Prismatic Ground Presents
10 Episodes
One of the most creative and galvanizing venues for film exhibition to emerge during the pandemic, Prismatic Ground is a festival centered on the intersection between experimental and documentary film. This selection of shorts from its first edition in April 2021 offers an eclectic cross section of formally and politically radical work. Highlighting filmmakers whose approach to image-making eschews traditional narrative in favor of abstraction and sensation—and whose techniques span animation, archival collage, 16 mm photography, and digital technology—Prismatic Ground shows how avant-garde techniques can be deployed to confront violent histories of colonialism, genocide, and capitalism, introducing audiences to a cinema of radical potential.
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09:51Episode 1Loose Corner
Episode 1
Directed by Anita Thacher • 1986 • United States
Starring Catherine Lloyd, Owen Roth, Jeffree ClappLike the challenges to our assumptions posed by “Alice in Wonderland,” issues of scale, materiality, and relationships are raised within a child’s “game-like” structure in this film/installation w...
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13:42Episode 2Reckless Eyeballing
Episode 2
Directed by Christopher Harris • 2004 • United States
Taking its name from the Jim Crow–era prohibition against Black men looking at white women, this hand-processed, optically printed amalgam is a hypnotic inspection of sexual desire, racial identity, and film history.
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19:51Episode 3my favorite software is being here
Episode 3
Directed by Alison Nguyen • 2021 • United States
This video work by visual artist Alison Nguyen centers on a computer-generated woman raised by the Internet in isolation in a virtual void. From the apartment where she has been placed, Andra8 works as a digital laborer, surviving off the data fro...
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15:52Episode 5A New England Document
Episode 5
Directed by Che Applewhaite • 2020 • United States, United Kingdom
Using found footage with selected images and text from the Marshall Collection at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, A NEW ENGLAND DOCUMENT reconstructs the genocidal impulses of two ethnographers’ ...
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17:45Episode 6Letter From Your Far-Off Country
Episode 6
Directed by Suneil Sanzgiri • 2020 • United States, India
Shot with 16 mm film stock that expired in 2002—the same year as the state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide in Gujarat—and filmed amid the anti–Citizenship Amendment Act protests in Delhi, LETTER FROM YOUR FAR-OFF COUNTRY finds filmmaker Su...
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26:05Episode 7A Demonstration
Episode 7
Directed by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner • 2020 • Germany, Netherlands
Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of early modern European science, A DEMONSTRATION explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from tod...
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10:33Episode 8Two Sons and a River of Blood
Episode 8
Directed by Amber Bemak and Angelo Madsen Minax • 2021 • Mexico
The self-made family unit of two dykes and a trans man imagine a kind of erotic magic that will allow for procreation based solely on desire.
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06:05Episode 9Bodies in Dissent
Episode 9
Directed by Ufuoma Essi • 2021 • United Kingdom
BODIES IN DISSENT is an exploration of the body as a central site of remembrance and resistance, exploring ideas around “bodily insurgency” and using the body as an archive, a point of return, a position of refusal, and a broker between transgenera...
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08:43Episode 10Melting Snow
Episode 10
Directed by Janah Elise Cox • 2021 • United States
Two tons of snow—flown from New Hampshire to Puerto Rico in 1952 in order to “gift” Puerto Ricans a “white Christmas”—become a metaphor for the colonialist paternalism of America’s relationship to Puerto Rico.
