HERE IS EVERYTHING:
THE FIRST 10 YEARS OF WUFF
JUNE 1 - 15 | On-Demand | VUCAVU.com
Holy shit; has it really been 10 years?
We're celebrating a decade of WUFF with a special retrospective program of works presented in our first 10 years, streaming free on-demand on Vucavu.com. We approached assembling this block not as a best-of, but as an attempt to sift through and reflect upon the feelings and ideas that have given us shape throughout our history — the power of empathy and the weight of grief, the familiarity found in altered states of consciousness, aging and the passing of time, the fallibility of remembering, the thrill of being caught off guard. The works in this program are by turns quiet and contemplative, irreverent and punk, vulnerable and opaque, and have reminded us why shepherding this festival though ten years of programming has been such a revelatory privilege.
"There's the sudden sense of vertigo you feel when you realize that something you thought was enormous and incredibly important, is from another perspective tiny and irrelevant. This can also happen in reverse. It's significant because it gives you a sense of your own scale in the order of things."
WATCH ONLINE FOR FREE AT WWW.VUCAVU.COM/HERE-IS-EVERYTHING
The Asylum, dir. Prapat Jiwarangsan
2015 | TH | 9 | video | WUFF 5
DJ Dok Rak (Varunee Tapanya), a disc jockey for a Chiangmai radio station, lost her job when the National Peace and Order Maintaining Council shut down every Red Shirt radio station in Thailand, after the 2014
coup d'état. Since then, her life has turned upside down. She becomes a taxi driver instead, yet she still lulls her passengers with her own live session. A boy named Ah Tae has to work anonymously in a village in Chiangmai, due to his lack of identification. He needs to be more cautious after the coup because he is afraid of being send back to Myanmar. This pond is a sanctuary where living creatures gather. During the night, animals moan uproariously and grievously, waiting for someone or something to set them free. DJ Dok Rak, Ah Tae and the animals reside in the same place - a shelter where they can do things that they cannot do in real life. They seem like non-permanent refugees who are looking forward to liberation and far-fetched freedom.
SLIT ME A RIVER, dir. Christine Negus
2013 | CA | 5 | video | WUFF 2
SLIT ME A RIVER uses the tale of Bubbly Creek - a section of the Chicago River that was reportedly polluted with animal entrails - as a point for an absurd departure. A
narrator recounts a perverted version of the legend as a performer “recreates” the scene with a collection of crab heads, artificial aquarium plants, home décor pebbles and
Kool-Aid. The result is a traumatic terrarium that is at once repulsive and alluring.
I Touched Her Legs Remix, dir. Mike Hoolboom
2019 | CA | 6.5 | video | WUFF 8
Eva Marie Rodbro’s embedded ethnographic maestro short, originally shot in Brownwood, Texas in 2009,
is given a fan remake. Night vision animal life and teen hangouts conjure a temporary and fragile collective, while conversation fragments, alternately performed and raw, shouted and whispered, collide.
Walked In, dir. K$K
2019 | US | 10 | video | WUFF 7
I walked into selling drugs the same way I've approached everything in my life: At first, I can be afraid, but in the end I always do it big. This is the story of a Millennial bad bitch. An insight into an all-women takeover of the TRAP. An homage to gangster movies and Bankroll Fresh!
KING JAMES VERSION GENESIS CHAPTER NINETEEN, dir. Martin Sulzer
2015 | DE | 8 | video | WUFF 4
Genesis 19, or "Sodom and Gomorrah" - not only in the bible but also in the Quran and the Torah - marks a foundation for attitudes towards homosexuality historically and to vast geographical expanses. An elemental challenge for all religions, nonetheless, is that of interpretation: how can religious stories be read and retold without affecting the authentic godly word through human interpretation?
P.O.P., dirs. Eduardo Menz + David J. Romero
2013 | CA | 3 | super 8mm on video | WUFF 3
Film portraits that capture a different state of mind.
The Time That Remains, dir. Soda Jerk
2012 | AU | 12 | video | WUFF 1
In this gothic melodrama, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis perpetually wake to find themselves haunted by apparitions of their older and younger selves. Isolated in their own screen space, each woman must struggle
to reclaim time from the gendered discourses of aging that mark her has ‘past her prime’.
How to Recreate Human Cremated Remains, dir. Zorya Arrow
2016 | CA | 3 | video | WUFF 6
An oddly content heavy, strange and experimental YouTube tutorial.
Here Is Everything, dir. Emily Vey Duke + Cooper Battersby
2013 | US/CA | 14 | video | WUFF 2
Here Is Everything presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they’ve decided to speak to us via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however, belies the complex set of ideas that fill the remainder of the film. Death, God, and attaining and maintaining a state of Grace are among the thematic strokes winding their way through the piece, rapturously illustrated with animation, still and video imagery.
Images from: Prapat Jiwarangsan's The Asylum, Martin Sulzer's KING JAMES VERSION GENESIS CHAPTER NINETEEN, and Duke + Battersby's Here Is Everything