PROGRAM

Should we paint over history or keep it in a glass case? The films in STANDING BY THE RUINS draw inspiration from disruptive spaces and works of art from the past. In the midst of gathering fragments, the filmmakers consider the costs of preservation in the face of government censorship, economic development, and art historical revision. Key sites in Hong Kong, Libya, United States, and Canada are presented through the material legacies of revolutionary events that shaped them.

Chelsea 5124 | Kevin Jerome Everson | United States, 2022, 3 mins

CHELSEA 5124 is the 1966 Andy Warhol film "Chelsea Girls" realized through sculpture.

Looking Backward | Ben Balcom | United States, 2022, 10 mins

Filmed on the former grounds of Black Mountain College, LOOKING BACKWARD is a brief elegy to the legacy of a utopian college and other impossible projects.

The Ruins (Al Atlal) | Raed Rafei | Lebanon, 2021, 16 mins

In a French travel book to the Middle East, a drawing of an ancient bathhouse sparks a visual poem inspired by the Arab poetic tradition of "standing by the ruins." The ambivalence of the five-hundred-year-old image gestures towards enduring imperial power dynamics. Pleasure and pain, seduction and domination, homoeroticism and violence, archives and ruins, histories of sex and of empire, all commingle in this essay film.

We May Go in a Different Direction | Sally Lawton | United States, 2021, 10 mins

A survey of Detroit’s central train station, vacant since 1988, as it transforms into Ford Motor Company’s self-driving car campus. The ability of knowledge to sedate us is explored through renderings of the future and incomplete pictures from the past. These images are then painted over in an attempt to see what is between automation and delusion and who is in opposition to the truth of the myth.

Tugging Diary | Yan Wai Yin | Hong Kong, 2021, 16 mins

TUGGING DIARY documents a footbridge in Hong Kong over the year between August 2019 to January 2021. As protest rallies and strikes are often conducted without a central leadership, both the internet and physical spaces act as critical communication platforms of its own during this period. As such, information can be circulated in the community more widely and rapidly outside of the existing mainstream media. As time goes by, these materials are continuously altered, some were renewed, while the others were removed, covered with paint, or overlaid by other information.

All My Life | Ariana Hamidi | United States, 2021, 3 mins

A single shot around the Marcus-David Peters circle in Richmond, Virginia, formally known as the Robert E. Lee Monument. After police shot and killed local teacher Marcus-David Peters during a mental health crisis on May 14, 2018, amidst the BLM protests, MDP Circle was named by the people and served as a transformative hub for the Black Liberation movement in Richmond. The state erected a fence around MDP Circle in 2021 in preparation for its full removal. The film serves as an homage to filmmaker Bruce Baillie and a love song to the community space reclaimed in 2020.

Last Lost Time | Gabi Dao | Canada, 2021, 17 mins

Experimental and experiential sonic interventions into two contested architectural spaces — a sugar refining factory and a former law court cum-civic art gallery bring together the complexities and complicities between corporations, cultural institutions, and the state.