HONEYCOMB
dir. Avalon Fast, 2022
70 mins. United States.
In English.

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SATURDAY, JULY 1 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY JULY 8 – 3PM
FRIDAY JULY 14 – 5PM

In the mundane hours of early summer, five girls sulk in their own boredom waiting for something. When Willow (Sophie Bawks-Smith) stumbles upon a seemingly abandoned cabin, she begins fantasizing about the life she and the girls could have there. Leader (Destini Stewart), Jules (Jillian Frank), Vicky (Mari Geraghty), and Millie (Rowan Wales) pack their bags and whisper a quick goodbye to the life they knew. They flow through open fields, blissfully entering their new sun-soaked world. Director Avalon Fast’s new film HONEYCOMB s a way of feeling. A slow mindless space has been written with borderless rules and time to fill. The girls push for a meaning that is hardly there, struggling to reach out, grab it, and lock it in a box. Sometimes the girls find themselves feeling as though they were more free before.

AVALON FAST began making short films independently at the age of 8 and has continued to create film ever since. After high school graduation, Avalon was able to start her film career professionally. At 18 Avalon wrote VIOLETS BLOOM IN APRIL, a short film that was selected for the B.C. student film festival. There, she and her film crew won first place in the long-form category, and Avalon was awarded best director. In 2019, Avalon wrote and directed her Horror short NIGHT TROUBLE, which was screened at the “Magic of Horror Fest” and also took special interest from a Fantastic Fest programmer. TIFF programmer Peter Kaplowsky noted NIGHT TROUBLE as a “Compelling piece of filmmaking” as well as his favorite short of 2019. Avalon was accepted to both the Vancouver Film School and Concordia University for creative writing. Avalon chose against attending school and instead moved to Vancouver to continue writing and directing independently. Avalon wrote her feature film HONEYCOMB in 2019, and filming took place that summer on Cortes Island.

Spectacle is honored to present its first collaboration with the Caribbean film collective Third Horizon: We Are Here As You Were There, a programme of short films by Annabelle Aventurin, Maxime Jean-Baptiste and Suneil Sanzgiri. In these three layered personal documentaries, diasporic filmmakers meditate on colonialism and its aftermath through compelling intergenerational collaborations, the films enfolding multiple histories of extraction, solidarity, and resistance.

On Thursday April 6, filmmakers Annabelle Aventurin and Suneil Sanzgiri will be present for a post-screening conversation with acclaimed author and academic Sukhdev Sandhu, followed by encore presentations later in the month.

THURSDAY, APRIL 6 – 7:30 PM followed by a discussion with filmmakers Annabelle Aventurin and Suneil Sanzgiri, moderated by Sukhdev Sandhu (This event is $10)
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 21 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 30 – 5 PM

GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS

THE KING IS NOT MY COUSIN
(LE ROI N’EST PAS MON COUSIN)
dir. Annabelle Aventurin, 2022
30 mins. France/Guadeloupe.
In French and Guadeloupean Creole with English subtitles.

The author of the book Sunny Karukera, Stranded Guadeloupe (1980), Elzea Foule Aventurin engaged, in 2017, in a series of interviews with her granddaughter, the Paris-based filmmaker Annabelle Aventurin. Together they trace—not without malice—a family history, sailing from one side of the Black Atlantic to the other, from the Caribbean to West Africa and back again. A history of silences, pride, and revolt.

MOUNE Ô
dir. Maxime Jean-Baptiste, 2022
17 mins. France/French Guiana.
In Guianese Creole and French with English subtitles.

By presenting archival footage of the festive events which accompanied the Paris premiere of the historical drama JEAN GALMOT, AVENTURIER (1990) by Alain Maline, in which the filmmaker’s French Guianese father played a minor role, the images of MOUNE Ô reveal the survival of the colonial inheritance within a western collective unconscious always marked as stereotypes.

GOLDEN JUBILEE
dir. Suneil Sanzgiri, 2021
19 mins. India/United States.
In Konkani and English, with English subtitles.

GOLDEN JUBILEE takes as its starting point scenes of the New York-based filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India, created using the same technologies of surveillance that mining companies use to map locations for iron ore in the region. A tool for extraction and exploitation becomes a method for preservation, in a ghostly look at questions of heritage, culture, and the remnants of history.

