Film Diary NYC is a festival for diary films, home movies, and personal documentaries. The festival’s opening night screening at Spectacle will feature a selection of ten short films from around the world, highlighting ground-breaking new works in autobiographical, personal cinema.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 20 – 7 PM, THIS EVENT IS $10
FILM DIARY NYC III: COLDEST WINTER
OPENING NIGHT PROGRAM
Why Do Ants Go Back to Their Nest?
dir. Alex Lo, 2023
12 mins. Canada.
An auto-fictional experimental film about the filmmaker digging a hole from Toronto to Hong Kong.
Palcorecore
dir. Dana Dawud, 2023
6 mins. Palestine.
Palcorecore is created against Serge Daney’s statement “there’s no image of Palestine”. While images are dead, the image has not been more alive, and the only image is the image of Palestine.
Even God
dir. Liz Roberts, 2023
12 mins. United States.
All personal archival VHS engaging with a core question of artists in times of chaos: who owns a memory and what is its value? A record of the queer Midwest. Drugs, sex, love, friendship, and a failed Los Angeles movie deal.
Black Internet
dir. Allen-Golder Carpenter, 2023
5 mins. United States.
Found video inter spliced with a recording of an original performed poem. Loosely exploring memes, internet virality and the lasting implications of these “viral” moments , as well as the concept of “black twitter” as it relates to the tendency of humor to be used as a coping mechanism. Using the chair beatdown from the Montgomery riverfront brawl as its central motif.
Bezuna
dir. Saif Alsaegh, 2023
7 mins. United States/Iraq.
Bezuna explores the complexities of fleeing a war-zone through the analysis of peripheral details. Through interweaving different narratives, the film presents the raw and broken feelings of a child and a cat whose lives will never be the same.
I am your Daughter
dir. Jasmine Veronica, 2023
3 mins. United States.
I Am Your Daughter visually displays the dynamics of my mom and I’s relationship as both mom/daughter and me as her caregiver, but also how it’s complicated with me having to remind her that I am her daughter.
wormsnet collection 1
dir. Mac Wold, 2023
10 mins. United States.
wormsnet is a video series aimed to capture the beautiful fleeting moments of a chaotic and adventurous lifestyle.
a la prochaine
dir. Kelee W.Hall, 2023
7 mins. United States.
In Kreyol and French with English subtitles.
Through journal entries narrated in Kreyol and French, a la prochaine juxtaposes the chaos of an outside world with the sensual connections unfolding in the intimate space of lovers’ exchange.
curation is care (unfinished)
dir. Ajay Ram, 2023
4 mins. United States
A fractured oral history of new york city cinema from my mom, harlem archivist and public school teacher jean phillips.
Ca(r)milla
dir. Kearra Amaya Gopee, 2023
12 mins. United States.
1. a desire to play with and/or subtend tropes such as monstrosity, Caribbean folklore and desire that have long served as sites of comfort for me and 2. using fantasy a method to stave off the anticipatory grief that now inundates the relationship between my mother and I in the wake of my grandmother’s passing in 2021. The inevitability of loss and the application of a queer lens to grief and faith spill forth and alchemize the edges between fantasy and reality. At its core, this video is a wish.
House of Victories
dir. Matt Feldman and Shirine Shah, 2023
7 mins. United Kingdom.
In English and Arabic.
Shot in Suburban London, exploring the local Islamic community of the writer and their musings into socialised identity and the abyss that bridges religion and the fallacy of language.