Upcoming Events​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Fri Jan 10, 6-8pm - FRAGMENTS: Justin Rhody [photo exhibition opening reception] - FRAGMENTS consists of large format archival photo prints created across multiple decades and continents. Utilizing medium format and 35mm film, while also painstakingly developing, scanning, and printing the photographs himself, Rhody is decidedly more interested in a relational process to the work's creation than he is in delivering quick answers to its meaning (or advancing a possible career in the gallery-museum complex for that matter). Pulling from multiple bodies of work, this exhibition embraces the seemingly disjointed nature of a life lived when viewed mid-process. All secrets will continue to be withheld or exist only as a projection of the viewers themselves.  ~  Justin Clifford Rhody is a filmmaker, photographer, curator and musician based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work has been widely exhibited internationally and he has been organizing art, film and music events for over 20 years. Rhody is a co-founder of No Name Cinema, he runs the Physical media label, and plays in the free-improv expanded cinema trio, K/S/R. Rhody is currently editing a three-channel video installation, shooting a mid-length carnival/ufo film on 16mm, mixing an album of field recordings from Central America, and filing a claim for unemployment benefits.  (refreshments will be provided at the opening reception, alongside a soundtrack of brutal death metal)

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Tues Jan 14 - ROGER BEEBE (multi-projector 16mm film performance) - Beebe returns to the Santa Fe for the first time since 2019 with a program of 16mm multi-projector performances celebrating the 25th anniversary of his first touring program.  ~   The program features several newer works (un arbre (2024, 4 x 16mm + video), Lineage (for Norman McLaren) (2019, 4 x 16mm), de rerum natura (2019, 3 x 16mm + video), Home Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry (2021, 4 x 16mm), alongside some of his best-known projector performances (including the seven-projector show-stopping Last Light of a Dying Star (2008/2011).  He will also include a sampling of recent essayistic videos, presented as live-narrated documentaries. These works take on a range of topics from the forbidden pleasures of men crying [Historia Calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes)] to the racial politics of font choices (The Comic Sans Video) and the real spaces of the virtual economy (Amazonia).  ~  Roger Beebe is a filmmaker whose work since 2006 consists primarily of multiple-projector performances and essayistic videos that explore the world of found images and the "found" landscapes of late capitalism. He has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica as well as more likely ones including the Sundance Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art with solo shows at Anthology Film Archives, The Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, and Los Angeles Filmforum among many other venues. Beebe is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small-gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and was the founder and Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival from 2004-2014. He is currently a Professor in the Departments of Art and Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at the Ohio State University.  (filmmaker in attendance from Ohio + presented on film + post-screening Q&A)

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Fri Jan 24 - A FIDAI FILM (2024, 78 mins, directed by Kamal Aljafari) - "In the summer of 1982 the Israeli army invaded South Lebanon. They advanced as far as West Beirut, which had been home to the Palestine Research Center and its vast collection of photographs, films, and documents since 1965. The Israeli army seized the archive as war booty.... This history forms the departure point for Kamal Aljafari’s reconstruction of a revitalized Palestinian visual record, a sort of counter-archive that he calls “the camera of the dispossessed.” A Fidai Film is a blend of found footage and experimental cinema, with parts of the image cut out or replaced with material from the background, and title texts scratched out with red marks.... The film is a treasure trove of footage about Palestinian life before and after the Nakba, accompanied by a soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner and texts by writers including Gassan Kanafani. Each image and montage embodies history and art, longing and sadness and resistance and sabotage."  ~  Amidst fragments of memories and images of a people beset with the insignia of erasure, Kamal Aljafari’s cinema presents chapters of an unfinished story, all at once personal and communal. The Palestinian director and artist, born in the city of Ramla, in 1972, and based in Germany for years, has created a poetic filmography marked by restlessness, devising an elaborate mise-en-scene with different modes of resistance against the systematic attempts to destroy subjects, places, and the symbolic field that attest to a Palestinian existence. Over the course of his almost two-decade career, the filmmaker has undertaken a thorough investigation into the forms and politics of images amidst their power games, about what is seen and what has been made invisible, among material and memorial ruins interpolated in the editing room.  (Palestinian Solidarity Benefit Screening - View trailer HERE)

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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 14 - LUIS MACIAS "YOUR EYES ARE SPECTRAL MACHINES" (multi-projector 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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MARCH 2025 (exact date TBA) - RANKIN RENWICK (filmmaker in attendance from Portland Oregon + 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 offers 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 two 16mm film projectors, two 35mm slide projectors & live sound) + another local expanded cinema act + new short films by Ben Kujawski (filmmaker in attendance from New York + post-screening Q&A)

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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) - 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)