Prismatic Ground: West Coast Showcase Program 2
Amma ki Katha, by Nehal Vyas
Los Angeles Filmforum and Rotations present
Prismatic Ground: West Coast Showcase
Program 2
Sunday June 2, 2024, 4:00pm
At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057
In person: Inney Prakash, Nehal Vyas
Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members
At https://link.dice.fm/Se6be40021d0
Or buy a pass for the day for $30: https://link.dice.fm/Ud490800dcc9
Screening followed by a conversation with Inney Prakash, Nehal Vyas, and Razan al-Salah (schedule permitting), and a reception.
Filmforum and Rotations are delighted to host curator Inney Prakash and multiple filmmakers for a showcase highlighting Prismatic Ground. Based in New York City, Prismatic Ground is centered on the best in contemporary and underseen classic cinema. This special west coast showcase features a selection of work by filmmakers featured in previous editions of the festival. From Palestine to India to Angola and Egypt— not to leave out the flowerbeds of Milwaukee— these artists address matters of personal grief, religious nationalism, settler-colonialism and capitalist excess with startlingly innovative and self-aware approaches to the moving image and its possibilities. www.prismaticground.com
Three different program s in one day at 2220, beautiful and powerful films demonstrating the breadth and depth of the curatorial vision of the festival, and bringing to Los Angeles some recent highlights of artist cinema, including tSuneil Sanzgiri’s new film Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?). Please join us for the day.
Masks are highly recommended at Filmforum shows - N95 or KN95.
Inney Prakash is a film curator and critic based in New York City. He is the founder and artistic director of Prismatic Ground.
Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation. 2024 is our 49th year. www.lafilmforum.org
Rotations is an LA-based, occasional film series focused on experimental nonfiction filmmaking, artist and political cinema, and their detours, by living, transnational feminist practitioners and their collaborators.
Basma al-Sharif - Born stateless and of Palestinian heritage, artist/filmmaker Basma al-Sharif explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.
Nehal Vyas is a film and video artist from India, currently based in LA. Her films are a mixture of documentary and fiction, using experimental techniques and mythological storytelling inspired by her grandmother’s way of storytelling. Her work implores questions of nation-states, the collective struggles towards decolonization, notions of global solidarity, and allyship through image-making. She stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine.
Razan al-Salah is a Palestinian artist and teacher based in Tiotiake/Montreal. Her films work with the material aesthetics of appearance and disappearance of indigenous bodies, narratives and histories in colonial image worlds. She often works with sound-images to infiltrate borders that have severed us from the land. Her films are both ghostly trespasses, and seeping ruptures, of the colonial image, that functions as a border, as a wall. She thinks of her creative process as a circle of relations with artists, friends, family, technology, images, plants, objects and sounds…These relations become different points of entry and exit into elsewheres here, where colonialism no longer makes sense. https://razanalsalah.com/
Capital, by Basma al-Sharif
Capital
By Basma al-Sharif
Egypt/Italy, 2023, Digital, color, sound, 17 min., Los Angeles Premiere
As Egypt syncs further into poverty and is overwhelmed by debt, new cities are being erected across the country and prisons fill with dissenting opinions. But who are these cities for and what desire or ambivalence do they inspire -- and at what cost. Since it is currently not possible to safely speak about this: a ventriloquist, songs, and advertisements describe a seemingly bygone era of fascism.
Referencing Telefoni Bianchi films, a precursor to propaganda cinema under Mussolini, the legacy of building new capitals provides the material to express opinions and hope, through satire. —Basma AlSharif
Amma ki Katha, by Nehal Vyas
Amma ki Katha
By Nehal Vyas
USA, 2023, color, sound, 21 mins.
India—my nation—is being rebuilt. Her foundation is being laid on the imagined land that claims to be the birthplace of my grandmother’s God. In the mythology that she passed down to me during many summer nights, her God was magical, kind, imaginative and democratic—just like my India was supposed to be. But today, through its many retellings and reimaginings, the tale is being used as a political tool to manifest the violent desire of a Hindutva state. This film attempts to remember—as well as dream—a forgotten nation. (Nehal Vyas)
A Stone’s Throw على مرمى حجر’, by Razan al-Salah
A Stone’s Throw على مرمى حجر’
By Razan al-Salah
2024, color, sound 40 min., Los Angeles premiere
Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice from land and labour. He is displaced from his birthplace Haifa seeking refuge in Beirut, and again to Zirku Island, for work on an offshore oil platform and work camp in the Arab Gulf. "A Stone’s Throw" trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labour in the region and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The film rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline. —Razan al-Salah