Activate a membership during our year-end giving campaign and receive a punch card worth three concessions at the AFS Cinema. Renew or sign up at the LOVE level or above and receive a coupon for an AFS-branded t-shirt.
On December 17, Spaceflight Records joins AFS for a special evening of sight and sound with a big screen presentation of John Carpenter’s 1974 debut feature DARK STAR. As a non-profit, the Austin-based record label provides equitable access to the many different aspects of the recording industry often way out of reach for marginalized musicians. An important part of that mission is being a launch pad for emerging artists and bringing Austin’s creative scenes together through events like this. Why DARK STAR? It’s a genuinely funny sci-fi farce about a junky starship, manned by bored misfits, dispatched to find and destroy unstable planets, and an all-time favorite of the label’s team. It is also in keeping with the theme of Spaceflight’s namesake—the evening promises to be a fun, multi-sensory exploration of one of the many interpretations of outer space…plus astronauts in Addidas sneakers.
Ahead of the event, AFS spoke with Spacefilght Records’ Brett Orrison and Sam Douglas to find out more.
Spaceflight Records Presents John Carpenter’s DARK STAR on December 17 at 7PM at the AFS Cinema. Join us beforehand for a live performance by Galactic Protector. Get tickets.
Tell us a little about Spaceflight Records. Spaceflight Records is the first 501(c)(3) non-profit record label of its kind in America, organized and operated exclusively for charitable and educational purposes. It was created to develop, promote and advance the appreciation of Austin, Texas musicians and their music by providing access to commercial record label services and music business revenue streams which are so vital to a musician’s success. Spaceflight provides marketing, radio promotion, video content creation, legal services, sync licensing opportunities, album release management, artist development and distribution. We provide these services at no cost to the artists, giving them an opportunity for success without incurring large amounts of debt. We are a launch pad for emerging music.
What inspired you to create a non-profit record label? Spaceflight was created to provide equitable recording contracts and artist development services to marginalized recording artists. We believe stripping down the economic barriers of promoting and distributing music will increase representation, diversity and access to the industry.
Why the film DARK STAR for this event? DARK STAR is a campy, psychedelic unpredictable sci-fi comedy. It’s John Carpenter’s first film, but it feels like it was co-directed by Robert Downey, Sr. And, I love that all the astronauts are wearing Addidas sneakers. How could you not wanna see this on a big screen with 200 of your closest friends?
What can audiences expect on 12/17 at the AFS Cinema? This will be an exploration into one of the many interpretations of outer space. A live performance by Galactic Protector will start and end the show. His songs could be described as spaceship lounge music and downbeat electronic. We are hoping it will be an event full of people that are as inspired by the exponential possibilities of spaceflight as we are.
We love this event! Does Spaceflight host similar events around Austin? This event is the first of its kind for us. AFS is doing wonderful things for Austin’s creative community and we are proud to be involved. We plan on creating more events that focus on bringing the film and music scene together.
(Still from Rosine Mbakam’s Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman. Courtesy Icarus Film)
Starting December 7, AFS presents a special series of three award-winning documentaries by Cameroonian Belgian-based filmmaker Rosine Mbakam, who NPR recently described as “…the filmmaker reinventing how African women are portrayed in movies.” Her films capture intimate accounts of African women’s lives in Belgium and in her home city of Yaoundé, Cameroon including the three we’ll be screening: TWO FACES OF A BAMILÉKÉ WOMAN (December 7), Mbakam’s autobiographical account of a trip home to Cameroon to visit her mother; and her most recent feature, DELPHINE’S PRAYERS (December 15), the story of a west African immigrant woman in Belgium who spent most of her life in prostitution; and CHEZ JOLIE COIFFEUR (December 12), a revealing verité portrait of a Cameroonian beauty salon in Belgium and its proprietor. Rosine Mbakam will join us for a virtual Q&A following the screening of CHEZ JOLIE COIFFEUR.
The immediacy of Mbakam’s camera image and her utterly unique approach to perspective has quickly propelled her into a rising global auteur. Her films have been New York Times Critic’s Picks and won awards around the world, and earlier this year, she was celebrated with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For a closer look, we’d like to share an excerpt from an interview with Mbakam in her own words, which appeared on MoMA’s blog, post: notes on art in a global context this past July. You can read the full interviewhere.
Excerpt from MoMA’s blog, post: notes on art in a global context:
Delphine’s Prayers is the first film I shot after film school, but it’s being released as my third feature. I met Delphine twelve years ago when I came to Europe to study cinema. We were connected by a mutual acquaintance as fellow Cameroonians who had recently arrived in Brussels, and we became friends. After five years at INSAS (Institut national supérieur des arts du spectacle et des techniques de diffusion de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles), she introduced me to Sabine, who became the subject of Chez Jolie Coiffure (2019), when I became interested in making a film in the shopping center nearby. As I was preparing to shoot Chez Jolie Coiffure, Delphine asked me to make a film about her first. I was a little bit surprised, telling her, “You are my friend. I don’t want to make a film about your life.” But she replied, “You don’t know anything about my life.” Two days later, we began filming, and she started telling me her story.