SUNEIL SANZGIRI is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. His work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence. GOLDEN JUBILEE is the final film in a trilogy of works about memory, diaspora and decoloniality, following AT HOME BUT NOT AT HOME (2019) and LETTER FROM YOUR FAR-OFF COUNTRY (2020), all Third Horizon Film Festival selections.

MAXIME JEAN-BAPTISTE is a filmmaker based between Belgium, France and French Guiana. His interest as an artist is to dig inside the complexity of Guianese colonial history by detecting the survival of traumas from the past in the present. His audiovisual and performance work is focused on archives and forms of reenactment as a perspective to conceive a vivid and embodied memory. His films include NOU VOIX (2018), LISTEN TO THE BEAT OF OUR IMAGES (2021, co-directed with his sister, Audrey Jean-Baptiste), and MOUNE Ô (2022), all Third Horizon Film Festival selections.

ANNABELLE AVENTURIN is a film archivist responsible for the conservation and distribution of Med Hondo’s archives at Ciné-Archives in Paris. In 2021 she coordinated, with the Harvard Film Archive, the restoration of Hondo’s films WEST INDIES (1979) and SARRAOUNIA (1986). She is also a film programmer. THE KING IS NOT MY COUSIN,  a THFF selection, is her first film.

SUKHDEV SANDHU runs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University.

THIRD HORIZON is a Caribbean film collective headquartered in Miami, Florida. Since 2016 it has hosted the Third Horizon Film Festival, an annual celebration of formally radical and politically aware cinema from the Caribbean, its Diaspora, and other spaces of the Global South. Third Horizon also makes films that center the stories of the Caribbean and its ever-expanding Diaspora. 

MIGUEL’S WAR
(أعنَف حُب)
dir. Eliane Raheb, 2021
123 mins. Lebanon/Germany/Spain.
In Arabic, Spanish and French with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, MARCH 5 – 7PM followed by Q+A with filmmaker Eliane Raheb moderated by Ginou Choueiri (Director of Film Programs, ArteEast)
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 12 – 5 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 21 – 7:30 PM

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MIGUEL’S WAR is the story of a gay man who grew up oppressed and shamed during the Lebanese civil war. Raised by a conservative Catholic father and an authoritarian Syrian mother, teenage Miguel was inhibited by a deep inferiority complex and was incapable of asserting himself. In 1983 the deeply sensitive boy, desperate to prove he “exists” and can act like “a real man” joined the fighting as part of an armed faction. But his experience was a failure. Traumatized he immigrates to Madrid, Spain. In post-Franco Madrid, Miguel seeks to liberate himself through debauchery. A string of destructive relationships lead him to a failed suicide. Trying to pull himself together, Miguel becomes a conference interpreter in Barcelona. Only then, thirty-seven years after leaving Lebanon, Miguel feels ready to face his trauma and the ghosts of his past, and hopes to regain his emotional balance and maybe even find love. Using intertwining cinematic forms, melding documentary, animation, theater and archive and filmed on location in Lebanon and Spain, this feature film hopes to offer an experience of self-confrontation, awareness and catharsis.

“MIGUEL’S WAR is possibly the first filmic document of the largely concealed lives of gay Arabs in the 1970s – a searing character study of guilt, agonisingly suppressed carnality, and the myriad ways in which people lie to themselves and create false narratives to cope with their PTSD.” – Joseph Fahim, Middle East Eye

“The film breathes new life into the literary genre of the anti-hero’s odyssey, tracing a
living map of witty turns and returns, inward journeys, and cross-Mediterranean escapes, excavating a set of dark events and lurid fantasies in the turbulent consciousness of a Lebanese gay man. MIGUEL’S WAR will disappoint those looking for a hero’s journey from East to West, shame to Pride, repression to freedom. This game-changing new film is so much more than that. Instead, we encounter a lush fabric of tricks and teases.” – Paul Amar, Los Angeles Review of Books

Programmed in collaboration with ArteEast. Special thanks to Ginou Choueiri and Eliane Raheb.

