Q&A with Simon Liu, Kevin Jerome Everson, and Francisco Rodríguez Teare on Oct. 6 & 7

Refuse Room
Simon Liu, 2024, Hong Kong/U.S., 10m
World Premiere
Tangled spirals, rapid encounters, a quiet war between the vertical and the horizontal: Simon Liu’s Refuse Room captures Hong Kong’s architectural densities and lurid fluorescence through shadows, graffiti, and detritus, surfacing the tense and dizzying atmospheres of a city in anxious slumber, caught between fragmentation and solidarity.

Machine Boys
Karimah Ashadu, 2024, Nigeria/Germany/Italy, 9m
Hausa with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A film of electric sonic and visual rhythms, Karimah Ashadu’s Machine Boys is one part 21st-century Scorpio Rising and one part incisive micro-ethnography. Intimately capturing Lagos’s sub-economy of motorcycle taxis—known locally as “Okada”—Ashadu zooms in on both the thundering, tricked-out machines and the bodies of the riders, whose performances of masculine bravado mask the precarity of their dangerous and illegal livelihoods.

Razeh-del
Maryam Tafakory, 2024, Iran/U.K./Italy, 28m
Farsi with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The dense layerings of inky newsprint and appropriated footage in Maryam Tafakory’s Razeh-del retell the history of Zan, Iran’s first women’s newspaper, whose brief run in the late 1990s inspires two schoolgirls to propose a film of their own. Amid intensely saturated fields of amethyst, crimson, and amber, images of women emerge and dissolve, smothered in inscriptions quoting angry responses from male readers and words of support from women who dream of an impossible cinema.

Practice, Practice, Practice
Kevin Jerome Everson, 2024, U.S., 10m
North American Premiere
Demonstrating his signature attention and economy, Kevin Jerome Everson finds a resonant frequency in the work of two subjects: Jerry Berritt, a telephone company lineman in Mansfield, Ohio, and Richard Bradley, whose political activism drove him to scale a government flagpole in San Francisco. Everson charts parallels between these men’s labors; their transmissions are shot through with the specificities of history, commingling gestures of labor and protest. 

October Noon
Francisco Rodríguez Teare, 2024, Chile/France, 12m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
“Everything is on fire.” Atop San Cristobal Hill, four friends overlook the city of Santiago and reflect on the events of the 2019 popular uprisings in Chile and the police violence that followed. Together, they inflate balloons, graffiti a friend’s torso, and discuss cinema, sustaining the reverberations of revolution as a collective memory, an echo in the street.