ONE NIGHT ONLY!
FRIDAY, APRIL 28 – 7:30 PM w/ Q&A (This event is $10)
Camila Moreiras’ films often bend forms, breezily shapeshifting from the stringently documentary to the purely experiential. Over the course of her burgeoning career, the hispanic artist has taken to finding ways of relating with and representing landscapes and bodies. From the strobes of medical footage seen in NOT FOR MEDICAL USE (2017) to her most recent work, Moreiras constantly engages new ways of marrying intellectual pursuits with exciting structural molds. SINE DIE (2020) uses a quote by Jacques Derrida to frame its investigation around the lingering effects buried plutonium is having on the citizens of Palomares, Spain. The film, much like EL AQUÍ — which the filmmaker wishes to refashion based on conversations with audiences — finds punctures in the everyday where fiction and reality fold into a series of dazzling, permuting visuals packed with hope and pain. Her cinema breaks ground and bends brains in its ruthless pursuit to rethink hidebound cinematic conventions.
NOT FOR MEDICAL USE
dir. Camila Moreiras, 2017
Spain. 4 mins.
Silent.
This early short by Moreiras looks at medical documents to interrogate what it means to be imaged. Moving in quick flickering strokes, NOT FOR MEDICAL USE works to seize the viewer in much the same way their insides appear captured on the screen. This experiential dive into the depths of the human body blurs the lines between what can be thought of as evidence and what as testimony, setting up the foundational grounds of inquiry upon which SINE DIE builds upon.
SINE DIE
dir. Camila Moreiras, 2020
Spain. 15 mins.
Silent with English subtitles.
Amid desert landscapes and chain-link fences, plutonium lay scattered and buried in the town of Palomares, Spain. A voiceover narration describes an undisclosed medical condition wherein land and body converge in uncomfortable manners. Telling two divergent stories in parallel, SINE DIE is responding to real events of physical contamination, whether that be of the earth or the body (the director’s) that together invoke a condition of the chronically present. SINE DIE was shortlisted for both the XXXVII Premios Goya 2023 and the XV Premis Gaudí 2023.
EL AQUÍ (The Here)
dir. Camila Moreiras, 2023
Spain. 33 mins.
[Work-in-Progress]
What starts as an unsanctioned academic conference by a group of Hispanic Studies scholars evolves into a meditation on what it means to move toward a third space of experiential thought.
This space, loosely referred to by the group as ‘infrapolitics’, raises pressing issues regarding the insular and often toxic culture of academia, and the urgent need to resist its demand for doctrinal homogeneity. Moreiras offers a work-in-progress version of her film, hoping the presentation too offers an intervention on its existence and final form.
Camila Moreiras (1986, Athens, Georgia) is a hispanic artist who makes experimental and creative documentaries. She’s particularly interested in relationships between landscape, ecology, and the body proper. Her work has been exhibited and screened in festivals and venues such as IDFA, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, FICG, Laboratory Arte Alameda, San Diego Underground Festival, and Los Angeles Underground Film Forum, where her film Not For Medical Use (2017) won best experimental short in 2018.
Programmed in collaboration with Jordana Mendelson at The King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University. This project was supported by the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and Durham Arts Council, local grants administrator.
Special thanks to Camila Moreiras, Jordana Mendelson at NYU KJCC, Pablo Menéndez and Josep Prim at Marvin & Wayne Short Films, and Valérie Delpierre at Inicia Films.
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