Projects

Featured Projects - by year

2022

Huahua's Dazzling World

Huahua's Dazzling World and its Myriad Temptations [Huahua shijie] Daphne Xu 2022, audio-video, 82 minutes Huahua, an eccentric and exuberant woman from Xiongan New Area, livestreams herself dancing, singing, and chatting with fans on Kuaishou for a...

Dry Ground Burning

Dry Ground Burning Joana Pimenta and Adirley Quéiros 2022, audio-video, 153 minutes When the flare lights up the night sky, that is how they know the gasoline is ready for sale, the men on the motorbikes who collect the canisters from the fearless Chitara...

De Humani Corporis Fabrica

De Humani Corporis Fabrica Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor 2022, audio-video, 120 minutes Five centuries ago, Andreas Vesalius opened the human body up to a scientific gaze, marking the inception of modern anatomy. This film seeks to open up the...

2021

[How] Will We Live [Together]?

[How] Will We Live [Together]? Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor 2021, audio-video, 248 minutes Leading thinkers try their hardest to answer this unanswerable question. Interviewees include Kwame Anthony Appiah, Emanuele Coccia, Vinciane Despret...

The A Team

Nnenna Onuoha 2021, audio-video, 17 minutes Over the phone, thirteen former classmates reminisce about their Ghanaian high school’s exchange trip to Jackson, Mississippi, USA a decade earlier. But the more they remember, the stranger it becomes. Comprised...

2020

Expedition Content

Expedition Content Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati 2020, DCP, 78 minutes An immersive marvel of sonic ethnography, Expedition Content draws on audio recordings made by recent college graduate and Standard Oil heir Michael Rockefeller as part of the...

2017

Somniloquies

somniloquies Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor 2017, audio-video, 73 minutes A wild orgy, a mass drowning, a dwarf city for rent, a surgical operation that goes tragically awry, a baroque mansion for sale that doubles up as a torture chamber, a de...

Commensal

Commensal Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor 2017, 2-channel film and video installation: 16 mm film transferred from 8 mm film and digital video. Film: color and black-and-white, silent, 42 minutes. Video: color, sound, 27 minutes A portrait of...

Caniba

Caniba Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor 2017, audio-video, 90 minutes Caniba reflects on the discomfiting significance of cannibalistic desire in human existence through the prism of one Japanese man, Issei Sagawa, and his mysterious relationship...

2016

Linefork

Linefork Jeff Silva and Vic Rawlings 2016, DCP, 96 minutes An immersive meditation on the passage of time and the persistent resonance of place, Linefork follows the daily rituals of an elderly couple living in Kentucky's Appalachian Mountains. Now well...

2015

Into the Hinterlands

Into the Hinterlands Julia Yezbick 2015, DCP, 39 minutes The Hinterlands, a Detroit-based performance ensemble, practice a form of ecstatic training which they see as a provocation towards the unknown — a space both physical and imaginary whose mystery is...

Lampedusa

Lampedusa Philip Cartelli and Mariangela Ciccarello 2015, DCP, color and black & white, 5.1, 14 minutes A multi-layered narrative of a past event--the sudden appearance and disappearance of a volcanic island off the southern coast of Sicily in 1831-...

Ah humanity!

Ernst Karel, Véréna Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor 2015, audio-video installation, 4.1, 23 minutes Ah humanity! reflects on the fragility and folly of humanity in the age of the Anthropocene. Taking the 3/11/11 disaster of Fukushima as its point of...

2014

Single Stream

Single Stream Pawel Wojtasik, Toby Kim Lee, and Ernst Karel 2014, DCP CinemaScope and 5.1 audio, 23 min. Blurring the line between observation and abstraction, SINGLE STREAM plunges the viewer into the steady flow of the plant and the waste it treats...

The Figures Carved Into the Knife by the Sap of the Banana Trees

The Figures Carved Into the Knife by the Sap of the Banana Trees Joana Pimenta 2014, DCP, 16 minutes The rapid turning of a light draws a circle. In the space bound by its line unravels an archive of postcards sent between the island of Madeira and the...

The Iron Ministry

THE IRON MINISTRY J.P. Sniadecki 2014, HD video, color, 5.1 surround sound, 83 minutes Filmed over three years on what will soon be the world's largest railway network, THE IRON MINISTRY traces the vast interiors of a country on the move: flesh and metal...

2013

Yumen

Yumen Xu Ruotao, J.P. Sniadecki, and Huang Xiang 2013, 65 mins. YUMEN combines ghost stories and “ruin porn” to form a celluloid psycho-collage of wandering souls seeking connection with one another and a lost collective history among the frozen remnants...

MANAKAMANA

MANAKAMANA Stephanie Spray, and Pacho Velez 2013, 35mm and DCP, 95 min Pilgrims make an ancient journey in a state-of-the-art cable car. Their rides unfold in real-time, highlighting interactions with one another, the landscape, and this strange new mode...

2009

7 Queens

7 Queens Véréna Paravel 2009, 22 min. Recorded during an aimless extended (anti)-ethnographic walk beneath the elevated tracks of the #7 subway line in NYC, 7 Queens wanders in the fragile zone of fleeting relations. Through a series of spontaneous...

Terrace of the Sea

Terrace of the Sea Diana Allan 2009 Terrace of the Sea (Jal el Bahar) was shot in 2008 in an unofficial Palestinian Bedouin gathering established in 1948 on a stretch of beach north of Tyre, in south Lebanon. Structured around a collection of family...

Sweetgrass

Sweetgrass Ilisa Barbash Lucien Castaing-Taylor 2009, 35mm, 101 min. An unsentimental elegy to the American West, “Sweetgrass” follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana’s breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka...

As Long As There's Breath

As Long As There's Breath Stephanie Spray 2009, HD video, 55 min. As Long as There’s Breath depicts a Nepali family’s struggles for cohesion despite everyday travails and the absence of a beloved son. More Information

2008

Monsoon-Reflections

Monsoon-Reflections Stephanie Spray 2008, video, 22 min. Drawing its title from a poem by Lekhnath Paudyal, who depicts the monsoon season as sublime and blissful, this video focuses instead on the melancholy and grit of two female Nepali field hands as...

Chaiqian (Demolition)

Chaiqian (Demolition) J P Sniadecki 2008, video, 62 min. A portrait of migrant labor, urban space, and ephemeral relationships in the center of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in western China. More Information

2007

Kale and Kale

Kale and Kale Stephanie Spray 2007, video, 50 min. Kale and Kale is an observational work that explores the subtle everyday interactions and relationships among an uncle and nephew, both nicknamed “Kale,” or “black one,” and their families in rural Nepal...

Luchando

Luchando Noelle Stout 2007, video, 67 min. Luchando follows a day in the life of four Cuban hustlers—a travesti, a lesbiana, and two pingueros—who set out to resolve their touching and at-times humorous predicaments in Havana’s gay underground. Luchando...

Songhua

Songhua JP Sniadecki 2007, video, 28 min. Songhua depicts the intimate and complex relationship between Harbin residents and their “mother river," the Songhua in northeastern China. By attending to the everyday activities of leisure and labor unfolding...