Chez Jolie Coiffure
2018. Courtesy Icarus Film
Excerpt from MoMA’s blog, post: notes on art in a global context:
“In film school, you learn that you have to know the story you want to tell, that you have to go through all kinds of preparations in order to make a film. But experience has shown me that sometimes, you have to abandon preparations and take what life gives you. And that’s what I experienced with Delphine. Had I waited and gone through the motions of planning before starting, had I been there with a crew, I would not have the same story. I would not have this spontaneous outpouring. And the film is also the film of the moment—of that moment in particular, when Delphine was moved to speak about what she had been through—and not a later date in accordance with a production schedule. I had to respect the moment. I hope one senses that in the film.
As African filmmakers studying in Belgium, we are taught Western cinema. I’ve had to deconstruct this to find my own cinema, because the way cinema is made in the West is not my way of doing cinema. It’s not the same reality. If I take the Western approach to making movies, I will destroy the singularity of the story that I want to film. I have to find, each time, the right way of filming the situation, story, or subject at hand. We even joked about it: Delphine asks me if I’m ready, if I have my “carnet de bord,” my logbook. And at the start of the film, she is the one directing me to sit next to her—rather than me occupying this other kind of position behind the camera. The mise-en-scène mirrors our friendship. It was similar with Sabine. She asked me in the first scene to enter the salon, to physically be a part of her world with my camera, not to film it from the outside. Sabine knows her space better than I do, she knows her story better than I do . . . and, as a filmmaker, I have to respect that. If I want to tell Sabine’s story, or Delphine’s story, I have to respect their gaze and what they have asked me to do.
I filmed Delphine at home for ten days. It wasn’t really a question of directing. Delphine knew exactly what she wanted to tell me and the way in which she wanted to say it. Throughout, I questioned my own role and place. I didn’t want to assert power over her story; I wanted to just be silent and listen, and to ensure that she was comfortable. Quickly, the bed became the focal point of our sessions. That was the place of confidence for her, where she was at ease and sheltered from the outside world— not least from her husband and children, who were on the other side of the apartment. Usually, we say that the director has the final word, but with Delphine, after ten days, the shoot ended as suddenly as it had started. One day I showed up with my camera, we talked for a little bit, and she told me that she’d said everything there was to say. No planning, the film shoot was over.
I did a first edit in 2015 and it wasn’t right. At that time, I was carrying around a kind of rage, born of my situation here, by my experience as a lone Black filmmaker in the film school, and I edited that film with my anger. I can say that. And it was not the story of Delphine, but rather the story of my bitterness. But that is not the kind of work I want to make, and so I set the footage aside and started working on a project about my mother, which would become Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman (2016). It was only in 2019 that I felt I was ready to edit the film. The experience of Chez Jolie Coiffure and Two Faces gave me the maturity to see Delphine’s story in the right way. When I started the editing, the choice of sequences and the process was really simple because the moment was right. I was no longer seeing Delphine through my lived experiences, but just seeing her as she was and is and . . . and everything was evident to me and to the editor. After editing, I asked Delphine to come and watch the film, and she saw it and told me, “I want people to see it now.” For me, this was a huge relief as I wanted to respect her voice and testimony.”
Certainly many of you reading this have seen Joanna Hogg’s remarkable coming of age film THE SOUVENIR: Part I (2019) and you are no doubt planning to join us at the AFS Cinema for the release of THE SOUVENIR: Part II when it opens on 11/19.
If you have seen the trailer for Part II you probably know that in the course of that movie the young filmmaker played by Honor Swinton Byrne makes her thesis film as her 80’s London social life swirls around her. It won’t surprise anyone that the events of these features hew closely to the events of Hogg’s own life.
Enjoy it, and if you’re new to THE SOUVENIR, have no fear, we are showing PART I – with special AFS signature pricing for members. These films have a richness of experience and a sense of place like few others in recent memory. You will leave the theater with that full feeling you have after reading a great memoir. This is a highly recommended experience. Trust us on this one.
AFS presents EL PLANETA, the debut feature film by Amalia Ulman November 3 -11 at the AFS Cinema.
Part of our Best of the Fests series, visual artist Ulman mines the devastation of post financial-crisis Spain to craft this imaginative and biting contemporary mother-daughter comedy, a selection of the New Directors/New Films and Sundance Film Festivals. With hilarious turns by Ulman and her real-life mother, Ale Ulman; a down-on-her luck designer and her one-time socialite mother try to keep up their decadent lifestyle in spite of their rapid descent from the bourgeoisie.
Here AFS Associate Programmer Jazmyne Moreno asks the question:
Just Who Is Amalia Ulman?
“Scammer.”
“Genius.”
“Provocateur.”
A few years ago, a read of the headlines and Instagram mentions would leave the uninitiated just as confused as intrigued.
Perfectly encapsulating the malaise of the times, EL PLANETA with its mother-daughter scammer duo living life on the edge in the sleepy resort town of Gijon, Spain is a cleverly wry, modern reworking of Lubitsch that will leave you asking, “just who is Amalia Ulman and when can I see more from her?”
