Centre Film Festival
Hourly Schedule
The State Theatre - Sunday, November 6th
- 11:00am - 12:12pm
- Experimental Film Block
- Gabby Sumney curates a block of experimental films from around the United States.
- 12:13pm - 12:45pm
- Discussion Panel
- Join us for a post-screening and discussion with some of the filmmakers.
Directors CARLEEN MAUER (Traces), CRYSTAL Z. CAMPBELL and MATT WHITMAN (That Was When I Thought I Could Hear You) in attendance and in conversation with experimental film curator, GABBY SUMNEY.
Kicking the Clouds
About The Film
What are the things that define identity, and what are children and grandchildren given to take with them on their journey through life? What role does language and speech play, and what happens when a language is prohibited from being spoken? A poetic exploration of the filmmaker’s Indigenous origin and mother tongue. The setting and starting point is an audio recording that the filmmaker’s mother once made with her own mother – in an attempt to learn the almost forgotten Pechanga language from her.
About The Director
The filmmaker (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington State and spent a number of years in California, Oregon and Wisconsin. While in Portland, he studied and taught Chinuk Wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. He took a BA in liberal arts at Portland State University and an MA in film, video, animation and new genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His work explores personal positions towards Indigenous homeland and landscape, and language as a bearer of culture.
Pigment-Dispersion Syndrome
About The Film
A diagnosis of an eye disorder incited this meditation on fear and beauty. Glimpses of curious and creative souls peek out of countless hand-painted film frames. Infinite colors and textures burst, blend and challenge the primacy of uniform vision.
About The Director
Jennifer Reeves (b. 1971, Sri Lanka) is a New York-based filmmaker working primarily on 16mm film. Reeves was named one of the “Best 50 Filmmakers Under 50” in the film journal Cinema Scope in the spring of 2012. Her films have shown extensively, from the Berlin, New York, Vancouver, London, Sundance, and Hong Kong Film Festivals to many Microcinemas in the US and Canada, the Robert Flaherty Seminar, and the Museum of Modern Art. Full multiple-screening retrospectives of her work have been held at Era New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, Anthology Film Archives in New York, and San Francisco Cinematheque. Currently, her 2014 film COLOR NEUTRAL has been making the rounds of the international film circuit. A new collaboration with Composer/Performer Marc Ribot premiered at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York in August 2015. Ribot and Ikue Mori perform a live score to Reeves’ SHADOWS CHOOSE THEIR HORRORS, LANDFILL 16, and HE WALKED AWAY. Marc Ribot performed his original score to the program of Reeves’ films at DIA: DETROIT for their Day of the Dead Celebration in 2015.
Building an Edge
About The Film
Seeking out the edges of a landscape you’ve never been to, we keep finding ourselves at the center of something.
All You Want is Greece
About The Film
Something is awry with Greece’s COVID-19 tourism ads—is it the virus itself? Or is the invitation to #visitgreece not as open as it seems? With a little help from datamoshing, the ads begin to offer glimpses of new anti-migrant measures and reveal the contradictions of travel.
About The Director
Alex Morelli is an artist, filmmaker, and educator based in Chicago, IL. Drawing on personal, observational, and archival practices, he makes films that examine intergenerational memory, carceral landscapes, and the relationship between place and identity. He fell in love with documentary in the Art, Film, and Visual Studies program at Harvard and later completed an MFA at Duke. He was a 2017-18 Harvard Film Study Center Fellow, a 2019 Flaherty Film Seminar Fellow, a 2021 LEF-CIFF Fellow, and a 2021 Gotham Documentary Feature Lab participant. He currently teaches in the Moving Image Arts program at University of Illinois Chicago while working as a cinematographer and editor.
To Live and Die in the Shadows: Ferns, Survival and Horizontal Gene Transfer
About The Film
180 million years ago, through a chance horizontal gene transfer, ferns acquired a much needed light sensor (neochrome) that allowed them to modify and survive in low light environments. We should all be so lucky.
About The Director
Shannon Silva
She is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her films have screened at festivals internationally including: Atlanta Underground, London Short Film Festival, Melbourne Underground, Cucalorus, Docutah, Indie Grits, Sidewalk Film Festival, St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival, and more.
Currently, she is in development on two feature, feminist, horror scripts, Keepsake and The Party. She is also in production on the short experimental, animation No Words.
double whammy!
About The Film
“double whammy!” explores mental illness and identity through diaristic form, providing an intimate look into the filmmaker’s journey of belonging, acceptance, and reclamation.
Traces
purgatory is the side of the road
About The Film
Filmed on 16mm using in-camera editing techniques, “purgatory is the side of the road” is an imagining of the liminal space between being and non-being.
About The Director
Mireya Martinez is a Mexican-American producer, filmmaker and researcher based in Los Angeles, California. After earning an MFA in Film Direction from the California Institute of the Arts, she produced and co-wrote the short film LATA (shot in Mumbai, India) which premiered at the 68th San Sebastian International Film Festival and screened at Sundance in 2021.
Currently Mireya is producing and co-writing Terra Long’s feature length documentary The Grass We Call A Tree and applying for development funds for the feature length docu-essay film, Untitled Objects.
Her own work ranges from fiction to nonfiction. Her sole pursuit is to tell and support stories that make palpable the human experience in all of its tatterdness and beauty.
THAT WAS WHEN I THOUGHT I COULD HEAR YOU
About The Film
That was when I thought I could hear you on petals, on fire, and on the edge of the bridge.
About The Director
Matt Whitman is an artist and filmmaker working primarily with 16mm and Super8 motion picture film.
His work has recently screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, ANALOGICA, the Athens International Film and Video Festival, Fracto Experimental Film Encounter – Berlin, and exhibited at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, among others.
He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and has taught at Parsons School of Design since 2014.
Spectrum Spread
About The Film
Spectrum Spread is an experiment in graphic relationships, superimposing 1940’s Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr in Ziegfeld Girl with footage of atomic bomb films produced in the southwest by the U.S. government.
“After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, Hedy Lamarr fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris to continue acting.
During World War II, Lamarr learned that radio-controlled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course. She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She contacted her friend, avant-garde composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her develop a device for doing that, and he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player-piano mechanism with radio signals. They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented.
Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi.”
This Is How I Felt
About The Film
This Is How I Felt was filmed in a twenty-four period while the filmmaker was wearing a heart monitor to investigate possible arrhythmias.
About The Director
Josh Weissbach is an experimental filmmaker. He lives in a house with his wife, two daughters, three cats, and six chickens next to a once abandoned village.
His films and videos have been shown worldwide in such venues as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, Mono No Aware, Chicago Underground Film Festival, 25 FPS Festival, and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. He has won jury prizes at Videoex, ICDOCS, $100 Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, Berlin Revolution Film Festival, and Haverhill Experimental Film Festival.
From Oct. 31 – Nov. 6, 2022, The Centre Film Festival will return for a weekend of the finest offerings in contemporary cinema at the State Theatre in State College and the Rowland Theatre in Philipsburg. In addition to internationally recognized films, we will highlight the work of Pennsylvania filmmakers and Penn State alumni.
Save the date and get an early bird discount on your All Access passes which includes all films, events, and discussions throughout the entire festival as well as special perks from local businesses. Early bird pricing will be available until October 7th!
Check centrefilm.org for more information.