Bisagras (2024)
Luis Arnías
Bisagras, Luis Arnías, Venezuela/USA, 16mm > digital, 15.5 min, 2024
A film exploring the enduring here and elsewhere of Black consciousness. Finding a connection through the film’s emulsion and my skin, Bisagras holds my experience as a person of Afro-Caribbean descent during a visit to the House of Slaves on Gorée Island, Senegal, and the port of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. In these places I dare to imagine my ancestors’ history of the journey of African slaves to America and draw a line that goes through me.
Access to this film will conclude on December 29, 2024.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally, excluding Europe.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Canyon Cinema.
Image credits: all artworks, portraits, and stills courtesy the artist © Luis Arnías.
About the artist
Luis Arnías (Venezuela/USA) is an artist and filmmaker born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1982. He uses 16mm film to visualize everyday life, investigating the conceptual layers of neighbourhood, wilderness, borders, and boundaries through the lens of race, immigration, and identity. Subjects range from his home life to contested social spaces for communities of colour in Boston, to street life in Brazil, Senegal, Venezuela, and elsewhere. Arnías received an MA in Film/Video from Bard College (2020). His previous films, including Punky Eye (2018), Malembe (2020), Terror Has No Shape (2021), and Puerta a puerta (made with Jessica Sarah Rinland, 2022) have screened at numerous venues worldwide, including Toronto International Film Festival, Punto de Vista Film Festival, New York Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, Berwick Film and Media Art Festival, FICUNAM, EXiS, and Mar de Plata International Film Festival. He has been a Fellow of the Flaherty Film Seminar (2016) and the Film Study Center at Harvard University (2021), was the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship (2022), and most recently was a 2023 Wagner Foundation Boston Artadia awardee. He lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts, where he is an adjunct professor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.