Distant Words;
Dreams and Nightmares

Floor Three, Susan and John Hess Family Gallery and Theater

This film program comprises two screenings: Distant Words, followed by Dreams and Nightmares.

Distant Words
In this screening, two Iranian and Syrian filmmakers living outside their countries address their sense of isolation and injustice in hand-drawn animation and montage. The film Distant Words explores the isolation and loneliness of an outsider visiting his native country as a stranger. In Suleima, an animation documentary, a woman speaks for thousands of anonymous women in Syria through her activism and bravery.

Nassiem Valamanesh (b. 1978), Distant Words, 2011
Jalal Maghout (b. 1987), Suleima, 2014

Dreams and Nightmares
In Dreams and Nightmares, five animations and non-linear narratives form a kind of collective dream, or nightmare. Darren Bader’s animation questions the role of the artist and how the future might materialize as the United Nations General Assembly transports eleven sculptures into outer space. Jacky Connolly’s film, produced entirely in the life simulation computer game The Sims 3, explores a rural-suburban virtual world in looping tableaux of isolation and alienation. Keren Cytter’s fractured existential drama mutates and unfolds in 3D. In Andrew Norman Wilson’s hyper-real animation, the camera moves through an abandoned children’s psychiatric ward and an uncertain place in which the mosquito, a syringe and an oil derrick imply an unknown and sinister threat. Pieter Schoolwerth and Alexandra Lerman’s episodic narrative traces the story of a character who has been erased from the frame, appearing as a hole, shadow, or mirror reflection of others, and as such he is present entirely through his visual absence.

Darren Bader, The Vagrant, no date
Andrew Norman Wilson (b. 1983), Ode to Seekers 2012, 2016
Keren Cytter (b. 1977), Open House, 2011
Jacky Connolly (b. 1990), Hudson Valley Ruins, 2016
Pieter Schoolwerth (b. 1970) and Alexandra Lerman (b. 1980), Your Vacuum Sucks, 2015

Tickets are required ($12 adults, students, and seniors; free for members). Doors open thirty minutes before the program begins. Ticket holders are guaranteed admission until the start of the program, at which time any unclaimed seats will be released.