PETSCOP
Dir. Tony Domenico. 2017-2019.
United States. 269 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16 — 2 PM – 8 PM

Q&A w/ Jordan Fish, Liz Ryerson, and David Stockdale

TICKETS

In March 2017, a YouTube channel began uploading footage of a strange, long-lost pet collector game for the Sony Playstation known only as PETSCOP. Initially created as a way to chronicle his discoveries and exploration within, the narrator Paul soon unearthed a mystery far deeper and more frightening than anyone could have ever imagined. What would unfold over the next two years would completely expand the possibilities of screenlife, video games, YouTube, and the Let’s Play format as vectors for astonishing art and captivating storytelling.

After our historic initial first run, the people have asked us for one more. This November, please join us at Spectacle as we present to you an encore of the first ever public screening of the groundbreaking psychological horror series PETSCOP in its entirety. Join us after the viewing for a seminar between filmmaker Jordan Fish, internet and video game culturalist Liz Ryerson, and PETSCOP historian and YouTuber David Stockdale as we discuss the theories, meanings, and legacy of this important artifact of post-web mythology.

Our programming block is broken into three distinct Pieces. A 10 minute intermission will follow each Piece, concluding in a seminar following the Epilogue. Each attendee will receive a playbill containing important text relevant to each episode.

PIECE ONE
Episodes 1-10
90 min.

PIECE TWO
Episodes 11-16
82 min.

PIECE THREE
Episodes 17-24 + Epilogue
97 min.

“Jordan Fish is a screenwriter, filmmaker, and interactive director who loves cinema in all its forms. He’s also interested in YouTube as a node of culture, and in films that feel almost like video games, defy categorization, or otherwise push the bounds of their format. Jordan’s work has been featured in Pitchfork, Vice, Buzzfeed, and The Guardian. He is currently prepping his first feature, a paranoid thriller, for principal photography in 2025.”

“Liz Ryerson is a writer, composer, podcaster, and game designer currently based in Brooklyn. Her writing about games has appeared in publications like Vice, the New Inquiry, and Jacobin. She also currently hosts the Experimental Game Workshop at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and occasionally teaches at the NYU Game Center.”

“David Stockdale is a YouTuber who delves into obscure and unusual media, with a particular focus on analog horror and experimental storytelling. His channel, Nightmare Masterclass, has gained attention for its lengthy investigation of PETSCOP. He’s interested in the way online platforms are reshaping narrative and culture.”

Very special thanks to Tony Domenico, Steve Macfarlane, Liz Ryerson, Jordan Fish, Sylvie Shamlian, and David Stockdale.

Featuring films withdrawn from NYFF, Berlinale, & IDFA in solidarity with Palestine.

10$+ Suggested donations. Proceeds will go directly to the filmmakers & direct aid to Gazans.

TUESDAY OCTOBER 1 – 7:30PM – Program 1 – WITHDRAWN FROM IDFA  

ANIMALIA PARADOXA
Dir. Niles Atallah, 2024.
Chile. 80 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

A tale of metamorphisis of a post-apocalyptic being. In this eclectic fantasy of discarded dreams, echoes of an imaginary sea guide this amphibious creature towards a new dawn.

Prefaced by the NYC premiere of Palestinian filmmaker Rosalind Nashashibi’s NYFF film, THE INVISIBLE WORM.

THE INVISIBLE WORM
Dir. Rosalind Nashashibi, 2024.
United Kingdom, 17min.
In Arabic with English Subtitles

Benjamin Britten’s elegiac musical setting of William Blake’s “The Sick Rose” supplies the title of Rosalind Nashashibi’s video, which unfolds as an elliptical cross-media dialogue between the multimedia artist Elena Narbutaitė, the sculptures of Marie Lund, and Nashashibi’s own paintings and camera. What emerges is a set of funny and deep reflections on artist-types and the contexts and meanings of art-making—as a place to breathe and wonder, or a form of wasting time. “Don’t take it all too seriously.”

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 9 – 7:30PM – Program 2 – SHOVEL OR SPADE: WITHDRAWN SHORTS

MEHDI AMEL IN GAZA
Dir. Mary Jirmanus Saba, 2024.
Palestine. 14 min.
In Arabic with English subtitles.

THE SUN IS MISSING
Dir. Advik Beni, 2022.
South Africa. 8 min.

