Experimental

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Ripple

Sep 2016

2015 | Directed by Conner Griffith

An exploration of the grown and the manufactured through their recurring motifs.

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Memorial

Sep 2016

2016 | Directed by Ben Pender-Cudlip

Craftsmen are dwarfed by giant, abstract sculpture in Memorial, an experimental documentary. Monumental sculptures appear first as silhouettes, emphasizing their geometric purity and reminding us that cinema itself is act of reduction and representation. Human craftsmen provide scale, and the eyes through which we perceive the work. Crawling about and even soaring, God-like, over the rusty plates and tubes, they simultaneously humanize and deify this inanimate work. Archival footage introduces a sense of temporality, and asks us to consider how the scales of time differ for humans and our creations.

Memorial chronicles the complete lifecycle of its steel subject, but leaves the biggest question—why must it be destroyed?—to the audience. In considering this, we confront our own mortality and choices to express ourselves through art, even if it will not outlast us.

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Demeter’s Spring

Sep 2015

2012 | Directed by Daphna Mero

The film draws a portrait of a secular Cemetery in an Israeli kibbutz as it follows a single life cycle observing the cemetery as it withers and blooms again. There between being and non-being, holes are bored open in the earth and empty plastic chairs await sitters to come…

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The North Star

Sep 2015

2014 | Directed by Rob Koier

A haunting poetic recreation of a slave escaping form the south to New England in the 1830s. Based on fugitive slave memoirs.

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The Nature of the Flame

Sep 2015

2014 | Directed by Mike Messier

The Nature of the Flame burns softy as two young dreamers cross lives and paths in a supernatural landscape. This existential journey was filmed in The Providence Zen Center, the historic Newport Cliff Walk and the natural environments of Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Lindsey Elisabeth Cork and Jocelyn Padilla star as a wandering spirit and her ethereal mentor-sage. Writer/Director Mike Messier and DP/Editor Chris Hunter co-produced the The Nature of the Flame as the debut by Rhode Island South Filmmakers Group.

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A Descending Man

Sep 2013

2012 | Directed by Geoffrey King

An experimental undergraduate thesis film, A Descending Man is the story of a man in a turbulent relationship who must decide between mutual infidelity and a true chance at love, or misplaced loyalty and unhappiness.

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Cotton Candy

Sep 2013

2013 | Directed by Daphna Mero

Laundromat. A woman is sitting and looking at spinning laundry drum while she eats a cotton candy. Her hands become sticky and she becomes dirty, a violent encounter with a stranger resurfaces. Her action of eating in the present merges with the past memory; the Laundromat becomes both an interior and exterior space filled with cotton candy. The machine’s repetitive noise fills the Laundromat and dictates the movement inside it. The sweetness becomes too sweet, sticky and soiling. And she is spinning. This non-genre film combines elements from Video-art, Video-dance and fictional-cinema.

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BirthMarkings

Sep 2012

2011 | Directed by Margaret Lazarus

Twelve women explore how their bodies have been transformed by giving birth. We see body images and hear their voices. They talk to us from their bodies. We hear and see their ambivalence, humor and love. The film began when I learned that one of the fastest growing plastic surgeries was the post-birth tummy tuck. I thought about what it meant that we want to erase the signs that we have delivered children. I was driven to create a film that reframes and destabilizes our reactions to a woman’s body after she has given birth. The film builds on the tradition of body artists like Carolee Schneeman and Ana Mendieta, who used the transgressive presentation of violence and eroticism to shock and challenge. In “BirthMarkings” we chose to explore what one of the women in the film called the “public reaction of disgust and horror” to images of her post birth belly. In a nip-tuck driven culture that is inured to violence and erotica; a culture in which babies are often seen as the latest accessory, what is transgressive is the image of a woman’s abdomen that is not taut, and unmarked by birth. “Birthmarkings” challenges the static, commodified images that are everywhere in our public culture and define what is beautiful and visually acceptable. We refocus on the beauty, dynamism and lived experiences of the marks of birth. We become engaged in the tension between the dynamic and the static and the natural world and the commodity.

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Stranded

Sep 2012

2011 | Directed by Christian Wilfong

Stranded is a story about a young man who finds himself lost in New York City after a heavy night of drinking. On his journey home he reflects upon his life. The story is told through a series of voice-mails from his friends and family that he is unable to receive because his cell phone is broken. The messages from his phone help generate context for the action on screen much like title cards in a silent film.

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The Ministry of the Stove

Sep 2012

2011 | Directed by Finn Yarbrough, Katherine Yarbrough

Quaker tradition has it that meetings are held together on Sundays, collectively asking for the Holy Spirit to enter the sanctuary created by communal silence. The South Starksboro Meeting House is the oldest continually used Quaker church in Vermont: Quakers have worshipped here each Sunday in silence for 186 years. So in the wintertime when the fire is stoked in the center of the candle-lit and un-heated church, the ministry that they take is said to be “the ministry of the stove.”