Mills Folly Microcinema presents The Eyes of Summer and Recent Short Films
Join us for an evening of recent short experimental films on Wednesday, June 29, at 8:00 p.m. (Please note later start, closer to sunset.) Admission $5.00, free for ALL members. Seating is limited, and doors open at 7:30 p.m.
Mills Folly programmers have been busy surveying recent online experimental film festivals this past Spring, and we will present programs of short films and videos during our Summer 2022 season.
The Eyes of Summer (Gimhanaye Netra) | Rajee Samarasinghe | 2020 | 15 minutes
In a small and remote hamlet, a young girl develops a curious friendship with a spirit who lives in an abandoned house. "This film was shot in my mother's village in Southern Sri Lanka--shortly after the civil war in 2010," explains Samarasinghe, "Collaboratively developed with members of my family there, a narrative was improvised around an investigation into my mother's interactions with spirits in the community during her childhood." Landing somewhere between horror fiction and "spectral" ethnography, the film describes a population reeling from devastations of the past, where distinctions between the living and the dead are thinning.
Rajee Samarasinghe is a filmmaker from Sri Lanka currently based in the United States. His work tackles contemporary sociopolitical conditions in Sri Lanka through the scope of his own identity and the deconstruction of ethnographic practices.
Show Me Other Places | Rajee Samarasinghe | 2021 | 11.5 minutes
At the center of this film is a Sri Lankan woman accessing other places in digital form, while situated in her own physical reality. Navigating through a multitude of spaces from the natural world to man-made environments as well as virtual planes, traditional relationships between the creator, the tool, and the subject are questioned, shattered and reconstructed. "Reflecting on my own practice as a filmmaker working in non-fiction, the film takes a collage-like approach to examining issues around representation, verisimilitude, the ethnographic image, and the limitations of the form itself," explains Samarasinghe, "Shot on seven different cameras (and a video synthesizer) on both film and video over the course of a decade in Sri Lanka, China, and the United States, I delve into some of my fundamental curiosities as a filmmaker."
In and Out a Window | Richard Tuohy with Dianna Barrie | 2021 | 13 minutes
"The literal frame of a window overlooking a small garden becomes the scene through which Richard Tuohy’s film exploits the myriad plastic potentialities of the cinematic frame. Immersive and stroboscopic, In and Out a Window offers its own variations on cinema’s mechanical segmentations of space and time, opening up a portal to undiscovered dimensions and new phenomenologies." --New York Film Festival
Tuohy and Dianna Barrie are Australian experimental filmmakers dedicated to celluloid film and handmade filmmaking processes. They established Nanolab, a hand-processing lab for Super-8 black-and-white and color reversal film.
Polycephaly in D | Michael Robinson | 2021 | 23 minutes
Polycephaly in D is a densely collaged exploration of the existential drift, collective trauma, and psychological free-fall of the contemporary moment. Leaping, falling, and meeting your new self in an earthquake; we lose one head so as to grow another.
"With Polycephaly in D, Michael Robinson brings his pop-archivist sensibility into conversation with the current moment. Suffused with existential dread that taps directly into pandemic-era anxieties, the film tells a story of two telepaths through a montage of found footage of natural and manmade disasters, both real and fictional. In its most inspired sequence, scenes from The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the 1976 remake of King Kong, and the 1984 action-adventure comedy Romancing the Stone are intertwined into a weirdly romantic vision of the apocalypse.” - Jordan Cronk, for Hyperallergic
Michael Robinson is a film and video artist whose work explores the joys and dangers of mediated experience. Borrowing the formal skins of structural film, the emotional cues of pop songs and employing a woozy toggling of public and personal memory, his work strives to cultivate new resonances between seemingly disparate elements, harnessing the surface connotations of specific landscapes, television shows, texts, songs and sounds as psychological triggers, ripe for reconfiguration.
ABOUT MILLS FOLLY MICROCINEMA
Mills Folly Microcinema showcases nationally recognized experimental film and video art work from the festival and microcinema circuit. We network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at at Project Projection events.
Mills Folly Microcinema is funded in part by grants from Dane Arts and the Madison Arts Commission, with additional funds from the Wisconsin Arts Board.
