BORN TO BE A STAR

Recent Works From Montréal
Curated by Marianna Milhorat
Inaugural Screening of the CHICAGO LOVES… Series

November 19th, 2010

BORN TO BE A STAR travels a broken universe to bring you a program of recent works from Montréal. From 16mm film to hand-drawn animations, this program introduces the breadth of both new and established talent emerging from the home of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinéma, Double Negative Collective, and a wide array of public support for the arts. From photograph as epitaph in Mike Rollo’s stunning ode to Saskatchewan ghost towns in Ghosts and Gravel Roads to gesture as poetics in Richard Kerr’s Universe of Broken Parts, these films index and honor a few stars.

Program Details:
OPARINE by Stephane Calce
(2009, 10min, 16mm, color, mono)
Combining camera obscura images with re-photographed film and video images, Oparine revisits the story of film within contemporary media art history. Through the use of manipulated and disjointed sounds, latent meanings are extracted from the story, bringing out the marginal and omitted tales embedded in the original.

ASTRONOMY LESSON NO. 1 by Neely Goniodsky
(2007, 1:30min, DV, color, stereo)
A very important lesson in the workings of the universe.

UNIVERSE OF BROKEN PARTS by Richard Kerr
(2007, 11min, DV, color, stereo)
Inspired by Beat Poet Ed Dorn’s assertion that a poem is a ‘document,’ Universe of Broken Parts reflects Richard Kerr’s interest in the poetics of image and sound. Transitioning from a balletic dance of shadows playing basketball, to pure abstraction of shape and color, and cresting with images of police in riot gear, Universe amalgamates Kerr’s painterly and documentarian impulses into a contrapuntal, yet fluid whole.

BORN TO BE A STAR by Gina Dionne
(2007, 3min, 16mm to DV, color and b&w, silent)
Starring Natacha Thermitus and introducing her daughter Alex Grignard. A silent experiment, a spontaneous attempt to encapsulate the raw energy and vibrancy of a dying friend.

L’INTERNATIONALE by Marianna Milhorat
(2010, 9min, 16mm to DV, color and b&w, stereo)
In a foreign landscape, futuristic factories and boreholes harvesting geothermal steam serve as beacons of familiarity in the face of an unknown future. Awarded Best Experimental – Chicago Underground Film Festival.

UNTITLED 3 (STONE KILLER) by Solomon Nagler
(2006, 5:30min, DV, b&w, silent)
The colonial division between landscape and body has been rejected, and the politics of a new topology, one concerning a failed geometry imposed onto Canada’s Great Plains has emerged. This film is a Portrait that has been sketched into an infinite horizon, where a body becomes one with the landscapes it has fallen into.

GHOSTS AND GRAVEL ROADS by Mike Rollo
(2008, 16:00min, s16mm to DV, color, stereo)
An inventory of lost memories and places, the sun bleached landscape of Saskatchewan serves as a metaphor for displacement, a framing of emptiness and absence. Traveling to forgotten towns and channeled through old family photographs the camera catalogs the haunting remnants of the past, frail monuments and communities laid bare, broken under economic collapse. Under the weight of the prairie skies a visceral, personal encounter is revealed in the solace of open space. Awarded Canada’s Top Ten Shorts – Toronto International Film Festival

BIRDCALLS by Malcolm Sutherland
(2006, 5min, DV, color, stereo)
The written languages of birds come to life. Awarded Debut Prize – Hiroshima International Animation Festival

Program length: 61min

Marianna Milhorat is a Montréal filmmaker recently relocated to Chicago to pursue her MFA at UIC-Chicago. She received her BFA from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University in 2007. Milhorat’s work has screened internationally at festivals, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Images Festival.

CHICAGO LOVES… is an inaugural series of community-based programming hailing from curators around the globe.

Filed under: film, video