
Jessica Sarah Rinland
Directing
Biography
Jessica Sarah Rinland is an Argentine-British filmmaker. She is a recipient of numerous prizes including Special Mention at Locarno Film Festival and Best Film at DocumentaMadrid, Primer Premio at BIM, Arts + Science Award at Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Schnitzer prize for excellence in the arts. She has had retrospectives of her films at Anthology Film Archives, Open City Documentary Film Festival, Doc’s Kingdom, Aricadoc, Curtocircuito, London Short Film Festival, and Flaherty Film Seminar. Her films are held in the British Film Institute’s collections.
Known For

Boys On Film comes of age with uplifting and powerful tales recounting the lives of everyday heroes striving for their own identities and fighting for the right for us all to be ourselves. Volume 18: Heroes includes ten complete films: Dean Loxton's "Dániel" starring Csémy Balázs, Hilda Péter, and Henry Garrett… Niels Bourgonje's "Buddy" starring Daniel Cornelissen and Tobias Nierop… Tamara Shogaolu's animated "Half A Life"… Victor Lindgren's "Undress Me" starring Jana Bringlöv Ekspong and Björn Elgerd… Sam Ashby's "The Colour Of His Hair" starring Sean Hart and Josh O'Connor… Hope Dickson Leach's "Silly Girl" starring Ciara Baxendale, Mollie Lambert, and Jason Barker… Søren Green's "An Evening" starring Jacob Ottensten and Ulrik Windfeldt-Schmidt… Alejandro Medina's documentary "AIDS: Doctors And Nurses Tell Their Stories"… Kai Stänicke's "It's Consuming Me" with Volkmar Leif Gilbert… and Mikael Bundsen's "Mother Knows Best" starring Alexander Gustavsson and Hanna Ullerstam.
Boys on Film 18: Heroes

With an elephant’s tusk as the protagonist, the film meditates on the endless tactility of conservation.
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another

Samsara is the Buddhist cycle of death and reincarnation. From the temples of Laos, we will accompany a soul in its transit from one body to another through the bardo.
Samsara

Based on an unrealized film script written in 1964 for The Homosexual Law Reform Society, a British organisation that campaigned for the decriminalization of homosexual relations between men, "The Colour Of His Hair" merges drama and documentary into a meditation on queer life before and after the partial legalization of homosexuality in 1967.
The Colour of His Hair

Karl, a 70-year-old Austrian astronomer, is at a crossroads in life and work. After a conference in Greece, he decides not to return home and heads for a small island in hopes of finding a sky dark enough to reconnect with the stars.
Little, Big, and Far
Nulepsy: the pathological need to be nude. An elderly man recounts his life story characterised by the rare, exceptional and inconvenient disease he suffers from.
Nulepsy

Puerta a Puerta records the preparation of a shipment in the United States and its attendant unboxing in Venezuela.
Puerta a Puerta

Santa Fe - notes, 2017 - 2019 is a story made up of fragments of landscapes, buildings, voices and objects. It is a film built on the relationship between art and the colony, memory and threat, native peoples and silence.
Santa Fe - notas, 2017-2019

An incomplete travel (and sound) chronicle; a place occupied by maps and globes; a recollection of memories instead of the repetition of an imprecise image. In the spaces that remain between these surfaces, Recording Rituals intends to meditate on the relationship between landscape and archive in the construction of imaginary communities and material memory.
Rituales de registro

Adeline For Leaves explores nature, science and mythology through the eyes of an eleven-year-old botanical prodigy and her recently deceased, elderly mentor.
Adeline for Leaves

Artist-filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland presents Black Pond, a film that explores the activity within a common land in the south of England. Previously occupied by the 17th century agrarian socialists The Diggers, the land is currently inhabited by a Natural History Society whose occupations include bat and moth trapping, mycology, tree measuring and botanical walks. After two years of filming on the land, the footage was shown to the members of the Society. Their memories and responses were recorded and subsequently used as part of the film’s narration. The film does not offer a comprehensive record of the history of humans within the area. Instead, it explores more intimately, human’s relationship with and within land and nature.
Black Pond

The whale forever exists, like utopia, as a parable, a myth, and a nightmare – caught between the wide open ocean and our two-dimensional confinement, between reality and imagination. We Account the Whale Immortal, an ever-changing film and a one off performance, explores the arrival of three mythic whales in the Thames, from the 17th to the 21st century, as evocative emblems of utopian intent.
We Account the Whale Immortal

Intimate and fragmented moments unfold in a community of zoos and animal rescue centers across Argentina. As histories of these institutions are uncovered, dedicated workers commit both day and night to caring for the remaining enclosed animals, fostering a mutual bond that transcends imagined boundaries between human and animal.
Collective Monologue

80-year-old Saul has lived in London all his life. For the past 20 years he has spent his spare time climbing trees in Hampstead Heath.
Not as Old as the Trees

Accounts ranging from varying moments in human history, describe the organisms that inhabit the second largest wetland in the world.
Y Bera : Aguas de Luz

Garbiñe Ortega, Artistic Director of Punto de Vista, came up with the idea of creating a collective audiovisual project in which several filmmakers would make a filmed letter addressed to another filmmaker they did not know personally and who was as far as possible from their own cinema. This is how THE LETTERS THAT WEREN'T AND ALSO ARE was born. The result is an exciting journey through their affinities, their admiration and their creative processes.
Querida Chick: Jessica Sarah Rinland to Chick Strand

A response to Stan Brakhage’s The Act Of Seeing With Ones Own Eyes which creates a blunt statement on the human condition by depicting human autopsies. Necropsy of a Harbour Porpoise (Seeing From Our Eyes Into Theirs) examines the ever-enigmatic whale by revealing its interior, taking away its mystery and disparity, highlighting similarities between seemingly contrasting, expired organisms.
Necropsy of a Harbour Porpoise (Seeing From our Eyes into Theirs)
Filmed between September and November 2015 in Península Valdés, in the Argentine Patagonia while living with a group of biologists who study southern right whales. During these months the whales migrate to the peninsula to breed, some stranding onto the shores.
Repetición

Conservators at the Natural History Museum in London are seen through a thermal imaging camera traditionally used in surveillance or hunting. They restore taxidermy specimens from the South American collection in preparation for relocation to off-site storage. Infra-red night-time footage captures endangered animals that have recently been translocated from Europe back to their native habitat in Argentina, the country from which Rinland’s parents emigrated.
Extramission: The Capture of Glowing Eyes
The journey of a bottlenose whale, caught in 1860 and currently stored in the basement of UCL's Grant Museum. Voice by ex-whaler John Burton.