First Look Shorts II

Program of shorts premiering at the 2019 First Look festival.

Approximate running time: 80 mins

Uppland (Dir. Edward Lawrenson. 2018, 29 mins.) An architect and filmmaker from Europe visit Yekepa, a town in the remote highlands of Liberia, once a thriving mining community, now decaying and desolate: a concrete ruin in the West African bush. Exploring Yekepa, they discover promises of prosperity and forgotten injustices. Edward Lawrenson (Abandoned Goods, First Look 2016) returns with a film that explores the remnants of colonialism within architecture, as well as within his own documentary impulse and project. The result is a sharp, rigorous, reflective work. North American premiere.

Between My Flesh and the World’s Fingers (Dir. Talena Sanders. 2018, 31 mins.) Inspired by queer proto-feminist turn-of-the-century writer Mary MacLane, director Talena Sanders creates a dreamy, incantatory essay film. A tactile collage of MacLane’s still bold diary entries, archival material, recreation, and contemporary landscape photography of MacLane’s Butte, Montana, the film melds past and present, biography and autobiography, iconoclasm and experimentalism. New York premiere.

All Voices Are Mine (Basir Mahmood. Pakistan. 2018, 20 mins.) Artist Basir Mahmood addresses notions of an emerging Pakistani film industry by celebrating the once vibrant but now dormant Lahore-based studio system, using a fragment of a song written by his father as the basis for sketchy, stilted tableaus, kabuki-like mythopoetic homages to a film that never got made. The effect is dreamlike, disarming, and slyly humorous. North American premiere.

Tickets: $15 (Free for members at the Film Lover level and MoMI Kids Premium levels and above). Order tickets online. (Members may contact [email protected] with questions regarding online reservations.)