Manu: A Visual Album

Manu: A Visual Album

Manu:  A Visual Album

Wednesday November 29, 2023, 7:30 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057

In person: Bryan Senti, Alexandra Cuesta, and April Cuneo in conversation with Madison Brookshire and Nate Sloan

The film will be precede by a short performance by Bryan Senti! 

Tickets: $15 general, $8 students/seniors, $0 for Filmforum members

https://link.dice.fm/n63cb4792da7

Masks are highly recommended at Filmforum shows - N95 or KN95.

Manu, A Visual Album is an experimental documentary by Alexandra Cuesta born as an accompanying piece for the record Manu by composer Bryan Senti. Senti's record is a self-voyage that searches and explores his Latin American ancestry through the complexities of weaving Indigenous sounds with Western Classical influences. A meditation on landscape, the film is also constructed as a voyage, visually inhabiting the diverse geographies of the Ecuadorian territory: coast, highlands, and Amazon, the director's country of origin.

Shot on 16mm film in black & white and color and moving through various textures, portraits, territories, and visual rhythms, the film reflects on memory and hints at remembrances of shared experiences. Intertwining documentary and visual poetry, Manu, a Visual Album is also a document of remote locations in Ecuador currently on the verge of disappearance due to climate change and increasing violence. These last remains of the past hold an inherent nostalgia and a sense of surrender, which speaks about the region's historical and colonial mandates and the sociopolitical implication of the complicated legacy in Latin America.

Bryan Senti is a BAFTA winning first-generation Latin American composer, violinist / multi-instrumentalist, and producer. His debut crossover LP, “Manu” was released on the French independent, Naïve (Believe) in 2022 and the accompanying remix record featuring artists such as Grammy award winner Toumani Diabaté and electronic music innovator Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith was released summer of 2023. His recent collaborations include numerous projects for Dustin O’Halloran and Peter Gregson for Deutsche Grammophon. His film and tv career began with Michael Almereyda’s “Experimenter” which premiered at Sundance in 2015 and since then he has composed for multiple films and tv shows including the BAFTA winning series “Save Me” (2021) by Lennie James.  Most recently he scored the BBC musical, “Mood” by Nicole Lecky which earned him a BAFTA award for original music. Bryan is a graduate of Yale University and Carnegie Mellon.  https://bryansenti.com/

Alexandra Cuesta is an Ecuadorian MacDowell Colony Fellow and Guggenheim Award-winning experimental filmmaker and visual artist living in Quito, Ecuador. Her poetic films and videos combine experimental film traditions with documentary practices and often comment on social diasporas and displacement. Her work has screened at The New York Film Festival, Fronteira Festival, Guggenheim Museum, MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Open City Film Festival, Viennale Int'l Film Festival, Palacio Nacional de Bellas Artes, Oberhausen, FiD Marseille, Anthology Film Archives, among others. She has an M.F.A. in Film and Video from Cal Arts.  https://cargocollective.com/alexandracuesta

Madison Brookshire lives in Los Angeles, where he makes films, paintings, and performances. His work invites viewers to become aware of perceptual processes and the sensuous experience of time. He frequently collaborates with musicians and composers, such as Ezra Buchla, LCollective, Laura Steenberge, Mark So, and Tashi Wada. More: madisonbrookshire.com

Nate Sloan is a musicologist and performer who researches jazz, classical, and popular music, and teaches at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music. He co-hosts the Vulture podcast Switched on Pop and has written about music for the New York Times and other publications. https://music.usc.edu/nate-sloan/