Roland Dahwen, Pam Minty, Julia Oldham
Tonight we will be showcasing three shorts by filmmakers who explore the changing landscapes, tourism, and geography of places near and far.
Program:
There are no Birds in the Nests of Yesterday by Roland Dahwen
High Lakes by Pam Minty
Fallout Dogs by Julia Oldham
Roland Dahwen is a filmmaker whose work explores migration, race, and memory. His films and installations include There are no birds in the nests of yesterday, Field Theories (with Samiya Bashir and keyon gaskin), We are all the production line, and Haft-Seen (with Stacey Tran and Jonathan Raissi). He has been a recipient of the Oregon Media Arts Fellowship and an artist-in-residence in Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Creative Exchange Lab. He is the founder of Patuá Films. His first feature film in forthcoming in 2019.
There are no Birds in the Nests of Yesterday documents el silbo gomero, the whistling language of the Canary Islands.
Pam Minty’s work explores geography, home and community through still photography and motion pictures. Her work has been exhibited at Anthology Film Archives, Center for Documentary Studies, Co-Prosperity Sphere, Film Studies Center at University of Chicago, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, International House Philadelphia, Los Angeles Filmforum, Place Gallery, Portland International Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, UnionDocs, Vancouver International Film Centre, as well as other venues throughout North America.
High Lakes is a 16mm film that combines staged scenes along with observational documentary recordings of summer housekeeping work at a lakeside resort in the Oregon Cascades.
Julia Oldham is an artist and storyteller who was raised by a physicist, a rock hound and a pack of dogs in rural Maryland. Born the same year as the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, Oldham has been consumed by scientific curiosity her entire life, and has sought through her work to understand the unknowable and transcend humanness. She blends digital media and drawing to tell stories that she finds both troubling and beautiful, ranging from the historical tale of Laika the Soviet Space Dog’s journey into orbit to science fiction visions of a post-apocalyptic future world populated by high-tech chihuahuas. She frequently collaborates with scientists and finds hidden love stories in particle physics and theoretical mathematics, and ghost stories in wetland ecology. Oldham builds her alternate realities by combining photography and video with fantastical hand-drawn characters and landscapes; and this process results in work that rides a fine line between the real and unreal.
Fallout Dogs is a cinematic portrait of Chernobyl guided by the movements and activities of the stray dogs that live in the exclusion zone and the people who take care of them.
