Stephen Vitiello

After living in the United States for decades, Brazilian geographer Camila decides to return to her native state of Minas Gerais when a mining-related environmental disaster strikes the area. A dam burst, destroying several villages with heavily polluted wastewater from an iron ore mine. In this documentary road movie, Camila shows how mining has shaped the state’s history.

From 1984 to 2019, Lynne Sachs shot film of her father, a bon vivant and pioneering businessman. This documentary is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.

When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who's doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there by observing these disappearing neighborhood spaces and the continual, intimate labor that is performed there.

Deep black blots created with drops of photographic developer, mirrored in various shapes and sizes, are sequenced into a variety of visual rhythms that add up to a sort of uneasy animation. A handmade 16mm film with an original soundtrack by Stephen Vitiello.

Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life.

Neptune's Choice is Santos' self-described "letter to Amsterdam." With lush images, elliptical text and a haunting sound collage, this poetic work explores the artist's impressions of the cosmopolitan city. Defining Amsterdam through its historical and contemporary relation to water, Santos celebrates the rhythm and routines of the city from the point of view of an outsider. This work was created as an artist-in-residence project of the World Wide Video Festival.

A haunting and romantic journey, Forward, Back, Side, Forward Again hypnotizes the viewer with blurred imagery of passersby. Dynamic visuals converge as a striking counterpoint to spoken text by Tracy Leipold and propulsive sound by Stephen Vitiello.

Combining artfully designed sets and digital processing, Santos recreates the historic Apollo lunar landing for this essayistic video, which uses simulation to interrogate representation. Relating a long-circulated rumor that the landing was actually faked in a NASA film studio — an opinion reputedly held by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, among others — Santos delicately negotiates the increasingly blurry line between fact and fiction. As he notes in his on-screen text, the coming of the Internet makes any purported fact "easy to say, hard to prove."

In this haunting work, Santos creates an elegiac mood that suggests both intimacy and loss. Based on a poem by Sandra Penna, which was inspired by a children's song about a couple who has broken up, this tape overturns the sunny idealism and rhymes typically found in children's songs. Contradictory feelings, imperfect remembrances and the inaccuracy of time are suggested by the poignant collage of home movies, voiceover, and music.

With Salt Creek, Seoungho Cho turns his hypnotic camera eye on the harsh terrain of Death Valley. Through a series of delicate formal manipulations, he folds representations of a coldly beautiful landscape into images of seething video static, water sluicing out of a tap, and a surveillance view from one office tower into another. Stephen Vitiello's score echoes the image track in describing a gradual arc of inhospitable elegance, rhythmic grace, and decay.

Drink Deep is a lyrical vision of friendship, hidden secrets, and desires. Cohen uses several types of film image to add texture to the layered composition. Beautiful shades of grey, silver, black and blue echo the water, reminiscent of early photography and silverprints. Cohen says, "The piece was constructed primarily from footage I’d shot of skinnydippers at swimming holes in Georgia and rural Pennsylvania. It’s about water and memory and stories just submerged. It is also, in part, a response to thinking about censorship. I would say that Drink Deep is both unabashedly and deceptively romantic. Surface, flow, and undertow. What looks like paradise is always paradise lost."

Produced during a year-long residency in New York, Neo Geo is a vivid portrayal of the contemporary American cultural landscape.