ELIANE RAHEB is the creator and director of several award-winning short films and documentaries. Her recent work includes SLEEPLESS NIGHTS (5th in Sight and Sound magazine’s listings of the best documentaries of 2013) and THOSE WHO REMAIN, screened in over 60 film festivals and winner of the prestigious Etoile de la Scam award. She is the founder of ITAR Productions, a company that has produced award- winning documentaries broadcast on ARTE/ZDF, France 3, France 24, NHK, Al Jadeed and the Al Jazeera Documentary channel, and screened in international film festivals worldwide. Raheb is a founding member of the “Beirut DC” Association for Cinema and is the six-time artistic director of its film festival “Beirut Cinema Days”. Raheb has lectured on Arab cinema and screened her films at universities worldwide including Harvard, Brown, Georgetown and George Mason.

GINOU CHOUEIRI is the Director of Film Programs at ArteEast.  She is also an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. She completed an MA in Artist Film and Moving Image at Goldsmiths University in London with high distinction.  In her artistic research, she looks at how complex and often conflicting histories can be reinterpreted, and alternative futures imagined through new forms of storytelling. Her creative documentary film “Rhythm of  Forgetting”  premiered at DocLisboa, and won several awards such as the Goldsmiths Warden’s prize, special jury mention at DokuBaku, and Best Director Award at Beirut Women’s International Film Festival.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

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This fall, Spectacle is pleased to host artist, filmmaker and writer Lydia Nsiah for a special one-night evening of selected films touching on spiraling body archives, techno distortions and the getting by forgetting – followed by a Q+A with the artist moderated by filmmaker Melissa Friedling.

distortion
2016. 5 mins.

Interference signals on all tracks: booming, choppy sound. The image disintegrates into digital blocks, into patterns and grids; flickers and vibrates. Flashing in between is a figure, a landscape, and a face. An uncanny rush of image and sound that probes the aesthetic potential of digitally deformed film. The concrete disintegrates into the abstract — distorted film in its most beautiful form.

to forget
2019. 17 min.

to forget is a filmic journey on the potentialities of forgetting and its resemblance to remembering. Recorded entirely on expired Super-8 and 16mm film, forgetting becomes productive and ‘visible’ in non-existing, fading and colour transformed film exposures. This (non-)documentation of possibly empty and fading spaces (to be) is further highlighted by Jejuno’s trance-like and uncanny sound composition: The abyss is present.

vs
2021. 8 min.

Images of buildings, strange architectural structures, in between vegetation and lots of blue sky: at first glance, it could be travel photos that Lydia Nsiah uses in the film vs. But the viewers’ eyes never arrive at the point of sorting out or more closely analyzing what they see: the images are accelerated, shifted, distorted, and blurred through a spiral rotation.

The artist designed and operated the technical apparatus for this. Recordings from server farms and data centers, which are the result of various translation processes between World Wide Web, expired 16mm films, and digital video, are sent into a metaphorical and literal maelstrom – becoming a mechanical eye that looks back and looks at us, the viewers. In return we look briefly into the abyss of the resource consumption that the server farms require to store millions and millions of bits and pixels.

Hui Ye’s composition processes the analogue and digital sounds of the multiple film recordings. A soundscape of layers and samples arises, which makes the film three-dimensional. The movement of the images, the spiral camera pan, is thus located between repetition and standstill, and becomes a seemingly eerie “impossibility.”

Like in earlier works, also in vs, Lydia Nsiah is concerned with recording and forgetting. What might a “body archive” (Julietta Singh) located in the sensorial look like? Who or what do data storage systems exclude? Can gaps be intentionally included in an archive? The strudel of images, the hypnotic sound of vs set the viewer’s entire body, not only the eye, in upheaval, in rapture, which deprives the subject of an ontological base. Arising through this “queering” of an established cinematographic human-machine connection is the possibility of a new, different way of dealing with memory, production of meaning, and ultimately cinema.

