Luis Arnías

A film produced with the same amount of care as the package at its centre, Luis Arnías and Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Puerta a Puerta records the preparation of a shipment in the United States and its attendant unboxing in Venezuela.

At night in Boston, a bodega cat is the only witness when an alien rock lands among the trees in an empty lot. Crude special effects conjure a viscous white humanoid who is stalked by a figure on a motorcycle. Their encounter ends in ritual fire. A burning effigy and a Senegalese call to prayer combine modes of Afro-Venezuelan spiritual resistance from past and future into an ambiguous present.

Through its rhythmic montage and mix of observational and surreal imagery, Malembe forges oblique linkages between the United States and Venezuela, conveying the strange dissociation of being uprooted, of living between places. As a knife cuts through sky, through snow, and through fruit, quasi-ethnographic footage—with its conventional markers of music, food, ritual—joins with home-movie auto-portraiture of a New England winter, communicating a sense of dislocation at once vertiginously queasy and absurdly comic.

Through its rhythmic montage and mix of observational and surreal imagery, Malembe forges oblique linkages between the United States and Venezuela, conveying the strange dissociation of being uprooted, of living between places. As a knife cuts through sky, through snow, and through fruit, quasi-ethnographic footage—with its conventional markers of music, food, ritual—joins with home-movie auto-portraiture of a New England winter, communicating a sense of dislocation at once vertiginously queasy and absurdly comic.

With an elephant’s tusk as the protagonist, the film meditates on the endless tactility of conservation.

Shot on 16 mm and in color, Distancing documents the logistics and poetics of Miko Revereza’s decision to leave the United States and return to the Philippines.