John Michael Boling

Wrestling with writer’s block for her first film, Bouchra, a queer Moroccan jackal living in NYC, starts having difficult yet overdue phone calls with her mother in Casablanca that begin influencing the project. Balancing the precarity of working as an artist, the rift in her cultural identity and an array of romantic interests, Bouchra’s emotional reckoning becomes her path to expression.

In February 2005, YouTube was launched and forever changed our relationship to moving images, both as viewers and producers. But even well before then, the web had made a large variety of new materials accessible to see and to download, as well as upload. “From the Cloud” is a video program that looks at found footage “films” in the Internet Age. The proliferation of archived photographs, digital images, and videos made available to everyone online as well as an exponential increase in production has changed the way artists interact with pre-existing material. The artists in this program both pull material from the cloud and implicitly comment on the cloud by doing so.

In the Netherlands, the ocean is rising. A reclusive engineer has arrived in Rotterdam, promising to invent a new system of dikes and dams, using a computer that harnesses the power of dreams. A pair of twins are selected for the study - gabber kids, from the local hardcore scene. As the duo get sucked deeper into a digital dream world, they begin to wonder if the inventor's true goal isn't to protect Rotterdam at all.