Friday, April 24 | 8:30pm | OKCMOA | 415 Couch Dr | FREE ADMISSION
Program 2:
Experience Tells Us
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The Sight Is A Wound, directed by Parham Ghalamdar
“"Do you see the burning? Do you see the graves? Or has sight itself abandoned you?”
— The Sight is a Wound, directed by Parham Ghalamdar
This program is a filmic coalition, appealing to the spectator to keep their eyes open. What will be the emblem of humanity? What is worth preserving? What can we possibly save? The collection of films in this program refuses to allow the spectator to observe passively, completely obstructing the numbing daily consumption of images and news piped into the average smartphone user’s mind. Together, the films showcase the seen and the unseen, past and present, through collections of stark auditory and visual experiences. The spectator does not simply watch; they see. Once they see, they gain insight. Only insight unclouds the obstructed eye and reveals truths otherwise unnoticed, though in plain sight.
In The Sight Is A Wound, we see the filmmaker burn his own artworks as a hushed, whispered narration motions the spectator inward, to be as close in proximity to the film as possible. The flames dominate the screen, and what is left behind? Ashes and silence. Ghalamdar provides not protest or documentary, but a provocation for the spectator and artist alike, to challenge their desensitized nature. To understand the ethical weight of the broadcasted decimation of the people of Gaza and their beloved home, and to hear that image makers cannot create more powerful art than the unbearable reality shown in real, live images of Gaza.
In an age of digital oversaturation, images lose their gravity and their relevancy. The spectator can find through lines for Program 3 summarized here: “When the eye fails, who sees”? Apply this question to BETTER LIGHTING, directed by Kathryn Ramey, and you find rampant complicity in systemic misogyny. Seeing and not seeing is also at the heart of Monument, directed by Jeremy Drummond, which filmically reenacts the work of a protest movement that covered and repurposed Confederate monuments to white supremacy. Catch Us On The Way Down, directed by Cali M. Banks, Prison and Time, directed by Evan Bode and Marvin Wade, and Good Neighbors Care, directed by Kate E. Hinshaw, all de-romanticize the hidden and the ignored, understanding that exposing the truth is always a moral good.
This program is political. Film is and always has been political. Each individual film is a new perspective on reality, and with perspective comes wisdom. Political change comes from the willingness of the cohort to seek that wisdom. Not merely to be a passive consumer but to be hungry for perspective, for knowledge, for growth. The filmmakers have worked in the sweltering kitchen of experience and offer freely, willingly, for the spectator to truly digest what they have to tell them.
- Sophie Barroso, BFA On-Camera Acting '26 Oklahoma City University
Monument, directed by Jeremy Drummond
Las Animas
directed by Matt Feldman
On the Glue
directed by Dave Johnson
From the depths of London England’s Barracks district amongst the derelict weapons huts, comes a public service expose from the 1970’s revealing “THE HORRORS” of kids participating in the act of glue sniffing.
This film and its title have been appropriated from a 1970’s BBC expose. The visual treatment exposed the footage (and the filmmaker) by gluing pieces of film together then ripping it apart. The film was edited by hand and sequenced using measurements to time each shot.
Your Darkness
directed by Susan DeLeo
A lyrical journey with super 8mm film and sound. A stream of consciousness piece conceived from dark wanderings and trance like states in and out of the western landscape.
The Sight Is A Wound
directed by Parham Ghalamdar
A haunting meditation on the collapse of imagery in the face of modern atrocities. The film begins with a simple question: What can the artist offer when the images of our time overwhelm the capacity of frames to contain them? In the wake of the ongoing genocide in Gaza—live-streamed by its perpetrators and rendered unbearable in its clarity—Ghalamdar burns over 50 of his own paintings, works exhibited in solo and group shows across renowned institutions worldwide. The act of destruction becomes a visceral response to the impossibility of creating images with greater urgency or ethical weight than those emerging from Gaza’s harrowing reality. Flames consuming canvases dominate the screen, transforming the medium of painting into ash and silence.
