2023 Program

by Leonardo Pirondi (2022, BR/US/UK, 16’)

Tuesday 15 August 7 PM
Boedecker Cinema

The film follows a voyage of the Brazilian Military in search of an imaginary island with the same name as their country. Amidst the fine threshold of the real, simulated, and imagined, the film analyzes the contemporary ideas of virtual reality and their ambition to expand the frontiers of the physical world into a “New World”.

by Carolina Arias Ortiz (2020, CR/CO, 69’)

Tuesday 15 August 7 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Carolina returns to Costa Rica to try to reconnect with her ailing father. She meets Ifigenia, an archaeologist studying ancient stone spheres and follows her on a journey through the country's deleted indigenous history. Through objects and their stories, Carolina learns a different way to relate to death.

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This screening will be followed by a conversation with Carolina Arias Ortiz in-person.

by Jessica Beshir (2021, ET/US/QA, 118’)

Friday 18 August 7 PM
Boedecker Cinema

A sublime work of trance-state cinema, the debut feature by the Mexican Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir is a hypnotic immersion in the world of rural Ethiopia, a place where one commodity—khat, a euphoria-inducing plant once prized for its supposedly mystical properties—holds sway over the rituals and rhythms of everyday life. As if under the intoxicating influence of the drug itself, Faya dayi unfurls as a hallucinogenic cinematic reverie, capturing hushed, intimate moments in the existences of everyone from the harvesters of the crop to people lost in its narcotic haze to a desperate but determined younger generation searching for an escape from the region’s political strife. The film’s exquisite monochrome cinematography—each frame a masterpiece sculpted from light and shadow—and time-bending, elliptical editing create a ravishing sensory experience that hovers between consciousness and dreaming.

*not available virtually

More Info

This screening will be followed by a conversation with the artist in-person.

A conversation with Jessica Beshir

Saturday 19 August 10 AM
Boedecker Cinema

As she traces the threads between her short work – including her directorial debut, Hairat (2017) – and her unforgettable feature, Faya dayi (2021), Jessica Beshir will illuminate her approach to cinematography and time. Elaborating on the infinite task of forming and sustaining a cohesive cinematic vision, Beshir unpicks her own application of Werner Herzog’s concept of “ecstatic truth” as an alternative to vérité. Beshir’s process is grounded in what she calls radical trust, which requires deep inner work directly confronting fear, doubt, and the self – what she argues is the work of every artist.

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Still from Hairat (2017) by Jessica Beshir.

Jessica Beshir is a Mexican-Ethiopian filmmaker, producer and cinematographer based in Brooklyn. She graduated in Film Studies and Literature at UCLA, after which she made several internationally acclaimed short films. The short documentary He Who Dances on Wood (2016) was selected for Hot Docs and won Best International Documentary Short at Edmonton Film Festival and the Jury Award at Anchorage International Film Festival. Hairat (2017) premiered at Sundance, was screened at IFFR and IDFA and won several awards at various other festivals. Beshir is a recipient of the Sundance Documentary Film Program, Jerome Foundation and NYFA Fellowships. Faya Dayi (2021) is her feature debut.

by Saeed Taji Farouky (2021, FR/CH/NL/PS, 90’)

Saturday 19 August 7:30 PM
Boedecker Cinema

In the Magway region of Myanmar, a country home to one of the oldest petroleum industries in the world, live husband and wife Thein Shwe and Htwe Tin. Running an unregulated oil field, they produce a barrel every few days. They wish above all else to see their youngest son succeed, to break the cycle of poverty. A kettle boils. Mud slicked hands work sputtering machines. The ambient sound of a football match hums from a nearby television. “These days passed quickly”, Htwe says.

A Thousand Fires is a portrait of a family in flux, and a story of intergenerational conflict and compromise. It is a film of transient moments; of hopes and aspirations; of faith in the forces of karma and luck; of a place, a community, and the rhythms of a day to day; of lingering memories and a turbulent past; and of life persisting, regardless.

