Luis Arnías

With an elephant’s tusk as the protagonist, the film meditates on the endless tactility of conservation.

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

At night in Boston, a bodega cat is the only witness when an alien rock lands among the trees in an empty lot. Crude special effects conjure a viscous white humanoid who is stalked by a figure on a motorcycle. Their encounter ends in ritual fire. A burning effigy and a Senegalese call to prayer combine modes of Afro-Venezuelan spiritual resistance from past and future into an ambiguous present.

Through its rhythmic montage and mix of observational and surreal imagery, Malembe forges oblique linkages between the United States and Venezuela, conveying the strange dissociation of being uprooted, of living between places. As a knife cuts through sky, through snow, and through fruit, quasi-ethnographic footage—with its conventional markers of music, food, ritual—joins with home-movie auto-portraiture of a New England winter, communicating a sense of dislocation at once vertiginously queasy and absurdly comic.

In a heartfelt conversation with my paternal grandmother, I gained a deeper understanding of her upbringing, her struggles, and her joys. She shared stories of her selfless sacrifices, working tirelessly in distant places to provide a better life for her sons. Despite her unwavering dedication, she often felt misunderstood and seen as an absent mother rather than the loving and devoted parent she truly was. This poignant insight into her life highlighted the complexities of her experiences and the depth of her love.

Bisagras is a film that triangulates the journey of African slaves to America and draws a line that goes through my brown skin.

Nada and Rabieh are a Palestinian couple living far from the possibility of a homeland. A meditation on time, memory, and the distance from a dream. A dialogue with Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu’s (1971) Red Army/PFLP: A Declaration of World War. Available to watch here: https://vimeo.com/77014813/9ecc802aef

Shot on 16 mm and in color, Distancing documents the logistics and poetics of Miko Revereza’s decision to leave the United States and return to the Philippines.