
Still from Pool Party
Watch a selection of phantasmagorical visions from the Boston Underground Film Festival.
For over twenty-three years, the Boston Underground Film Festival (BUFF) has been bringing the finest in vanguard filmmaking from all over the world to New England cinephiles.
BUFF celebrates unconventional stories, idiosyncratic voices, fever dreams, nightmarish visions, and all manner of cinematic forms.
Not recommended for younger audiences.
The Flypaper Spectacular
Luke Liberty, USA, 2023, 8 min.
A free spirit, with time to burn.
Sogno Blu
Coco Roy, USA, 2022, 2 min.
Three witches appear in a dream to bring a message with no answers.
Skjemt Blod
Gwenmarie White, USA, 2019, 6 min.
“Girl kvlture” as a vehicle for meditation on American brutality.
Pool Party
Ellie Stewart, Canada, 2023, 8 min.
Outcast Freya attempts to make it through the night at her childhood best friend’s seventeenth birthday party without revealing her most dangerous secret.
Diddie Wa Diddie
Joshua Erkman, USA, 2019, 8 min.
A French speaking otherworldly creature shows a recently separated couple what their true emotional needs and desires are.
Viola vs. The Vampire King
Kevin Fermini, USA, 2018, 9 min.
Everyone’s favorite Super 8 vampire kung-fu revenge film.
Ultra Witchy
Mariah Klapatch, USA, 2019, 15 min.
In a town inhabited by witches, dogs, weirdos, and creeps Ultra Witchy spies an outsider amongst the outsiders. In a beguiling family home, three women share space and volatile dynamics.
Bride of Frankie
Devi Snively, USA, 2018, 19 min.
In this darkly comedic feminist nod to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a not-so-mad scientist builds a mate for her mentor’s lonely creation with electrifying, and deadly, results.
The 2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour presented by Shutterstock is a 90-minute theatrical program of seven short films curated from the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, including two Festival Award-winning titles. Considered the premier showcase for short films and the launchpad for many now-prominent independent filmmakers, the Festival includes fiction, documentary and animation from around the world. Throughout its almost 40 years of history, the Festival has always supported short films, providing a platform for both established and new filmmakers to connect with audiences. The 2023 Short Film Tour program is a sampling of Festival offerings and a testament to the unique storytelling potential that the format holds. Audiences who missed the Sundance Film Festival—which took place online and in-person in Park City, Utah, January 19 through January 29 this year—can enjoy a mix of fiction, documentary, and animated shorts that are funny, sad, inspirational, and full of strong characters.
Help Me Understand
United States. Director and Screenwriter: Aemilia Scott. Fiction.
Six women come to a consensus.
Inglorious Liaisons
France/Belgium. Directors and Screenwriters: Chloé Alliez, Violette Delvoye. Animation.
On the night of a big party for Lucie, Maya, and their friends, Jimmy has also come. Everyone knows he is here for Maya, but does she have the same feelings for Jimmy?
Parker
United States. Directors: Catherine Hoffman, Sharon Liese. Non-Fiction.
Three generations of a Kansas City family are finally unified when they do something that countless other Black Americans could not — choose their own last name.
Pro Pool
Canada. Director and Screenwriter: Alec Pronovost. Fiction.
Newly graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history and civilization, Charles-Olivier struggles to find a job in his field and must rely on a clerk position in a pool shop. Feeling down, he navigates his gig as best he can.
Rest Stop
United States. Director and Screenwriter: Crystal Kayiza. Fiction.
On a bus ride from New York to Oklahoma, Meyi, a young Ugandan-American girl, realizes her place in the world through her mother’s ambitious effort to reunite their family.
Take Me Home
United States. Director and Screenwriter: Liz Sargent. Fiction.
After their mother’s death, a cognitively disabled woman and her estranged sister must learn to communicate in order to move forward.
When You Left Me On That Boulevard
United States. Director and Screenwriter: Kayla Abuda Galang. Fiction.
Teenager Ly and her cousins get high before a boisterous family Thanksgiving at their auntie’s house in southeast San Diego in 2006.
Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.
32 Sounds is an immersive documentary and profound sensory experience from filmmaker Sam Green that explores the elemental phenomenon of sound. The film is a meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us. The film will be at ICA/Boston in its “live cinema” form, featuring live narration by Sam Green and live original music by JD Samson.
Directed and Performed by Sam Green
Composed and Performed by JD Samson, with Michael O’Neill
Produced by Josh Penn & ArKtype/Thomas O. Kriegsmann
Cinematography by Yoni Brook
Editing by Nels Bangerter & Sam Green
Sound Design by Mark Mangini
Lighting Design by Yuki Nakase Link
Live Sound Design by Dan Bora
Headphone Experience Design by Sam Crawford
Sam Green is a New York-based documentary filmmaker. Green’s most recent live documentaries include A Thousand Thoughts (with the Kronos Quartet) (2018), The Measure of All Things (2014), The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller (with Yo La Tengo) (2012), and Utopia in Four Movements (2010). With all of these works, Green narrates the film in-person while musicians perform a live soundtrack. Green’s 2004 feature-length film, The Weather Underground, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award, was included in the Whitney Biennial, and has screened widely around the world.
