(((((/*\)))))

This ethnographic excursion is a feast for the eyes paced by the quotidian chorus of sounds in a Chiapan village. Gradually, political themes arise. As it relates the legacy of co-director Saúl Kak’s refugeed forebears, (((((/*\))))) (AKA echoes of the volcano) gives voice to the Zoque struggle for Indigenous sovereignty, against the neoliberal state.

YEAR 2019 RUNTIME 18 minutes LANGUAGE Spanish COUNTRY Mexico PREMIERE Midwest Premiere

FILMMAKER Charles Fairbanks & Saúl Kak

The Reversal

A haunting animation of an institutional glass-plate photo archive documenting the reverse-engineering of an urban river and the invisible histories and legacies of our capital-driven landscapes.

YEAR 2020 RUNTIME 11 minutes COUNTRY United States

FILMMAKER Jennifer Boles

Ghost Strata

‘Ghost Strata’ refers to the missing elements from within the rock strata that despite their absence offer hints of what was once there. The film is divided into the months of the year in which the footage was captured. Filmed in various places over the globe, charting various personal movements of the filmmaker, Ghost Strata explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence has on the earth in the past, present and into the future. Found sound and text create a meditation on time, memory, leftovers and extinction.

YEAR 2019 RUNTIME 46 minutes COUNTRY United Kingdom

FILMMAKER Ben Rivers

Ghost Strata Q&A

Ben Rivers is an artist and experimental filmmaker based in London, England. His work has been screened at film festivals and galleries around the world and have won numerous awards. Rivers’ work ranges in themes, including exploring unknown wilderness territories to candid and intimate portraits of real-life subjects.

Saul Kak is an internationally acclaimed painter and native speaker of Zoque whose art practice is dedicated to the “cosmovisión” and rights of his people.

Charles Fairbanks is a filmmaker, writer, and Guggenheim fellow whose films have screened on POV and at Anthology Film Archives, CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, and at hundreds of festivals

Jennifer Boles is a nonfiction filmmaker, historian, and educator based out of Chicago. She works primarily with and through visual archives to speak about the contradictions and contingencies of history. She received her PhD in History at Indiana University in 2015 and her MFA in Film at Northwestern University in 2019. Her work has been screened at festivals such as DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Alchemy Arts, Antimatter Media Art, New Orleans Film Festival, Chicago International, Chicago Underground, Florida Experimental Film Festival and others. She has received grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, Indiana University, Northwestern University, the University Film and Video Association and has participated in the Brooklyn UnionDocs Summer Intensive in 2015 and the UCSC Poetics and Politics Symposium in 2019. She currently teaches and runs a fellowship program at the University of Illinois-Chicago.