This year, MUBI is sponsoring the New York Film Festival's essential Projections strand, running October 2 - 4, and is bringing to U.S. audiences a stunning collection of highlights from last year's inaugural edition.
The New York Film Festival’s Projections section presents an international selection of film and video work that expands upon our notions of what the moving image can do and be. Drawing on a broad range of innovative modes and techniques, including experimental narratives, avant-garde poetics, crossovers into documentary and ethnographic realms, and contemporary art practices, Projections brings together a diverse offering of short, medium, and feature-length work by some of today’s most vital and groundbreaking filmmakers and artists.
Our selection includes:
LETTERS TO MAX (Eric Baudelaire, France)
A record of the epistolary encounter between French artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire and Maxim Gvinjia, former Foreign Minister of the breakaway Caucasian state of Abkhazia, Letters to Max is both a chronicle of a developing friendship and an ingenious and unusual essay film.
SEA OF VAPORS (Sylvia Schedelbauer, Germany)
A cascade of images cut frame by frame flow into an allegory of the lunar cycle.
BLANKET STATEMENT #2: IT'S ALL OR NOTHING (Jodie Mack, US)
A quilted call and response. A battle of extreme extremes.
THE MEASURES (Jacqueline Goss & Jenny Perlin, US)
Jacqueline Goss and Jenny Perlin retrace the journey of two 18th-century astronomers tasked with determining the true length of the meter. From the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel, The Measures explores the metric system’s origins during the violence and upheavals of the French Revolution.
NIGHT NOON (Shambhavi Kaul, Mexico/US)
Shambhavi Kaul sets up dialectical dread in Death Valley in a series of uncanny shots of geological formations, eroded mountains, dunes and dried lava contrasted against images of shimmering night skies.
DETOUR DE FORCE (Rebecca Baron, US/Austria)
A fascinating portrait of “thoughtographer” Ted Serios, a hard-drinking Chicago bellhop who caused a sensation in the sixties with his psychic ability to produce hundreds of Polaroid images from his mind.
MING OF HARLEM: TWENTY ONE STOREYS IN THE AIR (Phillip Warnell, US)
An only-in-New-York account of Ming, Al, and Antoine Yates, who lived in a social housing apartment in Harlem until news of their dwelling caused a public outcry. On the discovery that Ming was a 500 lbs. pound tiger and Al a seven-foot alligator, their story took on an astonishing dimension.