Excavations in Time

Co-presented with the Northwest Film Center's PIFF

Feb. 22 - 8:30 pm

Guild Theatre
829 SW Park Avenue

Video still from It's Not My Memory of It by The Speculative Archive

Film still from Concerning Flight: Five Illuminations in Miniature by Charlotte Pryce

Work Stills:

About This Screening

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 governmentís 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 Lernerís ode to a 1924 experimental poem by Mexican author Kyn Taniya.

Program Details

Tuesday February 22 + Sunday March 6

Face A/Face B
by Rabin Mroue
Lebanon, 2003, video, color, sound, 9 min.
It's Not My Memory of It
by The Speculative Archive
2003, video, color, sound, 24 min.
The Future Is Behind You
by Abigail Child
2004, video, color, sound, 18 min.
Concerning Flight: Five Illuminations in Miniature
by Charlotte Pryce
2004, 16mm, color, sound, 9 min.
I Began to Wish
by Julie Murray
2003, 16mm, color, silent, 6 min.
T.S.H.
by Jesse Lerner
2004, 16mm, b&w, sound, 7 min.