Offscreen Schematics for Past Futures
Cameron A. Granger, Ufuoma Essi, Mehedi Mostafa, and Tulapop Saenjaroen
Past event
- Price
- $12*
- Genre
- Film/Video
- Season
- Winter/Spring 2024
- DATE
- FEB 5
- IN-PERSON
- MON, 8 PM
- STREAM
- MON, 8 PM (PT) (24 hours)
- RUNTIME
- Approx. 80 minutes
- COUNTRY
- Bangladesh, Thailand, United Kingdom, USA
- Program
- Download Program Notes (PDF)
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About
Offscreen Schematics for Past Futures is a program of four short films that consider urban and rural environments and the many implications of living in this world. The four films complicate visions of space and place, poking holes in colonial and patriarchal interventions and intentional displacements of communities. A variety of offscreen “voices” —a benevolent, but naïve interviewer based in Bad City, United States; Jamaican poet Una Marson; Bangladeshi architect Keshef Mahboob Chowdhury; and Thai automated tour guide Kanya —offer points of entry into the planned and unplanned forces that form industrial cities, tourist-driven regions, and pastoral villages. These films sketch critical, speculative, and sobering perspectives that allow viewers to interrogate what unfolds around us.
Presented in English and Thai with English subtitles.
The program includes a post-screening talk with Cameron A. Granger, moderated by Jheanelle Brown.
Please note: Offscreen Schematics for Past Futures contains strobe lights.
Inspired by a talk by architect Keshef Mahboob Chowdhury, Mostafa never pretends he has answers. Instead his intuitive cinematography and imaginative sound design allow us to experience the paradoxes of the natural vs. the built, of utopia vs. the here-and-now.
—
Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles
The Jack H. Skirball Series is organized by Jheanelle Brown.
about the artists
Cameron A. Granger
Cameron A. Granger is Sandra’s son and came up in Cleveland, Ohio. Inspired by the rigorous archival and homemaking practices of his grandmother Pearl, Granger uses his work as a means to quilt his communal and familial histories into new—not just potential— but inevitable futures. He’s an alumni of Euclid public schools, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in-Residence Program.
In 2020 Cameron was selected as a Forbes’ “30 Under 30.” He’s currently part of the inaugural In Situ Artist Fellowship at the Queens Museum.
Instagram / Facebook / Website
Ufuoma Essi
Ufuoma Essi is a video artist and filmmaker from South East London. She works predominantly with film and moving image, as well as photography and sound.
Her work revolves around Black feminist epistemology and the configuration of displaced histories. The archive forms an essential medium for her as an artist and it’s through explorations with the archive that she aims to interrogate and disrupt the silences and gaps of political and historical narratives. By using the archive as a process of unlearning and discovery she seeks to re-center the marginalized histories of the Black Atlantic and specific histories of Black women. Her work draws from a range of influences, including Black popular culture, films, music, and historical texts as well as Black feminist theory ranging from writers such as Claudia Jones to Daphne Brooks. Essi’s work also seeks to examine the historical and contemporary links between the Black Atlantic and explores intersectional themes.
Her films have been screened and exhibited at film festivals, institutions, and galleries both nationally and internationally, including Gasworks, Lisson Gallery, South London Gallery, Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain (CNAC), Criterion Collection, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Galerie Rudolfinum, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Maysles Documentary Center, Black Star Film Festival, and LUX.
Mehedi Mostafa
Born in Bangladesh, Mehedi Mostafa studied architecture in Dhaka before joining the Mumbai-based film school Whistling Woods International. In 2017, he finished his diploma in filmmaking with a directing specialization. He is currently working on a feature documentary project titled Making Places and developing a fiction feature film. He has attended Docedge Kolkata, Uniondocs Summer Documentary Lab, and the Locarno South Asia Industry Academy. His latest short documentary, Fantasy in a Concrete Jungle (2022), has been selected at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, where it received the Lab Student Prize.
Tulapop Saenjaroen
Born in 1986 Chon Buri, Thailand, Tulapop Saenjaroen is an artist and filmmaker whose practice encompasses performance, video, and film. His recent shorts interrogate the correlations between image production and production of subjectivity, as well as the paradoxes intertwining control and freedom in late capitalism. In combining narrative and the essay film genres, he investigates subjects such as tourism, self-care, mental illness, free labor, power relation in storytelling, and cinema itself through re-making and re-interpreting the produced images and their networks. Saenjaroen received his MFA in Fine Art Media from the University College London’s Slade School of Fine Art, and his MA in Aesthetics and Politics from CalArts. He has been working with Electric Eel Films since 2008 and occasionally teaches in universities in Thailand.
Saenjaroen’s works have been shown in film festivals, screenings, and exhibitions internationally, including: Berlinale; Locarno Film Festival; International Film Festival Rotterdam; New York Film Festival; Cinéma du Réel (Paris); DOK Leipzig; Images Festival (Toronto); International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; European Media Art Festival; Valdivia International Film Festival; Curtas Vila do Conde; Uppsala Short Film Festival; Museum of the Moving Image (NYC); CROSSROADS at SFMOMA; Harvard Film Archive; Abandon Normal Devices(UK); NUS Museum(Singapore); Festival du Nouveau Cinéma; Taipei Digital Art Center, among many other venues. His work has been the subject of focus at e-flux Screening Room (NYC); Conversations at the Edge at Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago); M+ Museum Afterimage (Hong Kong); andKorean National Film Archive. Saenjaroen also co-founded the experimental film and media screening series Rapid Eye Movement in Bangkok. Currently, Saenjaroen lives and works in Thailand.
list of films
Pastoral Malaise (2022), 11 min. *
Dir. Ufuoma Essi
A Room with a Coconut View (2018), 28 min.
Dir. Tulapop Saenjareon
Before I Let Go (2022), 23 min.
Dir. Cameron A. Granger
Fantasy in a Concrete Jungle (2022), 15 min.
Dir. Mehedi Mostafa
* only presented in-person
trailers