WHEN LIGHT IS DISPLACED
Dir. Zaina Bseiso, 2021.
Palestine. 7 min.
In Arabic with English subtitles.

LET’S GO TO THE MINES
Dir. Advik Beni, 2022.
South Africa. 3 min.

NEWSREEL 242 – SUNNY RAILWAYS
Dir. Nika Autor, 2024.
Slovenia. 31 min.
In Slovene with English subtitles.

Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love —but the greatest of these is love.

In July, September, and December of 2023, Spectacle watched the seasons pass across nine features made over the course of the first few creatively explosive years of Russian expat Vadim Kostrov’s forays into his unique approach to personal filmmaking. While unable to travel to the United States during these screenings, Kostrov generously stayed up into the wee hours in his current home of Paris to call in the theater and discuss a stunning bouquet of work that captured the atmospheric shifts and burgeoning lives of idealistic young artists, mostly within his alpine-industrial home city Nizhny Tagil.

Just after one year in which we held screenings of Kostrov’s second piece in his incomplete seasons tetralogy, FALL, it comes with great delight to announce that the filmmaker will make his first —and no doubt far from last— in-person appearance at the goth bodega to present three pivotal and seasonally-aligned short films.

STILL FREE (set in the late summer) along with I SAW and THE LAST LOOK OF AUTUMN (both in the fall) represent various departures, epilogues, and transitions in the life of Kostrov and the friends that make up his pool of subjects and collaborators.

This will be the United States premieres of I SAW and STILL FREE, and the world premieres of THE LAST LOOK OF AUTUMN and LIGHT, a new music video by Kostrov that will finish the program.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 14 – 7PM w/ Q&A

TICKETS

STILL FREE
Dir. Vadim Kostrov, 2023.
Russia. 31 min.
In Russian with English subtitles.

Not dissimilar from Kostrov’s stellar feature-length couples portrait, ADA AND MAXIM, the diary footage shot in 2020 that makes up STILL FREE is another example of Kostrov’s ability to provide a welcoming gaze on the idealism of young romance, this time between Katya and her boyfriend Kostya, who will soon leave to join the Russian military from their town of Svobodny (which translates to English as “Free”). While the former film spotlights pockets of warmth in a desolate winter, STILL FREE plays as an inverse, a harbinger of war and upturned lives for those in front and behind the camera, amidst the crowded revelry of late summer beach-going.

I SAW
2022. Russia.
29 min.
In Russian with English subtitles.

An epilogue of sorts to the NARODNAYA trilogy, I SAW features an always welcome return for Kostrov mainstays Gosha Gordienko (seen over the course of seasons in ORPHEUS, SUMMER, NARODNAYA, AFTER NARODNAYA, and COMET) and Matvey Bedin as they piece together a new song for their band, Lazy Comet, in a dimly natural lit apartment. As with all of Kostrov’s work, the mundane and the divine are one and the same, as a home studio crossfades into a spread of autumnal hues.

THE LAST LOOK OF AUTUMN
(LE DERNIER REGARD DE L’AUTOMNE)
2023. Russia.
25 min.

Shot in the Urals during fall 2021, THE LAST LOOK OF AUTUMN comprises the last images Kostrov filmed in the region before leaving Russia in March, 2022. Edited after his move to Paris, the film takes on the quality of a solemn departure as locations and landmarks that have appeared in previous work are shadowed in the dark oranges and yellows of sunset. Perhaps classifiable as one of Kostrov’s landscape films, it stands out because of its unsettled framing. No longer on a tripod, the camera trembles in the filmmaker’s hands, his breath interwoven with the sounds of the environment.

LIGHT
2024. Russia.
5 min.

A brand new video featuring an ethereal rock composition played by Lazy Comet, originally set to vocals and lyrics written by Kostrov in summer 2020. Guitarist Gosha Gordienko and bassist Shamil Sayfotdinov stoically gaze upon, and approach, the blazing horizontal light of an Ural sunset in the fall of 2021.

Total running time: 90 min.

