PLAYTIME (SHORTS)

Shorts / 75 mins

PLAYTIME (SHORTS)

Sundance Kabuki Cinemas
March 15, 2015 5:00 pm Not Available

PLAYTIME (SHORTS)

Sundance Kabuki Cinemas
March 16, 2015 5:20 pm Not Available

Description

In this collection of exuberant and wildly imaginative short works, global politics, mythologies and simple sensual encounters are the laboratories for playful visual and aural experimentation. Puns, image-rhymes, fabulous logic and transcendent moments of stillness are the ways through which these artists explore everything from the “cloud” to financial meltdowns to filmmaking itself.

– Curated by Chi-hui Yang

In This Program

Curtains

Jenyu Wang / Shorts / USA / 2014 / Short / 3 mins
From this Chicago-based artist comes an opening provocation for attention and tension, where the ripples of an anticipatory stage curtain are the main attraction.
Ham Over Rice

Ying Liu / Shorts / USA / 2014 / Experimental, Short / 2 mins
In this pun-filled, rooftop-to-subway escapade, New York-based Liu deconstructs the Chinese myth of the legendary archer Houyi, who saves the world but loses his immortality. Animation, live action and a kaleidoscope of text connect the worlds.
Liquidity, Inc.

Hito Steyerl / Shorts / Gemany/USA / 2014 / Short / 28 mins
In this alternately absurd and poignant provocation, liquidity is metaphor, linking financial malfeasance to environmental disaster through the central character of financial advisor-turned-mixed martial artist Jacob Wood. As DIY CGI effects entertain the screen, militant meteorologists, shock-proof portfolios, cloud systems and Bruce Lee’s mantra “be like water, my friend” intervene to reveal a cosmology of interlocking ideological systems.
Moving to the Cloud

Laura Hyunjhee Kim / Shorts / USA / 2014 / Short / 2 mins
Digitalism might not be so friction-and-effort free, as demonstrated in this playful, hyper-colored, bubble-bursting intervention from San Francisco-based video artist Kim.
Odd Rumblings

Jun Cen & Gabriel Sedgwick / Shorts / USA / 2014 / 6 mins
The gorgeous, spare, wintry pop of Brooklyn, NY-based band Odd Rumblings animates the journey of a young woman who escapes institutionalized hibernation and escapes to the Arctic, where a snow monster might be the key to her past and future.
Raymond

Nina Yuen / Shorts / USA / 2014 / Short / 11 mins
Daydreams and musings, life and the universe, and the name of every person he’s known who has died begin to draw a portrait of Yuen’s father, who ruminates while this New Jersey-based artist constructs a fragmented, inspired and poignant imagistic universe to match.
Snipers in the Trees

Curtis Choy / Shorts / USA / 1985 / Experimental, Short / 12 mins
Curtis Choy’s (FALL OF THE I-HOTEL) early free-wheeling experimental shorts are a portrait of a vital San Francisco arts scene and a blistering, tongue-in-cheek comic assault on all those powers that (still) need checking. In seven wildly contrasting episodes — including “Burros at Taco Bell” and “Hip-Shaking C-Town” — race, cultural politics and place are skewered with Choy’s mondo-humor, where revolutionaries take a bao break, and macho men get down. Appearances by Janice Mirikitani, Lane Nishikawa, Marc Hayashi and more.
Trails

Cyrus Tabar / Shorts / USA / Experimental, Independent, Short / 4 mins
In multi-hyphenate Tabar’s hypnotic, near psychedelic study of modernity and landscape, the view from a Tokyo-Kyoto bullet train is abstracted through flashes of color and an original drone soundscape.