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A heavy summer night on the island of Lemnos: a pirate radio plays rebetiko, filling a smoky room with mournful music from a century ago, born then of forced displacement from Asia Minor and working-class counterculture in Greek cities. Artist-filmmakers Elise Florenty and Marcel Türkowsky, who previously tackled the ongoing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean through video game–inflected imagery, arrive at a powerful sort of representation via sensation and memory. Their host, whose entrancing set is staged for the camera in real time, finds in music a way to access feelings of longing, exile, and the search for liberation across past and present.
Luke Fowler’s portrait of pioneering disco producer Patrick Cowley also profoundly questions how to portray a subject through absence. Fowler’s 16mm imagery of San Francisco—recorded during a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts and edited during last year’s pandemic lockdown—offers a fragmentary but glittering elegy in sync with Cowley’s too-short, luminous career and signature energetic sound.
Patrick. 2020. Great Britain. Directed by Luke Fowler. US premiere. 21 min.
Don't Rush. 2020. Belgium/France/Germany. Directed by Elise Florenty, Marcel Türkowsky. North American premiere. In Greek; English subtitles. 54 min.
Virtual Cinema is not available to Annual Pass members. Virtual Cinema screenings are not available outside the US.