Directing
The third part of a trilogy regarding "feral domesticity," following "Strangely Ordinary This Devotion" (2017) and "Come Coyote" (2019). "Future from Inside" is a meditation on the environment, domestic space, queer desire, and magic.
A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency project.
In Dani Leventhal’s Platonic, geometric specters twirl in space; pet cats foam at the mouth; a little boy mistakes his junkie dad for a superhero; and a confused adolescent worries he has sired a centaur.
Sister City channels moments of paradoxical experience--of being a superhero or being for sale--into reverberant conduits, articulating a nature divided by panes of glass or suspended in watery solitudes. Each shift begets a kind of origin story: one encounter traces the specific azure of a James Turrell installation to a pet shop jellyfish, in another, a modern-day putto purifies a horrific tale by blowing bubbles in a tub. Sister City, like water, seeks its own level; cresting and displacing continuous bursts of life spiritualized, succulent, and ultimately alone. -Deirtra Thompson
Opening with jarring violence, Dani Leventhal’s Tin Pressed proceeds to negotiate a balancing act between the bewildering tonal variances of daily life—with all of its unnamable and enchantingly fragmented specifics—and the gravitational urge to construct both private and shared narratives. The world discovered through these images revolves around multiple centers. The camera’s odd equanimity feels both generous and dangerous. Leventhal’s deft oscillation between elision and inclusion reveals a brief but vast taxonomy of beauty, peace, longing, and terror.—Jeremy Hoevenaar
Subtitled "The Refusenik," "The Zealot," and "The Father," this video takes us on a journey where Germans, Turks, Israelis, Palestinians, fathers, grandmothers, daughters, and animals are together for 13 minutes.
SOTD was birthed out of a desire to privilege and amplify the strange and banal quality of daily life, to see what it can yield as an entrance to larger concerns, such as the environment, representation of motherhood, queer desire, the domestic as site of radicality.
"By way of lush formal and associative shifts, Hearts Are Trump Again evokes the ever-present tension between seemingly polarized states of experience. Desire and repulsion; freedom and constraint; pain and pleasure all find articulation in images of ferocious dogs and mock conversations about childbearing. Tonally complex and viscerally rich, Hearts Are Trump Again is a lyrical exploration of emotional weather." --Brett Price
In this piece Dani Restack recounts to camera her experiences of living and working in Israel, the fabled land of milk and honey of childhood lessons. With time spent in a metal factory and a battery farm for chickens, her harrowing tale includes stories of sexual harassment and sick birds. Against this background, there are idyllic images of bees and flowers, cows and calves, intimate caresses, dead birds. Every thing is worthy of Dani's gaze, and is transformed by the encounter, becoming more human or sacred, and we are closer to the pain and beauty of being alive.
Material is presented as short scenes: documentation of the quotidian, interviews, on-camera monologues, and performative or expressive shots that are constructed. So the material, while mostly generated as a diary, is heterogeneous enough to include just about any kind of footage. At one point, a baby cries inconsolably, in another, a boy in a baseball uniform is playing Bach while his mother sits next to him putting on mascara. The 18 minute video montage of impressions has a cumulative effect, accessed and read differently depending on the mental connections the viewer makes.
A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted), is a looping meditation on night as space of mysterious energetic transmissions. Animals, human bodies, children, ritual and performance are investigated as zones of conflict, desire and a visceral movement that is more felt than seen.
In Shayne's Rectangle, Dani Leventhal's moving and mysterious prayer for healing, a horse farm and a casual poolside dissection are the nodes between which a series of patiently taken sharp turns maneuver through moods both intimate and detached. The camera pursues, observes, offers, reflects, and is reflected. Things clear and things indistinct interact rhythmically, resonantly, producing a volatile and haunting visual prosody. -- Jeremy Hoevenaar
Inside a Lithuanian synagogue, young Domas Darguzs regales the filmmaker with a whispered, wide-eyed account of mythical events, while the film cross-cuts to images of a goat farm. Kid brother of a Isreali soldier, Domas’ stories are part fantasy, part hopeful ruminations of a courageous, young mind interrupted only by an impatient adult.
A five-minute video collaboration between Dani Leventhal and Steve Reinke.
A film by Dani Restack
“A soldier’s trip to Syria is complicated when he accidentally impregnates a friend. Meanwhile, a horse breeder from Ohio is driven away from home by her own desire to become pregnant. In Hard as Opal the lines between truth and fiction, fact and fantasy, are reined in and treated not as fixed, divisive markers but as malleable threads of narrative potential. Buckhiester and Leventhal perform alongside other non-actors who are filmed in their own varying domestic and professional environments. The result is a rich accumulation of narratives held together by questions concerning the nature of objectification, loneliness, and dissociative fantasy.”—Brett Price
Come Coyote is the second chapter in the trilogy, Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (SOTD) by Dani and Sheilah ReStack. Come Coyote continues their investigation of climate change, queer desire, motherhood, reproduction and collaboration.
The Grandmother recites the Mourners' Kaddish over her granddaughter.
A tapestry of images and sounds. Tango dancing. A conversation about heaven and hell, with illustrations. Horses nuzzle. A woman reclines. Silent soccer. Street entertainers play classical music. Travel is mysterious and sometimes fraught.
In Dani’s Leventhal’s latest video we are invited along on a house visit with a familial group. There’s trash in the garden, guns on the sofa, and martial arts in the living room. A photo session records a young woman throwing punches at a man, playacting for the camera, but sweating anyway.
