Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued. 2025. USA. Directed by Julian Castronovo. North American premiere. In English, French; English subtitles. 78 min.
One of Filmmaker magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2024, Julian Castronovo has come out of the gates hot. A graduate of CalArts and Brown (where he graduated from the same semiotics program as Todd Haynes), the Wisconsin-born writer and director turned $900 and a dream into this globetrotting metafiction that’s equal parts Sebald, Pynchon, Welles and Chandler—all while surfing on a computer in his bedroom. The real-life case of Eli Sakhai, a New York gallerist imprisoned for masterminding an elaborate art forgery scheme, is merely the springboard for Castronovo’s own flights of fancy, which involve a doppelgänger, a Chinese performance artist, plenty of red herrings, and a rather ingenious questioning of signs and signifiers, what’s real and what’s fake, as the filmmaker forges meaning through appropriation, reenactment, invention, and “other forms of duplicity.”
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历历如画 (14 Paintings). 2023. China. Directed by Dongnan Chen. In Chinese; English subtitles. 24 min.
Responding to the latest fads in the contemporary art market, China refashioned the village of Dafen, once the go-to place for convincing replicas and forgeries of Western masterpieces produced on an industrial scale, into a hothouse of artistic originality, selling aspiring collectors on custom-made paintings to suit their every need, whether for boardroom, living room, or laundromat. Dongnan Chen documents this remarkable trend in a series of 14 tableaux, questioning the freedoms of Chinese artists and consumers alike.