More Info

This screening will be followed by a conversation with the artist in-person.

with Saeed Taji Farouky

Sunday 20 August 10 AM
Caribou Townsite, Nederland

Soon We Will All Be History Here is a spatial performance lecture that examines absence as a fundamental part of radical cinema. Incorporating elements of music, architecture, and literature, Saeed will walk with participants around the remnants of the town of Caribou; a psychogeographic wandering through loss, displacement, reincarnation, and film as a form of resistance.

This event occurs off-site in the ghost town of Caribou, near Nederland, CO.

More Info

by Saeed Taji Farouky (2013, Norway, 54’)

Sunday 13 August 3:00 PM
The Backdoor Theatre (Nederland Community Center)

Mimesis x Nederland free pre-festival screening

There Will Be Some Who Will Not Fear Even That Void is an ecological film for the 21st century: part expedition documentary, part personal exploration of man’s relationship with nature. The film is a semi-fictional, sci-fi documentary, made as Director Saeed Taji Farouky’s love-letter to the Arctic. Shot over two and a half weeks on a tall ship as it sailed around Norway’s Arctic Svalbard Archipelago, …Even That Void examines the environment’s influence on us – emotionally, psychologically and ethically. The film suggests that the limits to exploring and dominating nature are no longer technological, but moral. We now have the technology to ‘conquer’ virtually any part of the planet if we want to – the question is no longer ‘can we’ but ‘should we’?

This screening will be followed by a conversation with the artist in-person.

Saeed Taji Farouky is a Palestinian-Egyptian-British filmmaker who has been making work around themes of conflict, human rights, and colonialism since 2004. His 2021 documentary, A Thousand Fires premiered as the opening film of Locarno's Critics' Week where it won the Marco Zucchi Prize for most innovative documentary. Farouky regularly teaches and lectures on filmmaking at venues including University College London, National Film and Television School (UK), Scottish Documentary Institute (UK), Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University, USA) and Maysles Documentary Centre (USA). He is the designer and lead tutor of a radical, free film school that supports people from backgrounds underrepresented in the industry, and co-founder of Safar, the UK's only film festival dedicated entirely to Arab cinema.

Documentary Block

Wednesday 16 August 1 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Centering internal reality rather than visible evidence, these documentaries look intently at illusions of health, disability, self-advocacy, and knowing the pain of others. From invisible worlds of illness and recovery come raw demonstrations – both gentle and devastating – of how we might nurture ourselves and each other.

Program:

Invisible World (2023, US, 5’)
Kym McDaniel

Oceans of Time (2022, US, 13’)
Devon Narine-Singh

Contrapunctus V (2022, DE, 18’)
Kenji Ouellet

re-record (2022, UA, 7’)
Kyrylo Zemlyanyi

Spontaneous (2020, US, 14’)
Lori Felker

The Body is a House of Familiar Rooms (2022, US, 10’)
Eloise Sherrid & Lauryn Welch

LYNDALE (2019, US, 24’)
Oli Rodriguez & Victoria Stob

More Info

Documentary Block

Wednesday 16 August 4 PM
Boedecker Cinema

A window opens out over planetary-scale computational systems, a viewshed compromised by the hegemonic regimes of data dissemination taking shape. Alternative perspectives interweave to examine the extraction and distribution of information by ambivalent technologies.

Program:

SOME DAY IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM (2021, US, 5’)
Matt Whitman

A Human Year is Seven Earth Years (2022, US/HN, 84’)
Adrian Quetzal Randall

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Documentary Block

Wednesday 16 August 7:30 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Confronted with the perpetual rhythm of change and the profound impact of childhood, we’re haunted by the uncertainty of our early years. Digital fabrics consume and astrological patterns silently guide the intricate process of growth, shedding the ghosts of our former selves to embrace who we become.

Program:

JUNK (2022, US, 8’)
Lily Fletcher

Memos From a New Age (2023, US, 8’)
Emma Baiada

The One Who Runs Away Is the Ghost (2021, CN/DE, 73’)
Qinyuan Lei

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by Chenliang Zhu (2022, CN, 104’)

Thursday 17 August 10 AM
Boedecker Cinema

Technology and spirituality are parallel paranormal forces in an abandoned Chinese amusement park once taken over by a community of outsider artists.

