Excavations in Time

Guild Theatre | 829 SW Park Avenue Feb. 22 | 8:30 pm
 
 

Drawing from uncovered political documents, scientific films, home movies and recordings, the six films in our annual collaboration with the Portland International Film Festival shed light on their aged and forgotten subjects to tell new stories. Rabih Mroue's Face A/Face B is constructed around a 1978 sound recording by Mroue and his brother; using virtually no images, this short piece is an intimate record of a family's life affected by loss and the political ideals of the Lebanese Civil War. It's Not My Memory Of It by The Speculative Archive (Julia Meltzer & David Thorne) is an intricately woven visual essay which combines text, sound, found footage, and animation to question the perception of secrecy and memory in the US governmentĂ­s handling of sensitive information. Abigail Child's newest work, The Future Is Behind You creates a fictional narrative out of an anonymous family archive from 1930s Austria that focuses on two sisters coming of age; it bridges the private and public in a multi-layered story touching on history, gender, and family psychology. Charlotte Pryce's beautiful and poetic film Concerning Flight: Five Illuminations in Miniature explores the mystery of insect flight: its various rhythms, movements and sounds. Julie Murray's I Began To Wish re-envisions a found film to create a haunting world where fruits grow pale and shrink back into buds, flowers speak, and sons wish for their father to kill them. T.S.H. is Jesse LernerĂ­s ode to a 1924 experimental poem by Mexican author Kyn Taniya.


Tuesday February 22 + Sunday March 6

  • Face A/Face B [Lebanon, 2003, video, color, sound, 9 min.]
  • It's Not My Memory of It [2003, video, color, sound, 24 min.]
  • The Future Is Behind You [2004, video, color, sound, 18 min.]
  • Concerning Flight: Five Illuminations in Miniature [2004, 16mm, color, sound, 9 min.]
  • I Began to Wish [2003, 16mm, color, silent, 6 min.]
  • T.S.H. [2004, 16mm, b&w, sound, 7 min.]