2024 Program

by Terra Long (2023, CA/US, 90’)

Saturday 10 August 7pm
Canyon Theater
Free and open to the public.

Along the San Andreas fault line in Southern California, Indigenous palm trees and date palms imported from the Middle East flourish. The people who tend to them reflect a landscape of frictions and affections shaped over generations by agriculture, luxury real estate, and border politics. Like the infinity storytelling of The 1001 Nights, stories fold into dreams and back into stories, a constellation of voices settle over mountains and into the earth. Intertwining color 16mm with textural black and white film hand processed with the dates leftover from harvest and plants native to the valley Feet in Water, Head on Fire is a sensory, polyvocal evocation of place.

Feet in Water, Head on Fire was made over five years through a collaborative process both behind and in front of the camera.

This screening will be followed by a live virtual Q&A with the artist.

More info

Terra Long is a filmmaker whose work circles cultural, personal, and (un)natural histories embedded within the landscape. Her practice is collaborative, with a commitment to deep listening and material explorations of celluloid. Her work has shown widely in festivals including the Toronto International Film Festival, Media City, CPH:DOX, Rotterdam, and IDFA among others. Her first feature film Feet in Water, Head on Fire, premiered at True/False and is currently circulating. She frequently collaborates as lead editor on documentary films including Going to Mars: the Nikki Giovanni Project (Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival 2023) and regularly consults on films, including as a Story and Edit Lab advisor with the Sundance Institute. She studied at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University and received her MFA in film from York University.

She lives and works on the traditional territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

Wednesday 14 August 6pm
CMCI Studio

Mimesis 2024 spotlights expanded cinema with an opening night of installation, live performance, and conversation. Grappling with grief, power, and transformations of form, these works translate documentary into embodied experience.

Holding Patterns (2024, US, 55’)
Alexandra Juhasz

How We Stopped It (2023, US, 118’)
Noah Teachey

KILLFACE (2024, US, 16’)
Kate Trumbull-LaValle

Lass that Has Gone (2023, US, 22’)
Laura Conway and Fragrant Blossom

Reading Aloud: What Is Power? by Fred Dewey (2023, US)
Dana Berman Duff

The sound of the ghosts (2023, FR, 17’)
Neelansh Mittra and Yasmine Mahjoubi

Schedule

6-7 PM
Doors open, installations on view.

7-7:30 PM
Live performance of Lass that Has Gone by Laura Conway and Fragrant Blossom

7:30-8 PM
Conversation with artists Dana Berman Duff, Kate Trumbull-LaValle, Alex Juhasz, Laura Conway, Noah Teachey, Neelansh Mittra and Yasmine Mahjoubi.

More info

by Miryam Charles (2022, CA, 75’)

Friday 16 August 8 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Shot on dreamy 16mm, the stunning debut feature from Haitian-Canadian filmmaker Miryam Charles resurrects a tragedy that occurred within her own family—the unresolved death of her cousin—to weave a ghostly and gorgeous reflection on memory, grief, and what could have been.

In Bridgeport, Connecticut, a teenage girl is found hanged in her room. While everything points to suicide, the autopsy report reveals something else. Ten years later, the director examines the causes and consequences of this unsolved crime. Like an imagined biography, Cette maison explores the relationship between the security of home and the violence that can jeopardize it.

*not available virtually

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

More info

A workshop with Miryam Charles

Saturday 17 August 10 AM
Boedecker Cinema

It is possible to translate a rich sound experience into a film practice. This workshop with Mimesis 2024 Artist-in-Focus Miryam Charles explores the principles of sound mapping. Participants will learn how to draw up a sound map that can serve as the basis for writing a screenplay or designing a cinematographic project.

Screening selections from projects by Miryam Charles may include:

Cette maison (2022)
The Times (2021)
Drei Atlas (2018)
A Fortress (2018)
Towards the Colonies (2017)

More info

Miryam Charles is a Canadian director, producer and cinematographer of Haitian origin. Her short films have been showcased in various festivals worldwide. In 2022, her first feature film, Cette maison, was premiered at the Berlinale also screened at the AFI, IndieLisboa, Viennale, Art of the Real, TIFF Top 10, and was named one of the best films of the year by Sight and Sound. The same year, she premiered the short film Au crépuscule at the Locarno Film Festival. She is currently working on her next feature, Le Marabout, as well as a group exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo.

