Material: Espíritu Siboney/Siboney Spirit Shorts Program
MATERIAL screens for a suggested donation of $15 / $7 reduced price on Friday, May 12 at 7pm
“Material” is a collaborative series that showcases independent, rare, historically significant, artistic & experimental documentary shorts made by BIPOC filmmakers/artists. Our inaugural series is programmed by the acclaimed visual artist, José Parlá and entitled Espíritu Siboney/Siboney Spirit. The series focuses on how our lives intersect with the political and our imagination. The films are a subtle call for discourse around the Cuban political system and its impact on art-making and resistance.
Post-screening panel discussion with filmmaker Cheryl Dunn and José. Learn about his relationship to painting, the moving image and 1980's graffiti culture. Music and drinks to follow!
Program:
Arazá (Claudia Hilda, 2023). Arazá is the tree of guayabas fruit (guavas). In Cuba and other Latin countries, people refer to lies as guayabas. In this piece, la guayaba symbolizes all the lies hidden beneath a thick, appealing, and pulpy crust. The women in this film come to the realization that the fruit is an ossified power structure that suffocates their individual rights under oppressive patriarchal constructs, and failed socio-political systems. They intentionally devour and disappear the fruit, as the highest gesture of empowerment, and sorority.
Méritos (Claudia Hilda, 2023).
This short film reveals how unbearable it can be to carry a lifetime devotion to a failed socio-political system, and the delayed internal blossoming to liberation.
Lux in Tenebris (Rey Parlá, 1998)
Lux in Tenebris is a composite hand-painted
8mm film and video feedback. Borrowing the title from a prose piece by Bertolt Brecht, it is a mesmerizing interchange of color and emotion.
Iré a Santiago (Sara Gomez, 1964)
Iré a Santiago was one her first films, portraying the city of Santiago de Cuba in a highly energetic and playful style of direct cinema, connecting the contemporary people, and spaces of this eastern city, to a past of slavery and resistance, music, dance, and daily life. “There is no doubt about our condition as people of the Antilles, but all this is almost a Cuban legend built through a dream. What happens is that Santiago is there. So it’s true: Cuba is an island in the Antilles. And mulatto? Mulatto is a state of mind.” (Gomez)
One Union of the Senses (José Parlá, 2015).
This love letter to New York City is inspired by the artist’s monumental 90-foot mural of the same name, commissioned for One World Trade Center in 2015. Starring the people of New York as well as the painter himself, the film captures Parlá’s creative process in his studio and as he traverses the city, screening with live accompaniment of an original score by El Michels Affair and the Michael Leonhart Orchestra.
Wrinkles of the City (JR & José Parlá, 2012)
Wrinkles of the City is a 28-minute, bilingual record of the Havana Biennial project, in which the two artists install wall-sized portraits of elderly Habaneros on more than 20 buildings around the city.The film's focal point is the people that JR and Parlá meet as they search the city for photographic subjects and potential walls for the murals. Later, they’re shown trying to defuse the anger of local residents who object to Parlá’s abstract, graffiti-like embellishments of the portraits. His spray-painted lines “are like your thoughts, your memories. It’s a calligraphy that represents a language (Parlá).”
Diablo (Rey Parlá, 1998)
A former Cuban soldier hired as a hitman by The Corporation in Miami falls for the boss's girl with the kind of love that brings down empires.
Stereomongrel (Dir: Luis Gispert, 2005)
Stereomongrel is a ten minute experimental film which explores the effects of two disparate worlds colliding. Witnessed through the eyes of a gifted twelve year old girl, high and low culture clash in the neutral battle field of a museum.
