. I record on 16mm most often, in part for the way that material destabilizes a viewer’s sense of time, blurring the line between found footage and what is contemporary.  I am proud to be a film educator, serving as Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Sonoma State University.

Kevin Jerome Everson (US) lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia. He holds a MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. He is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. His films have been the subject of mid-career retrospectives at the Tate Modern; Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; Viennale (2014); The Whitney Museum of American Art and Centre Pompidou, among other venues. His work was featured at the 2008, 2012, and 2017 Whitney Biennials and the 2013 Sharjah Biennial. Everson was awarded the 2012 Alpert Award for Film/Video and co-curated the 2018 Flaherty Film Seminar with writer/curator Greg DeCuir Jr. Everson’s films—including eleven features and over 200 short form works—have been exhibited at film festivals worldwide.

Takahiro Suzuki (Japan/US; he/him/his) resides in Milwaukee.  He completed his BA in Studio Art from the University of Virginia, concentrating in the media of photography and cinematography, and received his MFA in Film, Video, Animation and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His work and research practices are a constant endeavor of questioning. Each investigation offers a path toward further curiosity, rather than an inching grasp toward certainty, where the end product is not so much a thesis upon which to land, but rather an open hypothesis for the audience to consider. He is the Photography + Digital Media Lab Technician at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and is the co-founder and co-curator of aCinema, a monthly film series in Milwaukee.

Azucena Losana (Mexico/Argentina). Born and raised in Mexico City, 1977. I live and work in Mexico City and Buenos Aires. I attended the Multimedia Arts Degree at the National Arts University in Argentina, the Abigail Child Found Footage workshop and Claudio Caldini’s experimental film workshop. I work in film, installation and video. My films have screened at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, BAFICI; (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico, A Coruña, España; Kurzfilmtage, Oberhausen, Germany; LA Filmforum’s Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America; and The Age d’Or Festival, Brussels among others. In 2021 was selected as a Professional Development Fellow of the Flaherty Film Seminar and received a Grant for Independent Audiovisual Training from The Mexican Institute of Cinematography (IMCINE).

Noah Rosenberg (US) is an artist working primarily with painting and filmmaking. He has degrees in Studio Art, Evolution & Ecology and Philosophy from the University of California, Davis. Noah is the founder of Bend Film Productions. He lives and works in California.