Documentary Block

Thursday 15 August 1 PM
Boedecker Cinema

As time-space passes and elements of identity become entangled and change definition, assumptions of self transform. Where does one end and the other begin? How does place influence human connection? From a school in Hungary to Helan Shan; from California suburbs to the cathode tube, the selves in this program live, learn, grieve, and rejoice in the ongoing work of becoming.

Program:

Against Horizons (2024, US, 20’)
Lily Cunningham Perini

at the bamboo green (2024, CH/US, 11’)
Xiaolu Wang

Ode To Happiness (2023, HU, 9’)
Jake Maxwell Bellew and Anastasia Koutsonanou

The Spectacle of Her Appetites (2024, US, 6’)
Sue Ding

Earth to KB (2024, US, 19’)
Em Shapiro

Things We Swallow (2024, US, 4’)
Carleen Maur

The Instability of Clouds (2024, US, 15’)
Zazie Ray-Trapido

More info

Documentary Block

Thursday 15 August 4 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Measuring catastrophe in color and light and sound - an ashy red blizzard fills the whalebone sky, a high renaissance frieze of portents and signs. Sensory remnants of a distant sublime, oh Little Ice Age, see how shared phenomena collapse time.

Program:

Tomorrow, the Burning Heavens (2024, DE, 22’)
Max Bloching

A seismic silence (2023, AR/DE, 19’)
Julián Galay

The Lost Season (2023, US, 6’)
Kelly Sears

Terminal Island (2024, US, 13’)
Sam Drake

30 Kilometres per Second (2023, FI, 23’)
Jani Peltonen

Krakatau (2023, US, 11’)
Gloria Chung

More info

by Oksana Karpovych (2024, CA/FR/UA, 93’)

Thursday 15 August 8 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Sound and image stare each other in the face as quiet compositions of Ukrainians’ everyday life since the full-scale invasion contrast with intercepted phone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families.

*not available virtually

More info

Documentary Block

Friday 16 August 10 AM
Boedecker Cinema

Echoes of oppression, extraction, and the colonial project linger in a cool evening breeze. The commonplace turns into energetic resilience, defying historical forces through everyday ritual. These films illustrate kaleidoscopic power dynamics and the mundanity of oppression, inviting us to question the way histories are recorded.

Program:

Pasatiempos de un jardinero (What the Gardener Missed) (2024, US/MX, 13’)
Alan Medina

LINEAGE (2023, CO, 16’)
Ana Ma Ferro and Daniela Ruiz

A Feast in a Mirror (2023, US/IR, 18’)
Yasaman Baghban

In the Forest One Thing Can Look Like Another (2024, 16’)
Priyanka Chhabra

Heroínas (2022, PE, 21’)
Marina Herrera

a fence is a fence but the clouds move freely (2023, US, 8’)
Curtis Miller

More info

Documentary Block

Friday 16 August 1 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Conjuring ghosts banal and intimate in speculative reconstructions of disappeared historical narratives, these films interrogate both ephemerality and endurance. Juxtaposing personal and sociopolitical layers, the Poor Image (no matter how quotidian or forsaken) illuminates neglected pasts, embodied presents, and potential futures.

Program:

Bliss.jpg (2023, US, 10’)
Emily Rose Apter and Elijah Stevens

demarcations; you have black eyes (cheshmeh siya daree) (2023, US, 9’)
Zelikha Zohra Shoja

1922 (2023, EC, 30’)
Libertad Gills

Roots (2023, US, 8’)
Ellie Borzilleri

Even god (2024, US, 13’)
Liz Roberts

a video about red balloons (2023, US, 6’)
Walter Smits

Dear Jon (2022, US, 18’)
Hugo Ljungbäck

More info

Documentary Block

Friday 16 August 4 PM
Boedecker Cinema

The politics of public space buffed to a blinding shine - coal drops and blast furnaces regenerate into boutiques and tech corridors. George Romero and petty thievery spur re-calibrations of a home town’s self-image. Citizens navigate a maze of civic responsibility, community pride, and collective disgrace in a media city gone viral.

Program:

French Camera (2023, IR, 30’)
Ardavan Zeini Sough
*available virtually in Colorado only

Public Surfaces (2023, US, 12’)
Gillian Waldo

Privately Owned Public Space (2023, UK, 23’)
Patrick Tarrant

no more room in hell (2023, US, 23’)
rebecca shapass

More info

Live Performances

Saturday 17 August 1 PM
Boedecker Cinema

This program is presented in partnership with Cool Boulder.

