Prismatic Ground Presents
30 Episodes
One of the most creative and galvanizing venues for film exhibition to emerge during the pandemic, Prismatic Ground is a festival centered on the intersection between experimental and documentary film. This selection of shorts from its first three editions, in April 2021, May 2022, and May 2023, offers an eclectic cross section of aesthetically and politically radical work. Highlighting filmmakers whose approach to image-making eschews traditional narrative in favor of abstraction and sensation—and whose techniques span animation, archival collage, 16 mm photography, and digital technology—Prismatic Ground shows how avant-garde techniques can be deployed to confront violent histories of colonialism, genocide, and capitalism, introducing audiences to a cinema of radical potential. The additions from year three confront topics as varied as migration, community, family, and loss with rigorous attention to form and breathtaking emotional power. The fourth edition of Prismatic Ground runs from May 8–12, 2024.
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15:52Episode 1A New England Document
Episode 1
Directed by Che Applewhaite • 2020 • United States, United Kingdom
Using found footage with selected images and text from the Marshall Collection at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, A NEW ENGLAND DOCUMENT reconstructs the genocidal impulses of two ethnographers’ ...
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17:45Episode 2Letter From Your Far-Off Country
Episode 2
Directed by Suneil Sanzgiri • 2020 • United States, India
Shot with 16 mm film stock that expired in 2002—the same year as the state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide in Gujarat—and filmed amid the anti–Citizenship Amendment Act protests in Delhi, LETTER FROM YOUR FAR-OFF COUNTRY finds filmmaker Su...
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26:05Episode 3A Demonstration
Episode 3
Directed by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner • 2020 • Germany, Netherlands
Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of early modern European science, A DEMONSTRATION explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from tod...
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10:33Episode 4Two Sons and a River of Blood
Episode 4
Directed by Amber Bemak and Angelo Madsen Minax • 2021 • Mexico
The self-made family unit of two dykes and a trans man imagine a kind of erotic magic that will allow for procreation based solely on desire.
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06:05Episode 5Bodies in Dissent
Episode 5
Directed by Ufuoma Essi • 2021 • United Kingdom
BODIES IN DISSENT is an exploration of the body as a central site of remembrance and resistance, exploring ideas around “bodily insurgency” and using the body as an archive, a point of return, a position of refusal, and a broker between transgenera...
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08:43Episode 6Melting Snow
Episode 6
Directed by Janah Elise Cox • 2021 • United States
Two tons of snow—flown from New Hampshire to Puerto Rico in 1952 in order to “gift” Puerto Ricans a “white Christmas”—become a metaphor for the colonialist paternalism of America’s relationship to Puerto Rico.