INTERIOR / EXTERIOR
Saturday, June 1 | 7:00 PM | Dave Barber Cinematheque | 14A
When we cut something in two, we do not expose its interior. A collection of films that trace the imperialistic urge to render the invisible visible through voyage, resource plundering and self-mythologizing. Poetic reflections on empire and colony, water towers, TikTok, and the provenance of tattoos. Psychic geographies that manifest in a paradoxical imperative, foreclosing the possibility of an interior.
*This program is rated 14A. Total runtime 68 minutes.



Parallel Botany, dir. Magdalena Bermudez
2023 | USA | 11 | 16mm on video | Canadian premiere
Still lives of real fruit meet botanical illustrations of plant galls to expose the paradox of dissection: each time we cut something in two, we merely create a new exterior.
Visão do Paraíso / Vision of Paradise, dir. Leonardo Pirondi
2023 | USA/Brazil | 16 | 16mm on video | Manitoban premiere
The great voyages to the "New World" were seen as expanding the frontiers of the visible and displacing those of the invisible. Therefore maps from that time render the real and imaginary. The film follows a voyage of the Brazilian Military in search of an imaginary island with the same name as their country. In the myth from 1483 Brazil, or Hy-Brazil, is known to exist to the west of Ireland and above the Fortunate Islands. Visão do Paraíso is an examination of the capacity of the human imagination and computer simulations to construct environments. Amidst the fine threshold of the real, simulated, and imagined, the film analyzes the contemporary ideas of virtual reality and their ambition to expand the frontiers of the physical world into a "New World."
Dau:añcut // Moving Along Image, dir. Adam Piron
2023 | USA | 15 | video | Manitoban premiere
The likeness of a relative of the filmmaker surfaces as a tattoo on the arm of a Ukrainian soldier. A U.S. Army post in Oklahoma, built to fight Kiowa and Apache, is rededicated to aid in the fight against Putin’s own Western expansion. In Dau:añcut // Moving Along Image, Adam Piron explores the contradictions of colonialism and anti-settler solidarity across time and geography and in the muddled spaces of TikTok, where representations of Indigenous peoples are caught up in the ongoing and increasingly rapid circulation of images.
a fence is a fence but the clouds move freely, dir. Curtis Miller
2023 | USA | 8 | 16mm on video | Manitoban premiere
a fence is a fence but the clouds move freely is a brief essay on the origin of four small towns in rural Kansas and Oklahoma, told through each town’s respective water tower. Tall tales, public memorials, and roadside signage present in a region shadowed with settler-colonialism, identity fictions, and the threat of severe weather.
Turtleneck Phantasies, dir. Gernot Wieland
2022 | Austria | 18 | super8 and 16mm on video | Canadian premiere
Turtleneck Phantasies tells the story of a German writer who worked as a sailor on cargo ships and later, after a shipwreck, spent over 30 years in psychiatric institutions tattooing his fellow inmates. The film combines historical accounts with personal memories, merging the documentary and fiction. This results in a complex work that seemingly incidentally, yet excitingly and often tragicomically sketch the state of a society, representing remembrances of suppressed, unheard, and forgotten voices. There are many moments in Wieland's films - one might call this the lexical "other" - in which the use of the third person depicts the characters on the verge of disappearing, and shows them pushing forward powerfully and in an unforgettable way, testifying to a general experience of otherness.


Images from: Magdalena Bermudez's Parallel Botany, Leonardo Pirondi'i Vision of Paradise and Adam Piron's Dau:añcut // Moving Along Image (top) and Curtis Miller's a fence is a fence but the clouds move freely and Gernot Wieland's Turtleneck Phantasies (bottom)