Fireworks were shot at a summer festival in Japan with a Super 16 format camera, obtaining images on the optical soundtrack area on the filmstrip. The position of the photocell to read the visual information on the optical soundtrack area in a 16mm film projector is 26 frames in advance of the position of the gate to project the image. The footage from two rolls of 16mm film were cut into shots of 26 frames each, and the shots were alternated from one roll to another, which would further separate the sound and visual, while producing a distinct rhythm throughout the film.

The film opens with a well-known British nursery rhyme, “Boys and Girls Come Out to Play.” It ends with a call, whispered in the ear at bedtime, to go and play and see what is going on in the street. This is precisely what Ben Rivers and Céline Condorelli suggest in After Work, the latter having been commissioned to design a playground in a working-class area of South London. On screen, we discover how it’s made—digging the earth, preparing the ground, welding, polishing. This is suggested through touches, captured by a camera playing with colours and overlaying, focused on the smallest snatches of gestures at work—a whole process splintered by an erratic chronology. The film is a focus of encounters, sometimes discordant, between worlds, between the poem and images, between work and play, the city and the animals, the adult world and the child’s world.—Nicolas Feodoroff

Poem by Jay Bernard.

Black Power on a snowy meadow in West Berlin. Speech by Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party. 

“Als sie ertrunken war und hinunter schwamm / Von den Bächen in die größeren Flüsse [Once she had drowned and started her slow descent / Down the streams to where the great rivers broaden].” In her touching, untrained voice, the filmmaker sings this Brecht/Weill song from the 1920s. No atmosphere; this song is happening in a different space. Plants on the shore, swayed by flowing water … What connection, what dialogue materializes here during the filming, what acts of self-assurance, shared rhythm; what solution? … To speak of transience would be euphemistic. The (un)touchable unity of the body, inside and out. Materially and metaphysically.—Madeleine Bernstorff

The mythical Isla de San Borondón (St. Brendan’s Isle) appears and disappears. Throughout history it has been placed near the Canary Islands on maps. The legend of the island of San Borondón became so pervasive that expeditions were organized to discover and conquer it for three hundred years. After centuries of oblivion, it has finally been found.

The Newest Olds is the second installment in Argentinian filmmaker Pablo Mazzolo’s cinematic diptych exploring the natural and urban environment within and surrounding the border region of Windsor–Detroit. Completed seven years after the release of Fish Point (2015), Mazzolo’s revelatory study of light and landscape that animated the deciduous forest harbours and rare ecosystem at the southeastern tip of Pelee Island, The Newest Olds transforms Detroit’s iconic cityscapes, dislodging buildings from their foundations and collapsing the physical, political, and sensory boundaries between Canada and the United States through alchemical, in-camera, and optical printing techniques.

This film is a reflection on descendants and ancestors, guided by a 50-year-old audio recording of my grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother. After being given this tape by my mother, I interviewed her and asked about it, and recorded her ruminations on their lives and her own. The footage is of our chosen home in Whatcom County, Washington, where my family still lives, far from our homelands in Southern California, yet a home nonetheless.