More Info

Documentary Block

Thursday 17 August 1 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Sometimes responses to old questions emerge between the cracks. What does the “untutored eye” see? What story does a defying look tell? What is an inheritance of space exploration memorabilia worth? A puzzle to solve, a mystery to unravel, a relationship to reconsider. A program that interrogates its own image making, the elusive memories that images preserve, and the traces of oppression. Cinema that helps us imagine what might have been.

Program:

[ green before "green" ] (2023, US, 20’)
Atticus Echeverria and Paul Echeverria

Archive of Cracks 2013 - 2023 (2023, IR, 18’)
Azade Shahmiri

Continental Drifts (2022, US, 11’)
Georg Koszulinski

Before Me (2023, CA, 18’)
Penny McCann
*not available virtually

Memorabilia (2023, AU, 17’)
Ceridwen Dovey & Rowena Potts

More Info

Documentary Block

Thursday 17 August 7:30 PM
Boedecker Cinema

The choice of framing and camera angles greatly influences the portrayal of documentary subjects. So goes the conventional wisdom of film school. Walking a tightrope between intimacy and audacity, the portraits in this program balance aesthetic risk with deep care for the labor, passion, and life experience of their protagonists. Sometimes direct eye contact calls for an oblique way of seeing.

Program:

Nona (2022, US, 6’)
Zazie Ray-Trapido

The Elwell Ferry (2023, US, 15’)
Dave Monahan

Really Good Friends (2022, US, 10’)
Adam Sekuler

Clean/Feed (2022, US, 6’)
Andie Madsen

The Hollow (2022, US, 14’)
Bretta C. Walker & Jean-Jacques Martinod

An Odd Pair (2021, US, 30’)
Melissa Friedling

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Documentary Block

Friday 18 August 1 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Like an abecedary of former addresses, possessions, and nation states, this alphabet catalogs loss, relocations, and rituals of reconnection. Personal archives of the hardcore mundane meet blurred memories and sacred sites. If home existed, we would be there by now.

Program:

We are the houses we lived in (2022, GR, 15’)
Katerina Markoulaki

Нутгийн Салхи / The Wind Carries Us Home (2022, MN/US, 11’)
Udval Altangerel

Bezuna (2023, US, 8’)
Saif Alsaegh

Iqraar-naama (The Agreement) (2021, IN, 55’)
Priyanka Chhabra

More Info

Documentary Block

Friday 18 August 4 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Lyrically powerful and formally bold indictments of the insidious violence women encounter – and perpetrate – in the domestic realm. Anti-tales reclaim autonomy and celebrate survival, processing distilled lifetimes of alienation and separation through poetry and movement.

Program:

Her Plot of Blue Sky (2023, UK/MA, 22’)
Kamila Kuc

Chadariya (2022, IN, 25’)
Nimisha Srivastava

The Caladium Garden (2022, US, 3’)
Riley Bartlett

Venus in Ferns (2023, US, 9’)
Laura Conway

A Movement Against the Transparency of the Stars of the Seas (2023, US/PH, 30’)
Esy Casey

More Info

Documentary Block

Saturday 19 August 1 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Springing from the Enlightenment’s world-in-motion, infrastructure excludes and subjugates as much as it connects and liberates. The dyadic implications of infrastructural development are full of desires and fantasies – eminent domain for the fabrication of totalizing truths in the name of progress. These counter-narratives shine light on nebulous land tenure policies that render the body and the non-human invisible.

Program:

Brutal Utopias (2022, US, 35’)
Morgan Adamson

13th Ave Fargo Mine Cart (2022, US, 3’)
Raymond Rea

The Fall of Cannonsville (2023, US, 22’)
Charles Cadkin

Section 59 (2022, IR, 15’)
Yasaman Baghban

Growing Up Absurd (2023, US, 15’)
Ben Balcom & Julie Niemi

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Documentary Block

Saturday 19 August 4 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Could oysters deliver the planet from climate collapse? Non-human queer heroes help us imagine different ways of living and experiencing the world, breaking the mold of humanity’s self-destructive tendencies. Transformation comes from below and beneath: in deep waters and scars within walls. Shifting our perspectives could take us far – light years away.

