Devin Jie Allen

Encounters in Light is the poetic documentation of two artists, friends, and lovers. The film eschews any biographical structure and instead looks at the ways these two artists are bound by time and light. Lawrence Jordan and Joanna McClure have extensive bodies of work between them. The film interweaves Joanna’s poetry, Lawrence’s films, personal interviews, and emotive imagery to produce a sensory engagement with a long lasting friendship and artistic practice. An understanding of mortality is ever present and the film let’s that feeling permeate throughout. How does one relate to years of love, friendship, and art? How does it resonate in the present moment? In the film, there is a sense of boundlessness and understanding that indeed, time dissolves all boundaries until there is only the possibility of light.

On an interstellar journey, a group of scientists studies the last living vestiges of Earth. The artificial intelligence, Museo, becomes a portal to the crew’s diaries and a fragmented archive of humanity. On Earth, the one believed to be the last of the humans traverses a ruined planet that is slowly recovering, little by little, from the apocalypse it endured.

A baptism of love.

Two aimless psychics develop a strange relationship as they come to terms with having been groomed for espionage as children in the Gifted and Talented Education program.

Occupying gaps in memory and history, Blue Distance serves as a personal and poetic intervention into the filmmaker’s familial immigration story. The film places in communion the mythic powers of cinema and the production of personal and cultural histories. Underpinning these tensions is the immigratory reality of occupying stolen land while trying to secure one’s own actualization.

‘Forbidden City’ draws in parallel an unexplained instance of violence committed against the filmmaker’s late grandmother, the constant threat of redevelopment and destruction present in the history of the broader Chinatown project, and the discovery of the filmmaker’s grandmother in archival footage depicting the last days of Detroit’s Chinatown.

A figure passes through an unconscious repository of experience. Unable to find its way, meaning soon drifts out of reach and what remains is birdsong. Inspired by the works of Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, and Judee Sill.

A film by Devin Jie Allen.