FILMS
TITLE: Hiroshima Bound
Length: 56 min. Date: 2015
Format: HD video
Hiroshima Bound is a personal documentary that tracks the construction of America’s collective memory (or lack of one) of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It follows the obscure histories of specific photos and photographers, both Japanese and American, who visited Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the aftermath of the bombings, counterposing this visual legacy with the stories of survivors, whose practice of speaking to small groups of students offers a modest but powerful counter-history to the official record. The film uses its maker’s own legacy as a child of the Atomic Age to look at the complexity of the representation of mass death, and the role of the archive in the digital era, taking viewers to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, the International Center of Photography in New York, and to contemporary Hiroshima, in order to explore and ‘unpack’ the trauma and myth surrounding the culture of Hiroshima representation.
At the International Center of Photography Archive.
WEBSITE: www.hiroshimabound.com
TITLE: Cold Shutdown: Fukushima One Year After
Length: 36 min. Date: 2012
Format: HD video
Cold Shutdown is a report on what citizens in Fukushima Prefecture are doing to protect the lives of their children and themselves in the face of the nuclear contamination of their region, still widespread a year after the disastrous meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. In the film we hear from the women of Fukushima occupying the grounds of the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry, and visit citizen radiation testing centers, food distribution centers, and schools. This film, shot nine months after the disaster, in Fukushima City, Nihonmatsu, and Tokyo, gives a gives a sense of the high price that citizens pay for a government policy that favors decontamination over relocation.
On vimeo: https://vimeo.com/38310902 In Japanese: http://vimeo.com/64314083 Go to FULL TEXT
Yoshihiro Kanno of “Save Watari Kids” checks radiation levels in his neighborhood.
TITLE: Beyond Recognition
LENGTH: 24 min. Date: 2012
FORMAT: HD Video
This short fiction film focuses on a day in the life of two soldiers operating an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, a missile-laden drone, from a trailer on an military base in Nevada. The pilot is a man in his twenties with aspirations of being a soldier. The bombardier is a woman who has worked her way up the military ladder, and has been in the UAV program for several years. This is their first “journey” together as they explore the strange nature of a job that allows one to “take out” targets on the other side of the globe while sitting at a console in the American Southwest. Their mission involves a targeted assassination over Pakistan, a job that raises important existential questions for this pair of quintessentially modern warriors.
TITLE: Treatment Plan
Length: 9 min.
Format: HD Video Date: 2011
On the surface, this is the story of a psychiatric patient in a waterside hospital suffering from severe depression. The art therapist suggests a video camera, and the treatment plan develops. However, the ‘patient’ is never seen, and his subjectivity comes filtered through the reports and working notes of a mental health professional.
The film was shot over a five month period in the Verazzano Narrows ship channel at the entrance to New York Harbor. The images are slow, on the edge between stillness and movement. The link between the image and the story is a tenuous one, and one that shifts during the eight and a half minute course of the film. While either the image or the sound track could be imagined as documentary on its own, in tension with each other, they offer a meditation on the nature and potential of storytelling itself. Premiere: Videoart.net Festival 2011.
TITLE: Earlier Incident
Length: 2:40
Format: SD Video Date: 2007
A short meditation on traffic flow and the language of control; originally shown as part of the “State of Emergency Election Night Screening” curated by Sherry Milner and Ernie Larsen. 2006. This exhibition was designed for silent projection in public space. Also featured at Niet Normaal Exhibition, Amsterdam, 2008. Eyebeam Art and Technology Center “Permanent State of Emergency” Exhibition. NYC, 2009.
