Upcoming Events​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Fri Feb 7 - TOTAL REFUSAL (pseudo-marxist media guerilla) - The artist, researcher and filmmaker collective Total Refusal (Susanna Flock, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf) explores and practices strategies for artistic intervention in contemporary computer games. It works with tools of appropriation and rededication of game resources. The collective's themes are informed by critical game studies and social theory in an attempt to promote and popularize a counter-hegemonic left. They also gain their inspiration from the gaming communities to practice "agitainment" - a synthesis of agitation and entertainment. By pouring post-Marxist analysis into the glossy world of video games, the collective aims to provide an accessible yet critical examination of mass media and its underlying ideological algorithms. Its work spans films, video art, live in-game performances, texts and educational initiatives. They call their films "Machinifestos" - political manifestos expressed through machinima. By bridging the worlds of academia, art, film and gaming, Total Refusal catalyzes a Marxist critique of society through playful, analytic and humorous practice in order to radicalize its audience.  ~  Since Total Refusal formed in 2018, their work has received over 65 awards and honorary mentions - such as the European Film Award, Best Short Direction Award at the Locarno Film Festival, the Diagonale Film Award for the Best Short Documentary, the Contemporary Visual Arts Award of Styria and the Vimeo Staff Pick Award. Total Refusals’ work has been screened at over 250 film & art festivals, such as Berlinale, Doc Fortnight at MOMA New York and the Locarno Film Festival. Their work has also been shown at various exhibition spaces like the Architecture Biennial Venice 2021, the HEK Basel, and the Ars Electronica Linz.

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Sat Feb 22 - ERIC LEISER - NYC-based filmmaker & animator returns to NNC to share new work, including: Twilight Park (The Bell Tower) (2025, 60 mins, shot on 4X6 inch Holographic Film, 35mm, 16mm & 8K Digital: Seraphim Cloud grows up visiting his Grandparents in Twilight Park, a desert retirement community in the Dinétah (Navajo Nation) There Seraphim meets Howie Heehaw; a wandering clown from Tibet seeking a flowering blue cactus seen in a powerful vision), alongside new short films First World (2025, 3 mins, 16mm to digital: a black light animation about the first world in the Diné Banhané (Diné Creation Story) with an accompanying live laser light show) & Bell Foundry (2024, 3 mins, 16mm to digital: Seraphim visits the only still-operating Bell Foundry in the USA where the tradition and craft of the bell-founders' art utilizes centuries-old methods).  ~  Eric Leiser is an award-winning artist, experimental filmmaker, animator, holographer, sculptor and teaching artist, working in New York City but born in California. An alumni of CALARTS experimental animation and art programs, Eric was mentored by Jules Engel, Suzan Pitt and Jan Svankmajer. To date their work is composed of 70 short films and 5 feature films along with numerous artworks exhibited and collected globally in alternative spaces, museums and galleries over the past 20 years. (filmmaker in attendance from NYC + post-screening Q&A)

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Fri March 7 - the short films of RANKIN RENWICK - Over more than forty years, Rankin Renwick has produced a collection of films, videos, and installations that hang together as comfortably as hobos around a rail side fire. It's an oeuvre of misfits. The narrative voice bounces from first-person memoir to straight documentary to outright appropriation. It's an oeuvre of opportunism. Renwick’s work often springs from deeply divergent impulses and understandings of beauty; sometimes elegant, often discomfiting, but always penetrating. While their films can be received as equally mystifying and assaultive on first encounter, deeper viewings reveal a resounding theme to be the artist's own consistent affection for experience, for others, and for life.  ~  Working in experimental and poetic documentary forms, Renwick's iconoclastic work embodies their interest in landscape and transformation, and the relationships that exist between bodies, landscapes, and borders. As an artist who often self-distributes their work, their screening history reads as a worldwide roadmap of independent cinema. Renwick's work has been exhibited in hundreds of venues internationally, both institutional and underground, including The Museum of Modern Art, Light Industry, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Basel, Oberhausen, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Centre Pompidou, Bread and Puppet Theater and True/False Film Festival, among many others. Artist website: odoka.org  (filmmaker in attendance from Portland Oregon + post-screening Q&A)