For more on Amalia Ulman visit: https://amaliaulman.eu/
(Still from Tramaine Townsend’s FRAMES., part of Ghosts of Lost Futures)
On November 8, AFS and Austin-based Experimental Response Cinema reunite to present Ghosts of Lost Futures—a look at what happens to history when it goes into an archive and comes out the other side, fifty years later.
This special program features new video works by 10 artists commissioned by the G. William Jones Film and Video Collection, housed at Southern Methodist University. It was intended to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the archive’s founding in 1970, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns, it was not completed until Spring 2021. The artists were given access to the same cache of footage from the WFAA Newsfilm Collection shot in Dallas and complete freedom in how they re-interpreted the footage. The resulting works are profound meditations on mourning, melancholy, disaster, and various reinterpretations of the events of 2020 and 2021 through images of Dallas’ past.
Ahead of the event, AFS spoke with the Experimental Response Cinema team—Jennifer Stob, Liz Rodda, and Ana Trevino—and project curator Mike Morris to find out more.
Ghost of Lost Futures takes place Monday, November 8, 7PM at the AFS Cinema. Get tickets.
Tell us a little about Experimental Response Cinema.
Experimental Response Cinema was launched in February 2012 by Caroline Koebel, Ekrem Serdar, Scott Stark, and Rachel Stuckey. This team quickly established ERCATX as one of the most important venues for moving image art in Central Texas. Past programmers include Nayantara Bhattacharya, Phil Fagan, and Jarrett Hayman. Our current programming team is Liz Rodda, Jennifer Stob, and Ana Trevino.
As an itinerant microcinema, we hold screenings at locations generously provided by a variety of partner organizations. We love being hosted by AFS and are so proud of our past collaborations! Together we brought amazing programs to life featuring artists like Peggy Ahwesh, Chantal Akerman, and Stan Brakhage.
ERCATX screens rare and precious experimental film in all formats: 35mm, 16mm, analog video, digital video and more. Our shows are always uncommon, infrequent, intimate, and worth it! We mix activism and art, we share our platform with guest curators, we welcome internationally-renowned filmmakers, and we organize local showcases to uplift artists in our own community.—Jennifer Stob, co-programmer
Where did the idea for this particular project come from? Why this archive as subject/source material?
This project was originally conceived by archivists Jeremy Spracklen and Scott Martin of the G. William Jones Film and Video Collection. Jeremy and Scott have been eager to put this collection in the hands of artists and filmmakers as a way of providing access to the rich history of Dallas, as told through the local journalism of the WFAA television station’s reporting.
The makeup of the collection is fascinating in that it consists of raw 16mm footage that was shot by reporters at WFAA, used for a single broadcast, and then set aside before arriving at the Jones archive. That is to say, we don’t know what parts of this material ever made it onto television and what didn’t, but the films are well preserved and have been digitized by the archive in-house and they document many interesting (and sometimes baffling) moments in the city’s history.
My job was to select 10 artists who would all be given the same cache of footage to work from, without any restrictions. The program yields charged juxtapositions of the past with the COVID shutdows of 2020, the outpouring of rage during the George Floyd rebellions, and the over-mediated anxiety of the end of the Trump administration. Even so, some of the videos included in the program are also deeply personal, formally experimental, and think deeply about different forms of mediation. —Mike Morris, curator
How was this presented to the filmmakers/artists?
I tried to select those that either had a history of using found footage in their work, or some who didn’t that I thought might be interestingly challenged by a project of this nature. I presented it as an opportunity to work with this rich material in an unrestricted way, with total freedom of how to treat the history depicted in the footage–whether to make use of the historical narrative it is attached to as part of the raw material, or to ignore it completely and create their own interpretations.
I knew that what resulted would be a totally new re-making of that history in either case. Some artists had connection to the region and some were from far away, having spent little or no time in Dallas. —Mike Morris, curator
Did the title ‘Ghosts of Lost Futures’ emerge before the project or after?
I came to the title ‘Ghosts of Lost Futures’ as the new videos were starting to come together. I’ve been thinking about/with archives in my own work for some time, but at that moment I’d been reading Mark Fisher’s interpretation of Derrida’s concept of ‘hauntology’, or the notion that the past haunts the present in a number of ways. The concept comes from Derrida’s mourning of the desire for radical change in the postmodern period.