“Lucía Seles is the + selfless, absorbed and romantic with herself in the world and she doesn’t want to be treated = no director living or dead besides she’s a classical guitarist a graphomaniac better than ella fitzgerald when ef was alive and too many more things than anyone.”
– Lucía Seles’ director bio

Suis generis works of avant-garde comedy, Lucía Seles’ tennis tetralogy, HATE UNCHAINED, are a sight to behold. Filmed over a few days on prosumer cameras working from improvised scripts, the films operate in a language uniquely their own. Seles incorporates on-screen text-based poetry, verbal slapstick, a documentarian’s eye, compelling characters, stray camera mistakes, love triangles, and more into an DIY screwball stew that lands somewhere between The Office, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, the work of El Pampero Cine, and Samuel Beckett. These are films that obey their own logic of dramatic storytelling, film aesthetics, and poetry to an often disorienting degree. During their premiere in Germany, no less than Ulrike Ottinger seemed to be baffled by Seles’ odd rhythms and unique potpourri of experimental techniques. We’re proud to host their New York premieres including a special conversation with Seles after the October 20th screening of SMOG IN YOUR HEART.

Focusing on the petty squabbles and romantic employees of a tennis complex on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, the series is best enjoyed by starting with SMOG IN YOUR HEART. Setting the stage for the interpersonal dynamics and romantic crushes of the five main characters, SMOG IN YOUR HEART establishes a screwball workplace dynamic that the next three films continually tease at and subvert through all sorts of absurdist detours. SATURDAYS DISORDERS, for example, sets half of its running time following a Kafkaesque pilgrimage around the suburbs of a small town, while TERMINAL YOUNG completely abandons the tennis complex for a roller rink where one of the characters is having a birthday party mainly filled with strangers.

SMOG IN YOUR HEART (Smog en tu corazón)
dir. Lucía Seles, 2022
Argentina. 112 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2 – 7:30PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15 – 7:30PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 20 – 5PM FT Q&A
MONDAY, OCTOBER 28 – 7:30PM

TICKETS

Q&A TICKETS

“How difficult it is when a person owns a tennis complex and mixes that with his other feelings.”
– Lucía Seles’ synopsis

Five characters working at a tennis complex: the owner Manuel, a tennis teacher who only goes by the name La Tenista, new recruit Sergio from San Juan, shy manager Lujan, and a dopey accountant Aristegui. The series begins in a romantic-comedy vein, introducing the protagonists and quickly drawing up a love pentagon between them as they talk about Singing in the Rain and whether people with dark eyes can love people with light eyes. Tensions flare as they consider making a pilgrimage to the cathedral of the town of Lujan, but don’t actually invite Lujan. Less a romantic melodrama than an anarchic cinematic poem of disorder, desire, absurdity, futility, labor, and miscommunication; Seles sets the tone strong in the first film through a chaotic montage of dramatic tensions, visual gags, and textual poetry.

SATURDAYS DISORDERS (Sábados desordenados)
dir. Lucía Seles, 2022
Argentina. 97 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2 – 10PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15 – 10PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 – 7:30PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29 – 7:30PM

TICKETS

“Saturdays Disorders is a non-professional tennis final linked to a not-so-famous way of the cross, apart from the fact that loneliness is undoubtedly the virgin, the mother and the most beautiful sister of all plans every day of the week.”
– Lucía Seles’ synopsis

Taking a bizarre left-turn from Smog in Your Heart’s labyrinthine romantic entanglements, Saturdays Disorders plays like an extended riff on a late scene conversation in that prior film with Lujan traveling to the town of Lujan to undertake a pilgrimage of the lesser stations of the cross. A seemingly endless Kafkaesque journey through the suburbs of Lujan ensues while the tennis complex holds a tennis competition with only two entreats, Selena Prat (Seles herself, but credited as Selena Prat) and a friend of La Tenista’s father. Injuries, misunderstandings, fairground rides, puffy jackets, on-screen poetry, barking dogs, and some oddly achieved notes of comic futility ensue.

WEAK RANGERS
dir. Lucía Seles, 2022
Argentina. 126 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3 – 7:30PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 7 – 7:30PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16 – 7:30PM
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24 – 7:30PM

TICKETS

“Neither the cold nor the storms can calm you down when you are faced with a new boss that you would not like.”
– Lucía Seles’ synopsis

The third film in the series showcases Seles’ most chaotic experimentation with time, see-sawing all over the place, simultaneously catching the same characters in various scenes through a relentless montage of poetic asides. La Tenista has taken over the complex, Lujan gets a haircut by Sergio, Manuel’s brother comes to visit (and wrestles him to the ground), and much more. The third film in the series shows Seles at her most rambling and discursive, working completely non-linearly in a disorienting montage of scenes truncated and intercut with each other so that the same characters often appear simultaneously in multiple instances of time. The result is something uniquely Seles’ own: a cubist-esque piece of freeform cinematic comedic poetry.