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Fri March 14 - LUIS MACIAS "YOUR EYES ARE SPECTRAL MACHINES" (16mm & 35mm multi-projector film performance) - A selection of films in which Luis Macias investigates the concept of what he calls spectral cinema.  Exploring each of the different components of the film spectrum: the process and structure as a challenge, the photochemical transformation in the laboratory of created and/or appropriate images, editing/manipulation and re-photography through the optical/contact printer, and the projection as an event.  The properties of the image and its forms and the modification/alteration of the mechanical structure of the projector are combined in new proposals for the exercise of a human eye that explores the images of nature and/or how it is revealed to us.  These are parts of a filmic form organized in closed structures allowing intermediate spaces that force/activate improvisation.  ~  Luis Macias is an artist, filmmaker & image composer. His work deals with the formal & spectral properties of the moving image, through the exploration of the cinematographic device itself & the photochemical nature of the medium.  Focused on experimental & procedural practices of analog image, his works in Super-8, 16mm, 35mm & video are composed for projection performance. His films and pieces of expanded cinema have been shown in prestigious film, art and music festivals as well as art centers, museums & alternative spaces around the world.  Macias is a co-founder of Crater-Lab, an independent laboratory for analog cinema, and alternates his art work with specialized teaching in experimental cinema and the exploration of analog formats.  ~  (filmmaker in attendance from Barcelona Spain + presented on 16mm & 35mm film + post-screening Q&A)​

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Fri April 4 - VERNACULAR VISIONS - A 35mm slideshow of found amateur snapshots; an exploration and celebration of the medium and its subjects, spoken and coded in the visual dialect of the amateur practitioner. Presented in a relaxed tone alongside a custom made audio mix which offering the opportunity for meditative contemplation, as well as casual and comfortable social interaction. - (90 min mixtape by DJ Drips, aka NNC's janitor, dubbed specially for this show pay-what-you-want)

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Fri April 18 - K/S/R "Already in Heaven" (expanded cinema performance for dual 16mm film projectors, dual 35mm slide projectors & live sound) + LUNA GALASSINI (expanded cinema performance) + JOHNNY WOODS (expanded cinema performance) + world premiere of new super-8 short, Maspeth is America, by BEN KUJAWSKI (filmmaker in attendance from The Catskills) + record release event for K/S/R's 2xCD!

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Fri May 2, 5-8pm - MEGAN MIRRO [art exhibition opening reception] - Oakland California-based ceramicist exhibits wall-hanging work in New Mexico for the first time ever. Refreshments provided.

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MAY 2025 (exact date TBA) - OPEN SCREEN v.7 - Open to all local artists working in experimental, personal, animation or non-fiction filmmaking. One submission per person, 15 mins MAX (shorter is better). No industry-aspiring work, please. - (submissions open in April 2025)

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MAY 2025 (exact date TBA) - the short films of GRETA SNIDER (filmmaker in attendance from San Francisco + post-screening Q&A)

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JUNE 2025 (exact date TBA) - the short films of MATT WHITMAN - Whitman has been making short works on motion picture film since 2010. Mainly silent and often edited in-camera, his films over the last ten years were largely generated in response to moments of grief and loss, both private and public – particularly as seen and felt through the mediation of digital interfaces and archives. ~ This program showcases his film work in chronological order starting with an early short shot on a now discontinued Super-8mm film stock and developed at lab on the Lower East Side that has since closed. While his films have been shown at festivals and other group screenings, this program of films is his first solo screening in the American West.  (filmmaker in attendance from NYC + post-screening Q&A)

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Fri Aug 8, 5-8pm - MAX NORDILE [art exhibition opening reception] - Olympia Washington-based collage artist & musician exhibits work in New Mexico for the first time. Live musical performance & refreshments provided.