Fisher uses this concept in a similarly melancholic way, lamenting that we seem to be stuck in a period of perpetual recycling that forecloses the notion of a future that could be better than the present. He writes of the necessity to dream beyond this end of history. The works in the program feel, to me at least, haunted with the need for change in our current realities.—Mike Morris, curator
For the second straight year the various COVID protocols dictated that the Toronto International Film Festivaloffered a virtual version of the international festival, albeit one that lacked access for certain of the more interesting titles. Still, there were a lot of films to be seen and we saw a few dozen of them. Here’s hoping that we’ll be able to visit Toronto again next year and see some of our far-flung and probably much grayer film-biz associates soon. Here are some of the best films I saw while sitting on my couch. – Lars Nilsen, AFS’s Lead Film Programmer
Directed by Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s first film, winner of the Cannes Camera d’Or, is a fraught four-hand ensemble piece that takes place on the Croatian coast. A teenage girl, desperate to escape the constricting confines of her ambitious and controlling father, sees a possible escape route when a very wealthy friend of the family – a handsome man of the world who offers to pay for her college education – visits their seaside home. Complicating matters is the attraction felt between the girl’s former beauty queen mother and the visitor. The film is tense, urgent and full of rich visual storytelling. This is the kind of Cinema that charges the batteries and awakens the senses.
Directed by Stanley Nelson Stanley Nelson is to Ken Burns what Howard Zinn is to a high school history textbook. For years now he has documented the American experience particularly as it pertains to Black Americans and has done it with a scholarly rigor that puts other documentarians to shame. This, his latest, must surely be the definitive statement about the 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion, in which prisoners protested their shocking living conditions by taking over the prison and for which they paid dearly in lives and blood by the time it was all over. In addition to interviewing the survivors, Nelson and his associates have gone through the available material and much of the footage included here is searing – prison guards shouting “white power” for instance, or a recorded conversation between New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and President Nixon in which Nixon is reassured to hear that the prisoners killed were Black. This is history that is undigested, history that sticks in the throat, history that we can’t go forward without understanding.
Directed by Céline Sciamma With her latest, Céline Sciamma continues to impress as a filmmaker whose style meshes serendipitously with her story choices. This film could not be more different from GIRLHOOD and PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, but her touch with the smallest details is completely in tune with her purposes. The story is about the connections between generations of women in a family, and it is achieved with a bold narrative gambit, which I will not spoil here. The point of view character is a child, and the world pulses with the mystery and wonder of childhood. It’s a very good film and one that deserves to be watched as carefully as it was made.
Co-directed by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman Speaking of bold narratives, this is a film that seems to have more ideas per minute than any other film I have seen in years. Written by Saul Williams and co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist Anisia Uzeyman, this film is a colorful melodrama/pageant/allegory of Afrofuturist aesthetics, set against the backdrop of a colonial mining community in Burundi. Bursting with music, poetry, radical political and cinematic ideas, it leaves the viewer feeling supercharged with exciting ideas about alternate futures that do not invariably place humankind on a collision course with oblivion.
Starting this Thursday, AFS presentsThe Wilder Touchas October’s Essential Cinema series—featuring some of the most timeless comedies ever to show on screen by the incomparable and celebrated director Billy Wilder, including A FOREIGN AFFAIR (1948), LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1957), THE APARTMENT (1960), IRMA LA DOUCE (1963), and beloved classic SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959). We’ll be joined by Noah Isenberg, chair of the University of Texas at Austin’s Radio-Television-Film department and guest programmer for this series, at select screenings for introductions and discussions beginning with A FOREIGN AFFAIR on Saturday, October 2. Professor Isenberg is an editor of Billy Wilder on Assignment and author of a forthcoming book on SOME LIKE IT HOT.
We asked Professor Isenberg, the Billy Wilder expert, for some context to the five films we’ll be showing in the series:
Although it was Ernst Lubitsch, that master of subtle humor, sly innuendo, and an unmistakable air of European sophistication, who is most often thought to hold exclusive rights on the touch, his equally acclaimed disciple Billy Wilder—whose Beverly Hills office famously displayed a sign with the credo “How Would Lubitsch Do It?” in reverent cursive letters—most certainly had a touch of his own. The five films selected for this series point to the enduring legacy of the Berlin-born Lubitsch, whose BLUEBEARD’S EIGHTH WIFE (1938) and NINOTCHKA (1939) were co-written by Wilder, and who passed away in Hollywood in November 1947, at the age of fifty-five, just as the younger director was hitting his jaunty stride. They also reveal a few illustrative moments along the career path of a writer-director whose achievements have found few rivals in motion-picture history.
As the embers of the Second World War continued to burn, the Galician-born and Viennese-raised Wilder returned to Berlin, where he’d lived and worked as a young journalist and budding screenwriter throughout the late Weimar years, 1926-1933 (much of his writing from that era is contained in the newly published Billy Wilder on Assignment). As part of the U.S. Army’s Psychological Warfare Division in Bad Homburg, he witnessed the mountainous ruins left in the wake of the Allied air bombings —footage of which is intercut in the opening sequence of A FOREIGN AFFAIR (1948), his dark comedy of the U.S. occupation—and the mountains of bodies left in the death camps (his mother, step-father, and other relatives are believed to have perished in Auschwitz). Together with Czech director Hanuš Burger, he made DIE TODESMÜHLEN (DEATH MILLS, 1945), a documentary short aimed at re-educating the German masses, produced just months after he and his crew at Paramount had wrapped on THE LOST WEEKEND, his adaptation of Charles Jackson’s bestselling novel, which would earn him his first pair of Oscars (Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, shared with writing partner Charles Brackett).
