FAMILY PORTRAITS: Films & video by Charlie Egleston, Philip Hoffman, and Naomi Uman

A selection of works by filmmakers exploring ancestry from places of origin through the language, customs, myths & rituals of hallowed sites and the historical remnants of familial lore to personal reflections on immediate members through the voices and faces of loved ones remembered.

Presented in partnership with FRAMES Film Series.

Friday, July 28 @ 7pm

$10 admission — cash only at door

(no one turned away)

Projected on 16mm film & digital video.

filmmakers Charlie Egleston & Philip Hoffman will be in attendance to introduce their work.

Program:

Kalendar

Naomi Uman | 2008 | Ukraine | 16mm | silent | 11 minutes

This silent film obliquely tells the story of language acquisition. The filmmaker, struggling to learn a new language, comes to understand that the names of the months of the year have concrete manifestations.

On This Day

Naomi Uman | 2008 | Ukraine | 16mm | sound | 4 minutes

This film explores and shares a secret that the filmmaker has kept from everyone in the village.

Family Portrait Cycle

Charlie Egleston | 2001-23 | Canada | digital | sound | 25 minutes

An ongoing series of short films spanning from 2001 to the present that explore expanded forms of ‘home mode’ moving image making. The works move from analytical views of familial imaging to the deeply personal, often reworking film and video mediums to elevate emotional and conceptual frameworks.

Kitchener-Berlin

Philip Hoffman | 1990 | Canada | 16mm | sound | 35 minutes

“Kitchener-Berlin is a tale of two cities divided by history, language, custom, and four thousand miles of air travel. Their alliance stems in part from a German migration that would settle on the small Canadian town of Kitchener as the locus for dreams of a new world. Before its renaming which followed the catastrophes of WWI, Kitchener was known as “Berlin,” so the film’s title also names a relation between cities separated by an alphabetic recess that secretes history’s hidden postures. Kitchener-Berlin is a naming of recall, a movement into the city’s Germanic traditions, and its rituals of memory, bereavement, and technology. It is Hoffman’s most frankly “poetic” film, employing image phrases across a wordless field of interlocking fragments, gathering the sum of a diary travel in overlapping movements that quietly course through a rectangle of introspection." — Mike Hoolboom

total duration : 75 minutes + intermission