BETTER LIGHTING
directed by Kathryn Ramey
An agitprop made from two 30-second GE adverts from the 1970's repurposed to rebuke the role white women voters in the US have chosen to uphold white supremacy and the patriarchy instead of supporting the interests of women and anyone who loves them.
Good Neighbors Care
directed by Kate E. Hinshaw
For decades chemical company DuPont and its subsidiary Chemours poisoned North Carolina’s drinking water through illegally dumping forever chemicals into the Cape Fear River. On altered 16mm film, corporate promises of community care and pure water dissolve as rivers and bodies merge in a meditation on what it means to exist in an imperfect environment.
Trump Pinochet
directed by Gerald Hobart
This short experimental animation reflects tensions and apprehensions around the growing autocratic tendencies in the US and the world at large. It references Donald Trump and Augusto Pinochet, authoritarians who successfully manipulated public perceptions and attitudes to centralize power and wealth while undermining the democratic and moral underpinnings of their respective nations. It's uncertain spaces, course textures, clumsy imagery and dissonant sounds resonate with the tenuousness of these developments and these times.
The Call
directed by Kelly Sears
A rebellion has been building for decades. The Call is an eco-revenge film featuring unlikely instigators who were observed and filmed over three years at airports across the United States.
This is a call to action.
The Man Cave
directed by Sarah Legow
A childhood memory brought to life through a mixture of archival found photos, staged scenes, and stop-motion animation, “The Man Cave” is a brief, bewildering journey inside two young girls’ shared dream of manhood.
It takes an experimental approach to personal history, veering from the serious straightforwardness of documentary to the joyful riffs of a musical. With an irreverent, childs’ eye view of sexuality, it sees the world through a proto-feminist lens: the male “safe space” of the “man cave” invaded by girls, culminating in absurd, exuberant fantasy.
T4T
directed by Avian de Keizer
T4T is a short Super 8 experimental film about trans love and the medical system. It uses original footage of my partner, in addition to direct animation via the film being ‘souped’ in testosterone gel, and then rubbed with more gel and lotion (just as I do to my own body every night). There are also skin cells, lifted and put onto the film with scotch tape, from my partner and me. It utilizes voicemails from the pharmacy and other audio from the filming process itself (footsteps, the sound of the film going through the scanner, the buzz of the camera filming) recorded on cassette.
Prison and Time
directed by Evan Bode & Marvin Wade
Filmmaker Evan Bode animates excerpts of an essay by writer & activist Marvin Wade, who speaks personally about his 25 years of incarceration—and the growth he achieved in spite of, not because of, the inhumane prison system around him.
This collaboration was produced by Project Mend, an organization in Central New York which celebrates the lives and creative work of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people as well as other individuals impacted by the criminal legal system.
Monument
directed by Jeremy Drummond
Beginning in ghostly abstraction and accumulating texture by texture into a droning meditative trance, Monument deepens to a visual and sonic intensity, mixing Super 8 film with video footage to create a complicated, multilayered encounter with the tension of protest and reclamation. A vivid and energetic durational experience of collective resistance and celebration.
Super 8 footage of the decaying monuments of Presidents Park (Croaker, VA) are layered with video footage captured on Monument Avenue (Richmond, VA) during the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Themes of registration and re-calibration are explored through form and content and the distinct features of the media employed.
Catch Us On The Way Down
directed by Cali M. Banks
A poetic and reflexive documentary approach to reproductive healthcare access in North Carolina, specifically on Indigenous reservations.
Combining super 8mm and 16mm tactile filmmaking processes, "Catch Us On The Way Down" weaves North Carolina's hostile legislature towards abortion with personal anecdotes, and anecdotes from women of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. This film incorporates knowledge from traditional medicinal practices with present-day access to reproductive healthcare, as a hope of a return and honoration of matrilineality in tribes.
This film is a part of the Abortion Clinic Film Collective.