In many ways a bittersweet nod to his days as a journalist in Berlin and to the city’s famed nightlife, A FOREIGN AFFAIR afforded Wilder the chance to work with Marlene Dietrich, whom he regarded as a lifelong friend and whose breakout performance as nightclub singer Lola Lola, in Josef von Sternberg’s DER BLAUE ENGEL (THE BLUE ANGEL, 1930), seems to haunt the entire film. Early on, Charles Lang’s camera takes us into the raucous Lorelei nightclub, where Dietrich’s performance, as ex-Nazi chanteuse Erika von Schlütow, features composer Friedrich Holländer seated at the piano, sharing a few drags of her cigarette—a throwback to their initial pairing on THE BLUE ANGEL and also a tacit acknowledgment of the friendship Holländer enjoyed with Wilder, when he, Peter Lorre, and several other refugees from Hitler were holed up in Paris at the Hotel Ansonia waiting for passage to America. The camera, still lavishing attention on the nightclub stage, reveals a drum kit with the Eden Hotel emblazoned upon it, the same hotel where Wilder worked as a dancer for hire, possibly a gigolo, in the mid-1920s, writing a three-part, tell-all series for his readers at the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag.
One of the many memorable profiles that Wilder wrote as a cub reporter in Berlin and Vienna was of the Swiss-French writer Claude Anet (né Jean Schopfer), whose 1920 novel Ariane, jeane fille russe, he later adapted to the screen and produced, as Love in the Afternoon (1957), starring Audrey Hepburn, in the first of a dozen charmed collaborations with writer I.A.L. Diamond. Fittingly enough, Wilder ends his 1927 profile of Anet with a couple of sentences taken from the author himself and that seem, almost uncannily, to anticipate Gary Cooper’s performance as the philandering Frank Flanagan in Wilder’s film three decades later: “The lady-killer disappears after his victory. Then the women curse the hour he was born, yet they regret not that he came, but that he went.”
In their next collaboration, Wilder and Diamond returned once more to a few evergreen sources from the late 1920s, their chosen setting for SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959), in which Prohibition-era Chicago has more than a mere waft of Wilder’s Berlin, known at the time—in a quip attributed to Mark Twain—as Chicago on the Spree. When he was just shy of his twentieth birthday, Wilder wrote a piece on the internationally acclaimed all-girl dance troupe from Manchester, England, The Tiller Girls, and their arrival in Vienna (“This morning, thirty-four of the most enticing legs emerged from the Berlin express train when it arrived at the Westbahnhof station”). It was an image Wilder never quite forgot, certainly not when he and Diamond dreamed up Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators. Their own variation at the Chicago train station has Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in full drag for the first time—coached, as fate would have it, by the Round Rock-native drag artist Barbette (né Vander Clyde), a performer Wilder knew from her Berlin tours of the 20s—and Marilyn Monroe and her dangerous curves sauntering by in a form-fitting skirt and flapper hat (“a whole different sex”).
The last pair of sex comedies selected for the series both feature Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine: THE APARTMENT (1960) and IRMA LA DOUCE (1963), the former a film for which Wilder would wrack up another three Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay) and the latter among his most commercially successful films of his career. In both instances, the Wilder touch is evident in ways that harken back to his early apprenticeship with Lubitsch and also to his years as a freelance writer, barely eking out a living, in Berlin and Vienna. In Volker Schlöndorff’s documentary BILLY WILDER SPEAKS (2006), the German filmmaker notes how the sense of alienation and loneliness, not to mention the self-deprecating mordant wit, that defines Lemmon’s character of C.C. Baxter in THE APARTMENT recalls quite vividly Wilder’s own art of getting by in the big city. Finally, Shirley MacLaine’s performance as the title role of Irma la Douce gives a second life to Fran Kubelick, the elfin elevator girl, and a chance for Wilder to entertain, even to tease, an American audience eager to appreciate his more libertine, continental sensibility.
2021 AFS Grant for Features recipients: 1: Jerod Couch, Starling Thomas, Fatima Hye, Nicole Chi Amén 2: Heather Courtney, Andrés Torres, Paloma Hernández, Renée Zhan 3: Kelsey Hodge, Jazmin Diaz, Lizette Barrera, Iliana Sosa, Chelsea Hernandez, and Sharon Arteaga
Last week, AFS announced the recipients of the 2021 AFS Grant for Feature Films. Ten projects by fourteen director applicants were selected for awards: five narrative features, four documentaries, and one animated feature. As with each group of grantees, this year’s roster is one you’ll want to keep any eye on as they develop and refine their feature films. Read on below to find out more about the filmmakers and their projects.
An essential part of our filmmaker support program, the AFS Grant provides vital resources to Texas independent filmmakers, creating life-changing opportunities for artists from diverse backgrounds that are traditionally underrepresented in the film industry and who are working outside of large coastal centers. Through the Grant and other programs, AFS is focused on making it possible for emerging filmmakers to build a career right here in Texas, ensuring that they are able to tell their unique stories and reflect the incredible diversity of this region.
