press release: Mills Folly Microcinema presents eyes of summer and recent short films

Join us for an evening of recent experimental shorts on Wednesday, June 29 at 8 p.m. (please note they start later, closer to sunset.) Admission $5.00, free for ALL members. Places are limited and doors open at 7:30 p.m.

The programmers at Mills Folly have been busy polling recent experimental film festivals online this past spring, and we’ll be showcasing short film and video programs during our summer 2022 season.

eyes of summer (Gimhanaye Netra) | Rajee Samarasinghe | 2020 | 15 minutes

In a small isolated hamlet, a young girl strikes up a curious friendship with a spirit who lives in an abandoned house. “This film was shot in my mother’s village in southern Sri Lanka shortly after the civil war in 2010,” Samarasinghe explains, “developed in collaboration with my family members there, a narrative was improvised around an investigation of my mother’s interactions with the spirits in the community during her childhood. Between horror fiction and “spectral” ethnography, the film describes a population reeling from the devastations of the past, where the distinctions between living and the dead dwindle.

Rajee Samarasinghe is a Sri Lankan filmmaker currently based in the United States. Her work addresses contemporary socio-political conditions in Sri Lanka through the scope of her own identity and the deconstruction of ethnographic practices.

Show me other places | Rajee Samarasinghe | 2021 | 11.5 minutes

At the center of this film is a Sri Lankan woman accessing other places digitally, while situated in her own physical reality. Navigating through a multitude of spaces ranging from the natural world to man-made environments to virtual planes, traditional relationships between creator, tool and subject are questioned, shattered and reconstructed. “A reflection of my own practice as a filmmaker working in non-fiction, the film takes a collage-like approach to examining questions around representation, verisimilitude, the ethnographic image, and the limits of the form it -even,” says Samarasinghe, “Shot on seven different cameras (and a video synthesizer) on film and video over a decade in Sri Lanka, China, and the United States, I dove into some of my curiosities fundamental as a filmmaker.”

Entering and exiting a window | Richard Tuohy with Dianna Barrie | 2021 | 13 minutes

“The literal frame of a window overlooking a small garden becomes the stage through which Richard Tuohy’s film exploits the myriad plastic potentialities of the cinematic setting. Immersive and stroboscopic, In and Out a Window offers its own variations on segmentations mechanics of cinematic space and time, opening a portal to unknown dimensions and new phenomenologies.” –New York Film Festival

Tuohy and Dianna Barrie are Australian experimental filmmakers dedicated to celluloid film and the process of making handmade films. They created Nanolab, a manual processing lab for Super-8 color and black-and-white reversal film.

Polycephaly in D | Michael Robinson | 2021 | 23 minutes

Polycephaly in D is a densely bonded exploration of the existential drift, collective trauma and psychological free fall of the contemporary moment. Jump, fall and meet your new self in an earthquake; one loses one head to make another grow.

“With Polycephaly in D, Michael Robinson brings his pop archivist sensibility into the conversation with the current moment. Steeped in an existential dread that taps directly into pandemic-era anxieties, the film tells the story of two telepathic through a montage of found footage of nature and man-made disasters, both real and fictional.In its most inspired sequence, scenes from THunger Games – Catching Firethe 1976 remake of King Kongand the 1984 action-adventure comedy Romanticize the stone are intertwined in an eerily romantic vision of the apocalypse. -Jordan Cronk, for Hyperallergic

Michael Robinson is a film and video artist whose work explores the joys and dangers of mediated experience. Borrowing the formal skins of structural film, the emotional cues of pop songs, and employing a dizzying shift of public and personal memory, his work strives to cultivate new resonances between seemingly disparate elements, harnessing the surface connotations of specific landscapes. , TV shows, texts, songs and sounds as psychological triggers, ripe for reconfiguration.

Microcinema Mills Folly presents nationally acclaimed experimental films and video art from the festival and microcinema circuit. We network with filmmakers and regional organizations to bring guest filmmakers and programmers to Madison for screenings. And we incubate local experimental cinema by providing screen time at Project Projection events.

Mills Folly Microcinema is funded in part by grants from Danish Arts and the Madison Arts Commissionwith additional funds from Wisconsin Arts Council.