FSLC Announces Ana Vaz as the 2014 Kazuko Trust Award Recipient

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces Ana Vaz as the 2015 Kazuko Trust Award Recipient. The grant is presented by the Kazuko Trust and the Film Society, in recognition of the excellence and innovation of an artist's moving-image work. Vaz's latest short film, Occidente, will premiere on Friday, October 2 and Saturday, October 3 in Program 3 of this year's Projections section, running October 2-4 and sponsored by MUBI. Visit filmlinc.org/nyff for more information.

The Kazuko Trust was established upon the death of Kazuko Oshima, a Patron of the Film Society who loved film, and experimental film most of all. It was her wish to contribute to this area of the film world after her passing, by awarding the Film Society with a $50K grant for the purpose of creating a scholarship fund for worthy experimental filmmakers featured in NYFF's Projections. In addition, a seat in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center was named in her honor.

In 2012, Laida Lertxundi and Michael Robinson each received $5,000 grants during the Trust's inaugural year, and in 2013, the committee awarded Dani Leventhal with a $10,000 grant. Last year, Jean-Paul Kelly was given a $10,000 grant. The 2015 committee includes Projections curators Dennis Lim (Director of Programming, Film Society of Lincoln Center), Aily Nash (independent curator), and Gavin Smith (Senior Programmer, FSLC and Editor-in-Chief, Film Comment); Rachael Rakes (Programmer at Large, Film Society of Lincoln Center); and Christopher Stults (Associate Curator, Film/Video, Wexner Center for the Arts).

Rakes says: "Brazilian artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz combines film and video, ethnography and speculation, precise photography and found footage in her series of short, carefully crafted works. Vaz's pieces often explore the meeting points between personal and geographic history in the post-colonial sphere, documenting place without the signals of exact physical orientation, but with a heightened sense of memory and time. Her latest work, Occidente, presents a mesmerizing cycle of establishing moments: the outside spaces of sea life, plants, and monuments, and variations on the domestic space of the table-all of which give over to a sense of locality that is at once subjectively knowing and voyeuristic, visually transmitting the scars of the past in the surfaces of the present."

Reflecting on her practice, Vaz says: "The work in itself does not exist, there is no whole or wholesomeness, what exists is a series of gestures, a multiplicity of perspectives, a savage mode of thinking, a history that is not his and that incarnates itself into a patchwork of materials and resources-moving or still, phrased or shot, imprinted or traveling. I want to disorganize, to dissociate through association-to bring things together in order to undo their normative state. A multiple becoming through film or otherwise, an untying of historical thinking and monolithic prose, a becoming that renders narration an art of trickery, of cheating and betraying both sight or sound only to permanently decolonize our modes of thinking."

Ana Vaz was born in Brazil in 1986. A graduate of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains, she was also a member of SPEAP (an experimental Art and Politics research group), a project conceived and directed by Bruno Latour. Her films have screened at a number of international film festivals including the New York Film Festival (as part of Views from the Avant-Garde, Toronto (Wavelengths), Visions du Réel, Media City, Ann Arbor, Images, Videobrasil, Buenos Aires Biennial of Moving Image, Premiers Plans, Melbourne International Film Festival, as well as solo and group shows at Rosa Brux (Brussels), Museum of the Republic (Brazil), Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), Jeune Création (Paris), and Temporary Gallery (Cologne). In 2015, she was awarded the Grand Prize for the international competition at Media City Film Festival as well as the Main Prize at Fronteira International Documentary & Experimental Film Festival for Occidente. Ana currently lives in Paris where she is developing a medium-length film with the aid of the CNAP (Centre National des Arts Plastiques) and will be a resident at Triangle Association (NYC) in Spring 2016. Her films are distributed by Light Cone.

The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from American Airlines, The New York Times, Stella Artois, HBO, The Kobal Collection, Variety, Loews Regency, Row NYC Hotel, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Support for the New York Film Festival is also generously provided by Jaeger-LeCoultre, The Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment, FIJI Water, LG, Design Within Reach, Portage World Wide Inc., KIND Bars, Deadline, Gotham, The Hollywood Reporter, WABC-7, WNET New York Public Media and Dolby Laboratories.
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