From antique magic lanterns to 3D game engines, two live documentary performances bridge an era of rampant technological development and drastically shifting ethics. Pre-cinematic techniques conjure specters of nature as seen through a dark mirror, while virtual landscapes model sustainable practices in a rapidly changing world. With a multiplicity of perspectives on land, stewardship, and accountability, both richly layered performances transport us across history, place, and species.

Program:

Strata | a performance of topography (2021, US, 60’)
Hannah Jayanti and Alexander Porter

Relict: A Phantasmagoria (2023, US, 35’)
Melissa Ferrari

More info

​Documentary Block

Saturday 17 August 4 PM
Boedecker Cinema

This program is presented in partnership with Cool Boulder.

Exercises in radical attention imagine humanity dethroned. Science fiction and citizen science balance the scales of expert-driven authority, excavating and connecting little known histories with the present realities of endangerment and conservation. These projects incite us to picture a better world and enable us to realize it.

Program:

Arremonops rufivirgatus (2024, US/DK, 12’)
Laurids Sonne

Eco: A Feminist Disaster (2024, US, 8’)
Emma Piper-Burket

Biopixels (2022, US, 4’)
Kristina Dutton

Just Above the Surface of the Earth (For a Coming Extinction) (2024, US/CA, 69’)
Marianna Milhorat
*available virtually in Colorado only

More info

Documentary Block

Saturday 17 August 8 PM
Boedecker Cinema

The projection screen is a threshold, materializing untraveled paths, far-away pasts, and surprising discoveries. The four portals in this program open to the Amber Mountains of Romania; an immigrant home in Oakland; heart lands across the midwestern US; and ancestral lands of the Nakhi tribe in Lijiang, China. These poetic journeys revive dormant knowledges and connections, creating opportunities for discarded ways of being in the world to become real again.

Program:

The Amber Gates (2024, RO, 4’)
Laura Iancu

Sister Mother Lover Child (2023, US/CA, 12’)
Nadia Shihab

Lighthouses in the Window Sill (2023, US, 4’)
Lane Epstien

Heaven Rain Flows Sweetly (2023, US/CH, 63’)
Shasha Li
*available virtually in the United States only

More info

by Manuel Embalse (2024, AR, 89’)

Sunday 18 August 10 AM
Boedecker Cinema

An amateur archaeologist obsessed with e-waste records images and sounds for 10 years. As a personal diary, he travels the world trying to decipher what his findings hide.

More info

Documentary Block

Sunday 18 August 1 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Acts of digging into the ground and into the past deconstruct vulnerabilities, unheralded work, and systems of care. Behind everyday labor we find partial prints etched in the pavement, on abandoned sites, or in recorded images; a palimpsest of existence and action to be deciphered by generations to come.

Program:

El itinerante (2024, MX/US, 17’)
Tiff Rekem

Contractions (2024, US, 12’)
Lynne A. Sachs

Couple More Shovels for a Few More Levs (2024, US/BG, 42’)
Pauline Shongov

Set Pieces (2024, SD/NO, 12’)
Bentley Brown and Ibrahim Mursal

Heterotopia (2024, RS, 7’)
Nikola Nikolić

More info

Documentary Block

Sunday 18 August 4 PM
Boedecker Cinema

This program is presented in partnership with the Endangered Species Coalition.

Forensic chronicles of image-making in the field and the challenges of imitating nature. Crucial visual research presents vulnerable inhuman ecosystems on land and sea, while works inspired by too-human George Orwell, James Audubon, and Ursula LeGuin ask what the natural means in manmade space, and what the domestic means in the wild.

Program:

Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (2023, US, 11’)
G. Anthony Svatek

Six Knots (2024, CA, 29’)
Ali Vanderkruyk

Parallel Botany (2023, US, 11’)
Magdalena Bermudez

Gavia stellata (Sea Mew Set with Stars) (2023, US, 3’)
Erin Espelie

Direction of the Road (2023, US, 8’)
Janelle VanderKelen

47˚c (2023, UK, 26’)
Heidi C Morstang

More info

Documentary Block

Sunday 18 August 8 PM
Boedecker Cinema

This program is presented in partnership with Cool Boulder.