GUIÁN
Directed by Nicole Chi Amén
An MFA Film Production candidate at UT Austin with a Fulbright Fellowship, Nicole Chi Amén is a director and producer from Costa Rica based in Austin. Her first short documentary GAMING: OH, IT’S A GIRL was selected in the Oscar-Qualifying film festival Short Shorts & Asia (2021) in the Vertical Theatre competition and awarded Best Editing at the Vertical Movie (2020) in Italy. Amén is the recipient of the 2021 New Texas Voices grant, a special section of the AFS Grant program that awards $10,000 to a first-time filmmaker of color making a feature-length film. This year’s grant will help her complete her new documentary GUIÁN, an intimate film that follows the journey of a Costa Rican-Chinese granddaughter trying to connect with her deceased grandma by searching for the home she abandoned in China when she emigrated to Latin America.
CRYPTIC TRIPTYCH
Directed by Fatima Hye
Fatima Hye is a Bangladeshi-American Muslim woman who grew up in Houston, Texas. She received her BA and MA from the University of Houston, majoring in Philosophy, minoring in Psychology and Media Production. A lecturer and filmmaker, Hye has directed several shorts and a featurette, ANIMALIUM. Her 2020 feature ABORTIFACENT was recently picked up for distribution by Summer Hill Entertainment and her experimental short COUNT THE WAYS will premiere at the Lost River Film Festival this month. With support from this year’s AFS Grant, Hye will complete her new feature-length narrative project, CRYPTIC TRIPTYCH, which she describes as “an art horror anthology.”
RANCHO
Directed by Andrés Torres
Andrés Torres is a filmmaker and writer from Colombia, based in Texas. As a filmmaker and storyteller, he is interested in creating non-traditional films through immersive community-based processes and non-professional actors, to explore themes of identity, representation and memory. His first feature film LA FORTALEZA world premiered in 2019 as a New Talent Award nominee at the Sheffield Doc/Fest. In 2020, the film premiered theatrically in Colombia where it was ranked in the Top20 films of the year according to Rolling Stone Colombia. The 2021 AFS Grant will help Torres complete his second narrative feature, RANCHO, which follows a former teenage actor returning home from the Army encounters the vestiges of his family’s rancho and tries to cope with the knowledge that his best friend and his parents were deported while he was away.
BLACK BUTTERFLIES
Directed by Starling Thomas and Jarod Couch
Starling Thomas is a producer, director and an award-winning screenwriter based in Dallas, whose work shines a light on the ills that Black Americans face in society. Her most recent short film HARVEST won best screenplay at Circle City Film Festival 2018 and also screened at the San Francisco Black Film Festival 2020, Las Vegas Black Film Festival 2021, and Best of Shorts Film Festival 2020, among others. She is a writer on the second season of the Emmy-nominated show #WASHED. Co-created, written, produced, and directed by fellow Dallas filmmaker Jarod Couch, WASHED# has earned top accolades such as Best of Fest: Audience Choice winner at the Hip Hop Film Festival and Best Comedy nominee at the Indie Series Awards. Together, Thomas and Couch are the directing team behind the 2021 AFS Grant recipient BLACK BUTTERFLIES, a new documentary focusing on the injustices of the for-profit prison industry. Thomas, a formerly incarcerated woman of color herself, calls on her own experience to expose the pervasive systematic oppression of the criminal justice system, particularly how it manipulates Black women.
PASTICHE
Directed by Paloma Hernández
Paloma Hernández is a Mexican filmmaker, editor and visual storyteller based in Allen, Texas. She is a DACA recipient who received her Bachelor of Arts in TV & Film Production from The University of North Texas where she discovered her passion for post-production and has been working as a video editor ever since. Hernández is the recipient of an AFS Grant for her new narrative feature PASTICHE, centered on a struggling art student inadvertently who takes part in an art forgery scheme and stumbles into a world of corruption that tests her identity, moral boundaries, and her true talents.
SHÉ
Directed by Renée Zhan
A past AFS Grant recipient, Renée Zhan is a prolific director who has directed dozens of short films over the past few years. Her films have screened and won awards at festivals internationally including Locarno, Tiff, SXSW, and the Jury Prize for Animated Short at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival (for her breakout RENEEPOPTOSIS) as well as been nominated for the Student BAFTA and Annie Awards. In her work, Zhan is primarily interested in exploring issues of the body, nature, and sexuality—all things beautiful, ugly, and squishy. With support from this year’s AFS Grant, Zhan will develop her new animated feature SHÉ, about Fei Li, the best violinist the Lost Maples High School orchestra has seen in 50 years. With a solid circle of friends, good grades, and a secret white boyfriend, everything is going great for Li—until one day, a new girl, Mary Jung, transfers into her high school.