Program:

Language Unknown (2022, US, 6’)
Janelle VanderKelen

Holding Back The Tide (2022, US, 81’)
Emily Packer
*preview screening, not available virtually

More Info

​Documentary Block

Sunday 20 August 1 PM
Boedecker Cinema

A new generation of youth demands social reform and the American Indian Movement walks across the United States. Colorado sees campaigns for change on a Boulder campus and in North Denver's most polluted zip code. Historical and contemporary documents of rising activist voices and emerging revolutions, united by unwavering political catalyzers painting a vibrant horizon of hope for the future.

Program:

The Longest Walk (2017, US, 7’)
Dana Plays

CAAAS & Effect (2023, US, 18’)
Nicholas Pope

The Awakening of the Youngsters (2022, ES/PE, 11’)
Sergio García Locatelli

A Good Neighbor (2023, US, 53’)
Maggie Hartmans & Brittany Zampella

More Info

Documentary Block

Sunday 20 August 4 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Framing the intersections of democracy, environmental justice, and scientific advancement, this selection of works offers a way into late capitalism's various crises. The narrative hybridity of trans-disciplinary lenses disrupts the rigid taxonomic systems of modernity. The cosmovision of the West creeps toward collapse.

Program:

In the Ice, Everything Leaves a Trace (2022, CH, 13’)
Christoph Oeschger & Gianna Molinari

“And when I die let me be buried in a Hemlock coffin, so I’ll go through hell snapping.” (2023, US, 8’)
Sarah Ema Friedland

Behind the Sun (2023, US/SA, 18’)
Bentley Brown

Delacroix (2022, US, 6’)
Keely Kernan

EN AVANT [about a year in MPLS] (2023, US, 37’)
Dan Schneidkraut

New Facades (2023, US/HU, 8’)
Kay Hannahan

More Info

Documentary Block

Sunday 20 August 7:30 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Players venture through the shifting borderlands between the organic and the artificial, testing their mettle, securing valuable resources, replenishing mana, harvesting precious loot, upgrading inventory, and unlocking new achievements, all to fuel their progression over time. They become architects of fate, attempting to assert dominion over the physical realm. Regeneration acts as a vital gameplay feature, a shortcut toward a save point in the struggle to live and work in an ever-changing world.

Program:

Damp Moss (2023, US, 4’)
Christopher Thompson

A Common Sequence (2023, US/MX, 78’)
Mary Helena Clark & Mike Gibisser

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These expanded documentaries are unconstrained by the single screen, drawing from a range of artistic practices including sound, installation, performance, interactivity, and extended realities.

This program is installed in the B2 Center for Media, Arts, and Performance in sub-basement of the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. They will be on show from Thursday, August 17 to Sunday, August 20 and are free and open to the public.

by Jason Fox and Aliya Pabani (2023, US, 55’)

Friday 18 August 9:30 AM
Live Performance
Boedecker Cinema

What does the U.S. Democratic Party share with observational documentary? The promise and the problem of transparency. In a live performance from the forthcoming audio series "Trust Issues," Jason Fox explores the sixty-year long relationship between Direct Cinema and Democratic Party politics.

More Info

This event will be followed by a conversation with Mimesis artists about documentary and performance.

by stefa marin alarcon (2022, US, 40’)

17-20 August 11 AM-6 PM
B2 Center for Media Arts and Performance

An operatic biomythography for the diasporic and dysphoric, longing to find a body & a place to call home. An intimate spiral on an epic scale, this cinematic performance-ritual is an invitation into a portal, where the extra rib stefa was born with is the key. If even our bones transcend Adam and Eve’s creation mythology, maybe we can be re-made beyond colonial gender & theology. Maybe our god is trans-indigenous possibility. Maybe we can mourn who we could have been, by celebrating who we managed to become.

by Paulus van Horne (2021, US, 5’)

17-20 August 11 AM-6 PM
B2 Center for Media Arts and Performance

A rumination on human-computer intimacy using digital synthesis and AI systems. As virtual assistants and other digital entities learn to predict our needs and desires, they begin to take on qualities of an intimate partner. To what absurd conclusion can this relationship be taken? Is my computer queer? Or at least, could it be?

by Jules Victor Schwerin (1960, US, 27’)

17-20 August 11 AM-6 PM
B2 Center for Media Arts and Performance

The film documents the destruction of Cannonsville, NY as its residents are forced out in order to make way for a reservoir that will supply New York City with additional drinking water.