The Galapagos Islands and Colombia's high-altitude Páramo region transmit mythical narratives through the fog, offering reflections on the construction of testimony and the elusive nature of oral histories. Landscapes shape collective memory while conservation industries and military occupations shape the land.

Program:

Los dos lados de la tortuga (Two sides of the tortoise) (2024, EC, 11’)
Oscar X. Illingworth

La Laguna del Soldado (The Soldier's Lagoon) (2024, CO, 75’)
Pablo Alvarez Mesa
*not available virtually

More info

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

Many of these projects are installed at CMCI Studio, while others will be presented as live performances throughout the festival. Installations will be on show from Wednesday, August 14 to Sunday, August 18 and are free and open to the public.

by Alexandra Juhasz (2024, US, 55’)

14-18 August
CMCI Studio

A meditation on technologies of memory, with close attention paid to medium specificity, this installation considers how Zoom and other pandemic technologies composite onto screens, and also into rooms, flattening and deepening connection, attention, and care.

by Noah Teachey (2023, US, 118’)

Presented Online
14-25 August

A three-part audio documentary about a small group of people who came together to stop NRG from building an unnecessary fracked gas peaker plant in Astoria, Queens.

by Kate Trumbull-LaValle (2024, US, 16’)

14- 18 August
CMCI Studio

A sensory, sound-centric, visceral observation of female strength, stamina, and struggle, depicted through the visual metaphor of a female fighter. Presented as a three-channel immersive audiovisual installation, it envelops audiences within a trifold of screens to invite a comprehensive witness to female power. This conceptual nonfiction project is in conversation with the echoes of gendered violence, and invites viewers into an experience of female strength that transcends biography or justification.

by Laura Conway and Fragrant Blossom (2023, US, 22’)

Wednesday 14 August 7:00 PM
Live Performance
CMCI Studio

A live cinema work looking like a desktop performance with scenes from unfinished projects and a talk about the sticky interpersonal situations being a filmmaker creates. A funny, tender, and TMI performance accompanied by a live score from Fragrant Blossoms.

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

by Dana Berman Duff (2023, US)

14-18 August
CMCI Studio

One of the late Fred Dewey’s most penetrating texts is reimagined as a film. In the process the text of “What Is Power?” becomes a chorus of very different voices rising to affirm what we find hardest to believe: that power does not reside among the powerful but is always there for the people to reclaim.

by Melissa Ferrari (2023, US, 35’)

Saturday 17 August 1 PM
Live Performance
Boedecker Cinema

An experimental documentary performed with antique magic lanterns and hand-drawn animation. Invoking the history of magic lantern phantasmagoria as an exercise in belief and perception, Relict considers the zeitgeist of pseudoscience, fake news, religion, and documentary ethics collapsed within contemporary cryptozoology.

by Hannah Jayanti and Alexander Porter (2021, US, 60’)

Saturday 17 August 1 PM
Live Performance
Boedecker Cinema

A live-edited documentary performance that traverses a vast terrain without leaving a tiny patch of land. Each iteration is a unique call and response between a virtual landscape and documentary footage. Set in a small 3D scanned region of the Badlands of South Dakota, voices carry you from paleontology to foraging, indigenous herbalism to nuclear arms, and wildlife management to cattle ranching. Strata layers histories, economics, natural sciences, deep time, and personal anecdotes within an immersive landscape that invites you into a meditation on the complexity embedded in all lands, and how profoundly human perspectives shape and define their futures.

by Neelansh Mittra and Yasmine Mahjoubi (2023, FR, 17’)

14-18 August
CMCI Studio

This sound documentary follows Eva, a Spanish tour guide living in Paris for the past 7 years. Eva conducts the Mysteries and Legends Tour every week in the heart of the city in Île Saint-Louis. The tour traces the dark history of Paris, where she introduces her audience to the violence that consumed the city in the Middle Ages.

Through Eva’s undying passion for discovery, the piece invites the listener to see beyond what is mostly known of Paris today; asking them to patiently observe the city, and listen deeply to the sound of its ghosts.

Wednesday 14 August 7:30 PM
CMCI Studio

A conversation with Mimesis 2024 artists about expanded documentary and performance.

Thursday 15 August 10 AM
Boedecker Cinema

A conversation with Mimesis 2024 artists. Topic TBD.