SMILE
Directed by Kelsey Hodge
A recent graduate from Southern Methodist University with a B.F.A. in Film & Media Arts and recipient of SMU’s Outstanding Creative Achievement in Screenwriting Award, Kelsey Hodge aims to create and share stories about strong and diverse characters to provide representation for people whose stories aren’t being told. She has directed many short films, served as director of photography for many more, and has production experience on local independent film and professional television sets (Netflix’s Umbrella Academy.) As a Black filmmaker, Hodge continues to work towards a more diverse film industry through the stories told and the cast and crew involved. She received a 2021 AFS Grant for her new feature narrative film, SMILE, a drama that follows Jules during the summer after returning home from the lowest point in her life: a failed suicide attempt.
WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND (LO QUE DEJAMOS ATRÁS)
Directed by Iliana Sosa
Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020, Iliana Sosa is a documentary and narrative fiction filmmaker and a past AFS Grant recipient, based in Austin. Sosa’s first narrative fiction feature, DETAINED IN THE DESERT, premiered at the Los Angeles Latino Film Festival. Her documentary short AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE, co-directed with fellow AFS Grant recipient Chelsea Hernandez, won a Jury Award for Best Texas Short at SWSW 2018. She is the recipient of a 2021 AFS Grant for her first feature documentary, WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND (LO QUE DEJAMOS ATRÁS). The film centers on Sosa’s grandfather, Julian, who is told that he can no longer travel to the U.S. to visit family. As a result, he begins building a house in rural Mexico that will help keep the family together once he’s gone.
UNTITLED 19th NEWS FILM
Directed by Chelsea Hernandez and Heather Courtney
Chelsea Hernandez and Heather Courtney are the co-directors behind this new documentary feature about a fearless group of journalists who seek to upend the white male status quo by launching an all-women and non-binary news start-up. Both established documentary filmmakers with award-winning projects, UNTITLED 19th NEWS FILM is their first documentary project together.
Named as one of Texas Monthly’s 10 Filmmakers on the Rise, Chelsea Hernandez is a Mexican-American filmmaker based in Austin. She has worked for ten years in the documentary television and film industry, most recently on THAT ANIMAL RESCUE SHOW executive produced for CBS All Access by Richard Linklater. She made her feature directorial debut in 2019 with the award-winning documentary BUILDING THE AMERICAN DREAM, recipient of a 2018 AFS Grant. Heather Courtney is an award-winning filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles. Her 2011 film WHERE SOLDIERS COME FROM won an Emmy, an Independent Spirit Award, and a SXSW Jury Award. Her other critically acclaimed films include the Ford-funded feature documentary on DACA students, THE UNAFRAID, LETTERS FROM THE OTHER SIDE, and LOS TRABAJADORES/THE WORKERS, winner of an IDA Award and a SXSW Audience Award.
UNTITLED TEXAS LATINA PROJECT
Directed by Jazmin Diaz, Lizette Barrera, Sharon Arteaga, Iliana Sosa, and Chelsea Hernandez
2021 AFS Grant recipient UNTITLED TEXAS LATINA PROJECT is a new narrative feature film exploring Latina/x identity in Texas through the lens of five Latina directors living and working in the Lone Star state. All five directors are award-winning filmmakers and past AFS Grant recipients and include Iliana Sosa and Chelsea Hernandez, with:
Jazmin Diaz is a Mexican American filmmaker from Fort Worth and is the writer and director of the short film CARNE SECA, which premiered at SXSW 2015 and received awards from the Directors Guild of America and the HollyShorts screenwriting contest.
Based in Dallas/Fort Worth, Lizette Barrera’s films have played at festivals and shown on networks worldwide, including her short film MOSCA (HBO) and her short documentary film MR. PASTOR JONES. (ESPN). She was awarded The Filmmaker to Watch Award at the Women Texas Film Festival and is the recipient of an AFS Grant for her short film CHICLE, which premiered at SXSW 2019.
Sharon Arteaga is a first-generation Mexican American filmmaker from Corpus Christi. Arteaga has won many short film competitions, including being selected as a 2019 Tribeca Chanel Through Her Lens finalist for her short screenplay IN TOW and she is a recipient of an AFS Grant for short film PLANE PRETEND, winner of numerous awards including the Jury and Audience Award for Best Made in Texas Film at Cine Las Americas International Film Festival and the Premio Mesquite Award at CineFestival.
For everyone who has ever enjoyed the classic era of ’80s and ’90s Hong Kong Action, the new filmRAGING FIRE is going to feel like an absolute blast from the past. It’s the last film directed by Benny Chan, and it stars the classic good guy/bad guy tandem of Donnie Yen and Nicholas Tse. The story centers on Bong (Yen), a highly respected cop with a long history of success on dangerous cases, whose past soon comes back to haunt him when his former protégé (Tse) seeks revenge against all those who have wronged him.
RAGING FIRE is both a throwback to the golden age of Tai Seng VHS tapes with ear-blisteringly overloaded mono Cantonese soundtracks and an example of what the old school has to teach us today. Don’t believe us though—read on to see what the critics have to say.
Currently the No. 1 film in China, RAGING FIRE blazes onto the big screen at the AFS Cinema this Friday. Purchase tickets.
