Live Event – Single Channel Film Festival: Release Me
February 12 – 14, 2021
28 Howard Street, Suite 211, Burlington, VT 05401
Each year we curate a thematic film festival, and accept submissions via an open call:
Release Me
Imagining or experiencing the moment or process of liberation, of deliverance from what holds you, confined or isolated, gripped in uncertainty or fear, held back by powerful forces or structures, kept apart from others, mired in confusion, dwelling in the dark.
To witness or feel this point in time in slow motion or rapid fire
To imagine it as really possible, even sustainable.
Release me.
How do we imagine a world or ourselves changed after emerging from the grip of fear, solitude, anxiety, grief, oppression?
What does the other side of this prolonged condition look like ?
What occurs in the moment of release ?
Virtual Event – With: Lisa Crafts
February 27, 2021, 7:30 – 9:00 p.m.
Lisa Crafts is an animator and moving image artist whose interdisciplinary work addresses issues of environmental uncertainty, sexuality, creativity and chaos. She is currently working on a series of short moving image pieces about the horror, beauty, humor and loss of the Anthropocene. Blending animation, video, photography, drawing, painting and sculpture, the work inhabits the blur between what is seen and what is imagined.
Crafts’ work has screened in Europe, Asia, and throughout North America. She is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, and has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and The MacDowell Colony. She teaches in the Film Video department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.
Portrait of Atmospheric Scientist, Animation (snow, frogs, bone and mermaid), variable dimensions, silent, 2018.
Virtual Event – With: Sawsan AlSaraf
March 20, 2021, 7:30 – 9:00 p.m.
Sawsan AlSaraf (Canadian, b. Iraq) is a visual and multimedia artist who lives and works in Montreal, Canada. AlSaraf has moved between the Middle East and North America since 1977. In her work, she draws her references from her life experiences as an expatriate Iraqi woman.
AlSaraf’s artwork traverses multiple media, from her acclaimed photo-collage paintings in the “Sufi Path” series, to her experimental films in her “Rihla” series. Her work was exhibited in a three woman show alongside her two daughters in the award winning exhibition “Generation” which opened at Telfair Museums in Savannah, GA in May 2017. AlSaraf’s work has been screened and exhibited in Beijing, Beirut, Amman, Abu Dhabi, Baghdad, Montreal, Savannah, Vermont and Wisconsin.
AlSaraf has also given artist talks and lectures at multiple conferences and universities on pilgrimage and diaspora.
She holds a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada and an MFA in Visual Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
