A Cinema of Mutual Respect: The Unity of All Things & Palaces of Pity

About This Screening

Over the course of two nights we present selections from a group of frequent collaborators based in Lisbon and New York. Directors Daniel Schmidt, Gabriel Abrantes, and Alexander Carver create films that are seductively strange and grandly experimental. The works in this two night program, which all feature chimeric plots that revolve around the gravity of disquieting relationships—two young men looking to lose their virginity wander through the jungle in search of “pure” native women, young teenage cousins made to competitively antagonize one another as their ailing grandmother decides who will inherit her centuries old Lisbon estate (castle included)—deploy a number of techniques that create sharp dislocations between image and narrative. Dialogue tends to be slyly dubbed, producing an effect that is both unsettling and rapturous—just one example of the sort of uncanny aesthetic these filmmakers so expertly craft. Spatial and dense folly tracks embellish acid-washed images, which are distinctly filmic in texture and hue. Dialogue is often intersected by subtitles that introduce edits to the just-heard, further complicating any attempt to comprehend all that is seen, heard, and read. The kind of affective atmosphere produced by these films is perhaps no more strongly felt than in The Unity of All Things—an allegorical and metaphysically infused science fiction film about the development of a massive particle accelerator—which features an ethereal and ambient electronic score by Gatekeeper (Matthew Arkell and Aaron David Ross). And yet, surprising and often unexpected moments of humor act as ballasts that ground all the overt surrealism and avant-garde conceptual play. Please note these works do contain moments of nudity and adult sexual content, which may not be appropriate for young audiences.