REVIEWS
“An explosive action film like they used to make, with creative car chases on Hong Kong’s iconic Nathan Road, wild shoot-outs and intense hand-to-hand combat. Aided by the star magnetism of Yen and Tse and back in his element on the colorful streets of Hong Kong, Chan goes out with both guns blazing.” – G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle
“Raging Fire is an accomplished visual feat with detailed fight choreography and strong physical performances. But it’s definitely for those more swayed by guns than gags, and by action than character.” –Anna Smith, Deadline
“Rest In Peace, Benny Chan. Your final film might be your best overall work. Raging Fire is everything you would expect it to be. Raging Fire is straight fire. Raging Fire puts most Hollywood action movies to shame. Rarely do you watch a movie and get everything you expected from it. [It] is the action movie of the year.” – Todd Gaines, Bulletproof Action
“Raging Fire has enough incendiary shoot-outs, nail-biting car chases and brutal hand-to-hand combat to satisfy even the pickiest of action movie aficionados.” – Edmund Lee, South China Morning Post
“In a world where so many big-budget action movies are either sanitized or stylized to the point of abstraction, Raging Fire reminds us that a little bit of real-world chaos can still go a long way. If you can sit through the occasional sermon about the role of police in modern society, you’ll find yourself in the lap of true action greatness.” – Matthew Monagle, Austin Chronicle
There aren’t many films from 1933 that get the YouTube “This Video May Be Inappropriate For Some Users” gate, but LOT IN SODOM is no ordinary film. Made by the wealthy dilettante – and heir to large sums of the Western Union fortune, James Sibley Watson, who became interested in avant-garde literature while at Harvard and later expanded his interests to film.
1933’s LOT IN SODOM follows the story of the righteous Lot who escapes from the sinful city of Sodom with his wife and daughters. The parable is reproduced here with the same Biblical result for Lot’s wife. The major difference here is that there is no doubt that Watson and his collaborators find the moral abandon of Sodom, with its writhing orgies of shirtless young men, much more compelling than the righteousness of the long-suffering Lot. The influence of Jean Cocteau’s BLOOD OF A POET (1932) seems apparent here, though as Sam Staggs noted in an article for the Gay and Lesbian Review, it is, if anything, more homoerotic than Cocteau’s film.
We’ll let you judge for yourself. Just tell YouTube that you understand and wish to proceed. No turning back.
There’s an old tradition of American stars appearing in Japanese television commercials, often in wacky scenarios that play up some aspect of their public personalities or best known roles. Here are a few classic examples of those.
One of our favorite actors, and we’re guessing one of yours too, is Texas’ own Tommy Lee Jones. He is an Oscar winner and a member of the Texas Film Hall Of Fame, just to scratch the surface of the many shelf-crowding accolades he has received over the course of his long career. And, as the following Japanese commercials make clear, the admiration for – and intimidation power of – Tommy Lee Jones travels effortlessly to the Eastern Hemisphere.
In these commercials, which seem to take place in a MEN IN BLACK – inspired alternate reality, Jones plays a sort of grumpy, shape-shifting Stranger In A Strange Land, observing Earth (specifically Japanese) customs and wryly commenting on them from an outsider’s perspective, before downing what appears to be about a four ounce can of Suntory Iced Rainbow Blend coffee.
These commercials have been kicking around on YouTube for a while but now you can watch them with English subtitles by clicking on the little “CC” button. Not all the gags work. Some are just dumb, some may require more Japanese pop-culture context, but the collection is fast paced and it is a joy to watch Tommy Lee Jones having fun behind his stone-faced exterior. Enjoy.
When we look back at the work of Maya Deren (born April 29, 1917, died October 13, 1961) the breadth of expression is just breathtaking. She seemed to reinvent Cinema by rearranging its component parts of drama, music, ritual and visual arts along new bold lines that were absolutely personal, completely idiosyncratic, and unmistakably direct. AFS has shown her films often, and will show them many more times as they forever point the way to the future of artistic expression.
By the time the 27-year old Deren made the film you see here she had already emigrated with her parents from Ukraine to escape the brutal Soviet Bolshevik pogroms, become a revolutionary Socialist leader in New York, received a masters degree in English literature, become a professional journalist (and later a photojournalist), and then signed on with the pioneering African American dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham as an assistant and collaborator. All of that was before she began making and exhibiting films, a field that she revolutionized, changing the way that avant-garde films were received and appreciated.
She may rightly be called the Godmother of Avant Garde film. Her efforts in popularizing the form changed the landscape of the medium forever.
WITCH’S CRADLE, the unfinished, silent, deliberately unscored film you see below, was made in 1944. That was the same year as DOUBLE INDEMNITY, just to set your frame of reference for how unusual and ahead of its time the film is. It stars the mysterious Pajorita Matta and Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. Keep in mind that this is not the finished product, only a pass at editing some of the footage that was shot before she was presumably swept away into some other creative endeavor. Still, the vision is crystal-clear, the sense of ritual, dance and painterly visual composition. It’s remarkable in any context, let alone 1944.