In 2022 artist Charles Cadkin, with the participation of BB Optics, Inc. and the Delaware County Historical Association, preserved the 1960 film Indian Summer, creating a new digital master and 35mm preservation film elements. The preservation was funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF).

by Sarah Kanouse (2022, US)

17-20 August 11 AM-6 PM
B2 Center for Media Arts and Performance

An installation based on Sarah Kanouse’s solo performance. Part storytelling, part lecture, and part live documentary film, My Electric Genealogy explores the shifting cultures and politics of energy in Los Angeles through the lens of her own family.

by Nima Bahrehmand & Laurids Andersen Sonne (2023, US)

17-20 August 11 AM-6 PM
B2 Center for Media Arts and Performance

An installation that excavates the hidden strands of what we take out of the earth, and what we lay to rest under its surface. The film follows the life of wind turbine blades in the expansive windfarms of the great plains of Wyoming, to their decommission and burial at the regional landfill on the edge of the North Platt River in Casper. The film does so in tandem with exploring and engaging its kinship with another manmade structure in the landscape- the ever-cranking oil pump, known as the pump jack, or the donkey pump.

The project consists of a series of intertwined narrative fragments, that overlap, converge, and converse through textual, verbal, and aesthetic divergent relations.

by eteam (Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger) (2023, US, 17’)

17-20 August 11 AM-6 PM
B2 Center for Media Arts and Performance

This growing video-series is part of a daily practice where we stage and record ways in which our personal tech devices and their components exist in a possible future, shared between the architecture of circuitry, political thought, digital and analogue interaction and actions of the natural world.

by Erin MacIndoe Sproule (2023, CA, 18’)

17-20 August 11 AM-6 PM
B2 Center for Media Arts and Performance

Through the process of recording her grandmother, Marnie Sproule, Erin realises that memories are precarious and can’t be trusted. So how do we hold onto precious memories, before they're gone… even though they’re gone… why are they gone… gone… gone…?

by Paige Sarlin (2022, US, 30’)

17-20 August 11 AM-6 PM
B2 Center for Media Arts and Performance

A meditation on the transformations of perception produced by loss, this experimental video marks an anniversary of the filmmaker and musician Tony Conrad’s death with an assemblage of documentary images recorded in the apartment in Buffalo, NY where Sarlin and Conrad lived together and audio recorded at Hospice Buffalo where Sarlin played cello to Tony as his breathing slowed and changed. Exploring the capacity of video to function as a holding space for grief, this video is meant to be watched while holding a balloon.

Conversation

Wednesday 16 August 10 AM
Boedecker Cinema

A conversation with 2023 Mimesis artists.

The body-with-camera, or the documenting body, is a resisting body, an often-targeted body, because of its extended capacity to witness. It is also a social body — its configuration becomes an exponentially extended nexus for connections with other bodies. When we say ‘the personal is political’ we risk eliding Carolyn Forché’s third realm — the realm of witness. Rather than simply pass through this realm, we use this opportunity to live in it, in all of its complexities and contradictions. This conversation explores how the inherent positionality of the documenting body as witness produces intersubjectivity grounded in shared experience.

Suggested Watch List:

Brutal Utopias
[ green before "green" ]
Rebel Objects
Holding Back the Tide
Oceans of Time
Bezuna
A Human Year is Seven Earth Years
Before Me

Conversation

Friday 18 August 10:30 AM
Boedecker Cinema

A conversation with 2023 Mimesis artists on performance, politics and expanded documentary media.

Topics include: embodiment, interactivity, movement, queerness and feminism, audio and music performance, non-actors performing themselves, political performance, re-enactments and trauma, choreography and labor, performance and rituals

Suggested Watch List:

American Glass Factory
My Electric Genealogy
Venus in Ferns
Remembering Marnie
The Fall of Cannonsville / Indian Summer
Born With an Extra Rib
[six years]
A Movement Against the Transparency of the Stars of the Seas
Really Good Friends
The Wind Carries Us Home
Object Earth

This conversation will follow the live performance of American Glass Factory at 9:30 AM in the Boedecker Cinema.