TERMINAL YOUNG
dir. Lucía Seles, 2023
Argentina. 128 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3 – 10PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 7 – 10PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16 – 10PM
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24 – 10PM

TICKETS

“A light-eyed man who, thanks to his best friend, is an accountant at a tennis complex, rebels against the universe and himself and becomes an accountant at a flower shop.”
– Lucía Seles’ synopsis

Picking up a year after the first three films in the tetralogy, Terminal Young is set largely during Sergio’s birthday party at a roller rink. Organized by Sergio’s mom, the party is filled with random guests invited by Manuel including a real estate agent and a young blonde choir boy Manuel met at a terminal, nicknamed The Terminal Young. A mix of screwball tensions and awkward miscommunications, Seles finishes off her series in true style i.e. randomly, chaotically, irreverently, and hysterically. Do the romantic tensions established in Smog in Your Heart ever get resolved? Do the characters ever morph out of their bizarre and highly specific archetypes? Does Lujan ever make it to Lujan? See the movie and find out, but for anyone already keen to Seles’ relentless inventiveness, you may already know what sort of odd dramatic teases could be in store.

This collection of experimental shorts traces the systemic, oft-unseen echoes of history left through generational trauma, grief, colonialism, urban redevelopment, redlining, and displacement, and pays tribute to the individuals and communities that maintain and resist. Following the screening, artists Cameron A. Granger, Shala Miller, and Jard Lerebours will be present for an in-person discussion.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5 – 7:30PM FT Q&A

TICKETS

COCONUT
Dir. Jard Lerebours, 2022.
Jamaica, United States. 3 minutes.
In English.

To his mother’s homeland of Jamaica, a young man returns to pay last respects to the grandmother he called Two Mommy. COCONUT is a self-proclaimed “public declaration of love,” an experimental documentary and poetic remembrance of a matriarch and caretaker.

BEFORE I LET GO
Dir. Cameron A. Granger, 2023.
United States. 23 minutes.
In English.

Set in the fictional town of Bad City, 5 years after a giant monster attack leveled the city’s east side neighborhood, BEFORE I LET GO follows a documentary filmmaker’s experience covering the community’s recovery efforts. Awarded Best Experimental Film and Audience Award at the 2023 Blackstar Film Festival.

THE ECHO
Dir. Shala Miller, 2017.
United States. 8 minutes.
In English.

An ethnographic study of the relationship between Shala Miller and their mother (Ruby Clyde), specifically focused on the idea of trauma being passed in the blood.

HERE AND THERE ALONG THE ECHO
Dir. Cameron A. Granger, 2024.
United States. 27 minutes.
In English.

HERE AND THERE ALONG THE ECHO finds Granger and his community coming together once again to document and study the mysterious black holes plaguing Bad City, in hopes of finding a missing friend. Currently installed as part of Granger’s multidisciplinary exhibition, 9999, at Queens Museum, this screening will mark the film’s theatrical world premiere.

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Cameron A. Granger is Sandra’s son & came up in Cleveland, Ohio. Inspired by the rigorous archival & homemaking practices of his grandmother, Pearl, Granger uses his work as a means to quilt his communal and familial histories, into new, not just potential, but inevitable futures. He’s an alumni of Euclid public schools, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and the Studio Museum in Harlem AIR program. He is currently an In Situ Artist Fellow at the Queens Museum.

Jard Lerebours (He/They) is a queer community oriented Jamaican-Haitian filmmaker, writer and curator who creates exploratory pieces in service of venerating his ancestors and putting image to theory. He is an active member of the Meerkat Media Artist Collective. Jard’s practice straddles the worlds of cinema and video art. He approaches filmmaking as a conversation between friends and family guided by their loving West Indian upbringing in Long Island.

Shala Miller, also known as Freddie June when they sing, was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio by two southerners named Al and Ruby. At around the age of 10 or 11, Miller discovered quietude, the kind you’re sort of pushed into, and then was fooled into thinking that this is where they should stay put. Since then, Miller has been trying to find their way out, and find their way into an understanding of themself and their history, using photography, video, film, writing and singing as an aid in this process.