Screening November 20
Doors 8pm, for an 8.30pm start

A program of films that consider deep time, psychogeography, landscape as character, and subversive otherworlds.

16mm films from the National Film and Sound Archive alongside films made in the field and with The Weight of Mountains biennial:

SCREENING NOV 20:

NFSA FILMS:
Maya Deren, At Land | 15mins
(a dream film expressing the mythological voyage of a woman through a constantly changing landscape)

Sakumi Hagiwara, Kiri = Mist | 8mins
(a fixed camera photographs a fog shrouded landscape, at first totally white but then gradually revealed. The music is 'Japanified concrete')

Robert Morris, Mirror | 9mins
(Sculptor Robert Morris manipulates a rectangular mirror in a snow landscape, recording reflected images in relationship to the film frame)

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THE WEIGHT OF MOUNTAINS FILMS:
Terra Jean Long (Canada) - 350 MYA | 5mins
(The Tafilalt region in the Sahara Desert was once the Rheic Ocean. 350 MYA conjures the ocean's presence in the landscape: deep time in the folds of space)

Jean-Jacques Martinod (Equador) - Grabados del Ojo Nocturno | 7mins
(a collage of memories turned sensory vision, from the Sahara desert to the waters of South America)

Melody Woodnutt (Australia/Iceland) - Love and Other Ecologies | 15mins
(a subversive pagan-western fever dream balancing bodies, nature, and the occult, filmed in the subarctic)

Anita Bryan (UK) and Melody Woodnutt - Death Letter | 4mins
(the beginning of a film letter exchange between two artists across durational time, geographies, and interweaving worlds as death or passage echoes throughout)

Sabina Maselli (AU) - Equations for a Falling Body | 3mins
(shot in Iceland the film lingers in conversation with the ice of a glacier)

ABOUT:

The Weight of Mountains is a global and nomadic platform for filmmaking and an ongoing research project.
It includes a process-based artistic development residency for filmmakers alongside international platforms for presentation. The residency is held every 2 years in a difficult or challenging environment outside of conventional filmmaking contexts. It enables new dialogues, directions, and innovations in filmmaking to occur while artists are removed from the “industry” to explore a common artistic theme: the relationships between humanity and environment, psycho-geography, peripheral site-specifics, the nature culture symbiosis, and/or landscape as character.

Past selected filmmakers have gone on to present film or media artwork that they’ve created during our biennial residency at TIFF, RIFF (Reykjavik), 57th Venice Biennale, no.w.here London, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, IFFR, The Weight of Mountains Film Festival, National Geographic, CNN, Sundance, KIAC Dawson City, CBC, The National Film Board of Canada, National Museum of Art Osaka (permanent collection) and multiple galleries, festivals, and film events globally.

We encourage personal and professional development and hope to continue along our trajectory of gathering voices together, so that in half a century we can look back upon a chorus of filmmakers ideas in symphony with the environments we have immersed into. This collectivity will be archived. Our final cohesive work may only be realised when we cannot go on any longer.

The Weight of Mountains is an artist run program that collaborates with art organisations globally. It is nomadic and somewhat decentralised from mainstream notions of 'the institution'. We tailor a space for filmmakers to be free in their ideas with a cultivated space made anew for each biennial residency and encourage filmmakers to find likeminded adventurers within our frame.

We hold values of environmental, community, or site-specific ideologies that mean we are responsive and respectful of places we visit. We pay respects to First Nation Elders past, present and future on each of the diverse lands we visit and to all locals who have welcomed us so warmly the world over. We are grateful to the established arts communities and organisations who have worked with us in imagining the world together.

Our film collective/platform, "The Weight of Mountains" is founded and run by its Artistic Director, Melody Woodnutt and co-curator, Tim Marshall, who will be in attendance for the screening at Artist Film Workshop in Melbourne.

More information:
http://twom.is