Herb Alpert Award Winners to Show Films at the NY Film Festival This October

The Projections Series at the Festival is devoted to innovative, experimental, and avant-garde film and video work. The screening is on Friday, October 3rd at 9:15 p.m. at the Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th Street, New York City.

Deborah Stratman, (2014 Herb Alpert Award winner), makes experimental documentary films that investigate issues of power, control and belief, and explores how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Stratman is presenting Second Sighted, 2014, made in collaboration with composer Olivia Block. The work is fashioned solely from films from the Chicago Film Archives. "Obscure signs portend a looming, indecipherable slump. An oracular decoding of the landscape."

Kevin Jerome Everson, (2012 Herb Alpert Award winner), uses scripted, re-enacted, and documentary elements in his films while emphasizing materials, process, and procedures. The work foregrounds the aesthetic expression of daily life, questions representation and history, and examines just what "labor" means. His two pieces being shown on October 3rd are:

Fe26, 2014, shot in 16mm, examines the tensions between illegal work and basic survival tactics that exist in areas of high unemployment.

Sound That, 2014, a digital projection, follows employees of the Cleveland Water Department on the hunt for what lies beneath, as they investigate for leaks in the infrastructure in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Everson examines the relationship between what's seen above ground and the elements taken for granted beneath the surface.

The third filmmaker is Jacqueline Gross, (2007 Herb Alpert Award winner), who makes movies and web-based works that explore how political, cultural, and scientific systems change the ways we think about ourselves. For the last few years she has used 2D digital animation techniques to work within the genre of the animated documentary.

Goss' new work, The Measures, retraces the journey of two 18th-century astronomers tasked with determining the true length of the meter. Made in collaboration with Jenny Perlin, The Measures explores the metric system's origins during the violence and upheavals of the French Revolution, and considers the intertwining of political and personal turmoil, the failures of standardization, and the subtleties of collaboration. The film will be screened with a live voiceover by Goss and Perlin.

On October 5th, at 6:30 p.m. in the Francesca Beale Theater, a third work by Kevin Jerome Everson will be featured. Sugarcoated Arsenic, made collaboratively with historian Claudrena Harold, was shot in 16mm, and looks as if someone had made a documentary film at the University of Virginia in the 1970s. Everson notes, "It's as if Claudrena Harold had found a reel of film as she was researching materials about African American life at UVA."

The New York Film Festival's Projections section presents an international selection of artists' film and video work that expands upon our notions of what the moving image can do and be. Drawing on a broad range of innovative modes and techniques, including experimental narratives, avant-garde poetics, crossovers into documentary and ethnographic realms, and contemporary art practices, Projections brings together a diverse offering of short, medium, and feature-length work by some of today's most vital and groundbreaking filmmakers and artists.

Projections is curated by Dennis Lim (Director of Programming, Film Society of Lincoln Center), Aily Nash (independent curator), and Gavin Smith (Senior Programmer, Film Society of Lincoln Center & Editor-in-Chief, Film Comment).

The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts is an unrestricted prize of $75,000 given annually to five risk-taking mid-career artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theatre and the visual arts. The prize was initiated and funded by the Herb Alpert Foundation and has been administered by California Institute of the Arts since 1994.

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