LYDIA NSIAH is an artist, filmmaker and writer, working with the in-between, abysses and gaps in audiovisual knowledge production by transforming and incorporating found and recorded analogue and digital memory images, often in collaboration with sound artists. She publishes and exhibits internationally on Virtuality, Forgetting and Remembering, Failure and Error, Decolonial Practice, Film Art and Use. Her works were shown, among others, at the Berlinale Forum Expanded, the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (DE), Prismatic Grounds/ Maysles Documentary Center, NYC (US), Crossroads San Francisco Cinemateque/ SFMOMA (US), IDFA – International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (NL), Festival Ecrã (BR), Bangkok Art & Cultural Center (TH), Blickle Kino/ Belvedere 21, Kunsthalle Krems (AT), Slovenska kinoteka (SL), Curtocircuíto, Santiago de Compostela (ES), Antimatter [Media Art], Victoria, BC (CA), Kunstforeningen GL Strand (DK). Her films are distributed by Arsenal – Institut für Film- und Videokunst and sixpackfilm. Her art is in the collections of Wien Museum, Van Abbemuseum, Center for Book Arts, Mumok, Belvedere, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, University of Applied Arts Vienna et al.

On Saturday August 27th, join Spectacle, Cine-Movil and the Crown Heights Tenants Union for an emergency outdoor double feature at Lincoln Terrace Park starting at 7PM. This program juxtaposes two martial arts classics: David Warmflash’s grindhouse epic DEATH PROMISE (1977) and French filmmaker Pierre Morel’s BANLIEUE 13 (or DISTRICT B13), released in 2004.

DEATH PROMISE
dir. Robert Warmflash, 1976
95 mins. United States.
In English.

DEATH PROMISE stars martial artists Charles Bonnet (also nicknamed “La Pantera”) and Speedy Leacock as two young fighters who unite to take down a cabal of corrupt and exploitative landlords after Charley’s father is murdered. Albeit a late-night exploitation thriller from the last moment of human history when “Trump” was an obscure name, DEATH PROMISE eerily invokes the 1973 suit brought against Trump Management in Brooklyn, wherein Trump was accused of discriminating against nonwhite tenants to drive up his property value. The infamous theatrical trailer climaxed with a filthy rich landlord having his head tied in a burlap sack, besieged by feral rats. The voice-over intones, “A warning to the rich: get off our backs.”

DEATH PROMISE, acclaimed by critics as a chilling and exciting motion picture in the tradition of DEATH WISH… A film of poor against the rich…..

DISTRICT B13
(aka BANLIEUE 13)
dir. Pierre Morel, 2004
81 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

BANLIEUE 13 explores a different set of issues, as an elite undercover cop infiltrates a notorious 21st century ghetto housing project after a nuclear weapon falls into the hands of a powerful drug lord. A violent bromance takes place as one of the building’s residents joins his struggle after his sister is kidnapped by the same kingpin. Produced by Luc Besson at the peak of his Europacorp phase, BANLIEUE 13 is a nonstop martial arts thrill ride, but also endeavors to be a scabrous critique of the failures of social democracy for residents of slums like the suburb B13, almost as if LA HAINE were remade as a parkour movie. It was followed by DISTRICT B13: ULTIMATUM a few years later and, in 2014, remade by RZA and the late Paul Walker as BRICK MANSIONS (with DISTRICT B13’s original star David Belle bringing his irreplaceable stuntwork.)

Special thanks to Magnolia Pictures, Crown Heights Tenants Union, American Genre Film Archive and Cine-Movil.

Cine Móvil is a pop-up cinema collective spreading revolutionary culture across the five boroughs. Founded in the wake of the 2020 uprisings, the collective endeavors to bring together audiences to view and discuss radical cinema. Cine Móvil recognizes the role that culture plays in movements, and aims to uplift the revolutionary consciousness of people, connecting the films they screen with the real material conditions which people and organizations face in the present. Cinema is for the people!

Crown Heights Tenant Union was founded in 2013, and is a union of tenant associations. We are a mix of both long-term and new tenants who collectively fight against gentrification, harassment, displacement, and illegal rent overcharges in the neighborhood. We provide education, advice, and support for all of our neighbors. We also demand and fight for stronger tenant protections and rights throughout the state of New York. As of today, we have over 40 member buildings, and have recently been involved in campaigns to #CancelRent, establish an eviction moratorium, and fight the Adams’ administrations attempts to raise rent on rent stabilized units. We believe that when we fight, we win!