Saturday, April 25 | 7pm | OKCMOA | 415 Couch Dr | FREE ADMISSION
Program 4:
Creation
Plays Itself
Alpine Tundra, directed by Kathleen Rugh
Program 4 features films with an emphasis on the natural world. These films show the world from the small scale, down to the micro organisms, and the vastness of the world through snowy mountains, arid deserts, and endless oceans. In these films, nature is viewed through its adaptation to the human world and its innate cycle of life. This cycle of life is where the program earned its title, observing the natural world exactly as it is.
This program consists of eleven films, each with their own distinct relationship with the natural world. One similarity shared among films in this program is how they use sound. All use sounds from nature: the wind, running water, thunder, and the drone of crickets, etc. The sounds can evoke strong sense memory, as in a droning of crickets that feels nostalgic, like when the sun first starts to set and you realize that daylight is fleeting. Because of sound design, many of the films feel familiar, even on a first watch.
All of the films feature humans or manmade structures. There is a focus on humanity’s role in the natural world. In many of them we are the destructors. In Morii, directed by Mireille Heibreder, we hear powerful reflections of the program as a whole: “As you treat the earth, so you treat the people of the earth;” “Land is more than just dirt.” In others, humans play in and revel in nature. summer school, directed Josh Weissbach and Ocholockonee Split, directed by Dave Rodriguez, both see the camera and screen as providers of novel ways of interacting with nature.
Program 4 encapsulates what it’s like to be not just human, but living. We drink water, but we also are water. We are the world around us, the healers and destroyers. There is a connection that humans have with nature that can’t always be explained, at least not simply, but it can be felt while watching this program.
-Tyler Bohanan, BFA On-Camera Acting '27
Mist, directed by Brittany Gravely
Does the Sea Have a Heart?
directed by Miglè Križinauskaitė
A poetic essay, an ode to the sea, which has no human figure at its centre, but only traces in the sand, echoes, and presence through absence. It is through this absence that the essence of the human spirit is best revealed. As Kahlil Gibran wrote: “There must be something strangely sacred in salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.”
Sunny 16 Helsinki
directed by Eve Le Fessant Coussonneau
On the border between Finland and Russia, lazy summer vibes become stifling. Under the burning sun, on an island, two beings rave. Tender wander or anxious waiting on a sensorial experience. What is there to fear from the horizon ? They seems to be the only ones foreseeing the upcoming disaster.
Drift
directed by Tessa Garland
Drift is shot on Super 8 film. The sequence captures a walk around a low-lying sandbank island in Southern Portugal, threatened by rising sea levels, where fleeting observations come into focus only to vanish again. Rotations and cycles ebb and flow, while sea-worn, foraged objects suggest deeper meaning. Prehistoric-looking cacti dot the island, contributing to its otherworldly and surreal atmosphere.
summer school
directed by Josh Weissbach
along the banks of the salaca river in rural latvia, a haven emerges where analog film wizards and aspiring apprentices unite. at this pop-up school, the art of filmmaking intertwines with botany, folklore, and magic, weaving a tapestry of creativity and tradition.
Morii
directed by Mirielle Heibreder
Morii is defined as the desire to capture a fleeting moment and to reminisce in an occurrence that may never repeat itself. This film was created as a woven reality of incidentals and hidden niches in the spirit of the word expressed through five different film vignettes that have been crafted with re-purposed archival print footage, Super 8mm print, and digital film.
Alpine Tundra
directed by Kathleen Rugh
At an elevation of 14,264 feet above sea level, the peak of Mount Blue Sky is too harsh for trees and common vegetation. Instead, the ground is covered with fragile tundra grass, weak soil, and rock. In this harsh climate exists the highest paved road in North America, that allows visitors traveling by car to partake in striking views and a sense of awe in the extremes of nature.
Ocholockonee Split
directed by Dave Rodriguez
Inspired by Bill Brown and Thomas Comerford's 'Chicago Detroit Split' (2005), Ochlockonee Split deploys unslit double 8mm film to traverse the span of Ocklockonee Bay on Florida's gulf coast. A sonic collage of local field recordings and a handheld, malfunctioning camera capture a fragmented portrait of the estuary at low tide--where the boundaries between land & sea, life & death, growth & decay, and our own sense of spatial orientation briefly collapse across the brackish water held between dueling images.
Ashes to ashes
directed by Sidney Gordon
Ashes to ashes depicts fragments of the artist’s diary as they undergo physical and emotional transformation through a blazing agricultural landscape. Words turn to ash as the past is consumed by flames. Rivers ignite from embers, flow through vessels and begin to crack. Manifested through the land and material processes lies a situated reflection on recovery, loss and evolution. The film was shot at the 2024 Independent Imaging Retreat. It was developed with common comfrey and contaminated wood ash foraged from the farm and was coated in the artist’s blood.
Same Water
directed by Martine Granby
Drawing from institutional and personal archives, this film revisits a colored-only riverside recreation space that existed alongside a celebrated white-only water park, exposing the layered histories of segregation and unequal access to nature and leisure in Jim Crow America.
Mist
directed by Brittany Gravely
a phenomenon captured in the park, days after the death of a friend
Ancraophobia
directed by Mahda Purmedi
Shot on a Bolex set on a tripod. Each shot with the duration that the fully rewound motor of the Bolex runs. Then comes in a gust of wind.