JD Samson is best known as leader of the band MEN and for being one-third of the electronic-feminist-punk band and performance project Le Tigre. For more than a decade Samson’s career as a visual artist, musician, producer, and DJ has landed her at the intersection of music, art, activism, and fashion. She has toured the world, produced songs for Grammy award winning artists, written for publications such as The Huffington Post, Talkhouse, and Creative Time Review, created multimedia artwork, hosted documentary programs, acted, modeled, and engaged in direct support with a wide-range of progressive social and political causes. Samson is now an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.
Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.
Commissioned by Stanford Live, Stanford University; The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi; Ferst Center for the Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology; Green Music Center of Sonoma State University; Arizona Arts Live at University of Arizona; and developed through a creative residency at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts.
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
A mythic character who both was ahead of her time and helped to define it, heiress Peggy Guggenheim became a central figure in the modern art movement, collecting art and developing personal relationships with Samuel Beckett, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, and Marcel Duchamp, among countless other leading figures. Fighting through personal tragedy, she maintained her vision to build one of the world’s most important collections of modern art, now enshrined in her Venetian palazzo. Directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland. USA, 2015, 97 minutes.
The story of the most radical video collective of the 1960’s and 70’s, this documentary tells the quirky tale of ten people’s optimism, creativity, and vision of what television could have become had the three big networks not ruled the TV airwaves. Produced and directed by Jon Nealon and Jenny Raskin, who will be in attendance, along with Skip Blumberg, legendary video artist and former member of Videofreex. USA, 2015, 79 minutes.
Videofreex is presented in partnership with the UMB Film Series.
Drawing upon work from native and diaspora filmmakers and artists from West and Southeast Asia, Monsoon, Prayers New Routes is a compilation of films and videos that document the Islamic communities dispersed around the Indian Ocean and beyond. Many of the featured filmmakers and artists reside in trans-oceanic port-cities, and their practice touches upon concepts that reverberate across diaspora and migration, urban culture and religious struggle, and new approaches to image and sound in the age of globalization.
Filmmakers Monira Al Qadiri and Aryo Danusiri will be present for a post-screening discussion.
Total running time: 101 minutes
Programmed by Xin Zhou in collaboration with Harvard University Asia Center
An example of slow cinema, Distant is made up of thirteen parts, each a single long take without any dialogue and relying solely on image, sound, and action. Dramatic, realistic, and mysterious, these fragments tell a story of distance, focusing on the subtle moments when people are suddenly confronted with modernity and gradually become lost in transition. The film attempts to describe the alienation, abandonment, and eternal loneliness of today’s human condition. Presented by Crows & Sparrows. Director Zhengfan Yang will attend in person for a discussion with Yangqiao Lu, who writes about cinema for ArtForum China, La Furia Umana, Brooklyn Rail and LEAP magazine. China, 2013, 88 minutes.
Embedded in each seemingly mundane sequence shot is the implication of critique, a witty observation about modern life, or perhaps just a pleasurable uncertainty about the film’s fictive and documentary content.
The Brooklyn Rail
One of America’s foremost postwar artists, Eva Hesse helped establish the post-minimalist movement with pioneering sculptures made with latex, fiberglass, and plastics. This first feature-length tribute to her life and work makes superb use of the artist’s voluminous journals, her correspondence with close friend and mentor Sol LeWitt, and interviews with such fellow artists as Richard Serra, Robert Mangold, Nancy Holt, and Dan Graham, who recall her passion, ambition, and tenacity. The documentary captures these qualities, while also exploring the struggles of an artist who, in the downtown New York art scene of the 1960s, was one of the few women to make work taken seriously in a field dominated by male pop artists and minimalists. Directed by Marcie Begleiter. USA/Germany, 2016, 108 minutes.
Filmmakers Marcie Begleiter and Karen Shapiro will be in attendance and will speak following the film with Kirsten Swenson, Assistant Professor of Art History at University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
Black Radical Imagination is a touring program of shorts that delve into the worlds of new media, video art, and experimental narrative. Each artist contributes their own vision of postmodern society through the state of current black culture. The screening will be followed by a discussion with curators and featured filmmaker Terence Nance to contemplate the work and its impact on our ever-changing global culture. Nance will lead a workshop for teens in the Fast Forward program in conjunction with this event.
Curated by Amir George, a motion picture artist and film curator from Chicago, and Erin Christovale, a curator based in Los Angeles focusing on film/video within the African Diaspora, in collaboration with Sweety’s, a curatorial platform dedicated to supporting and promoting artists of color locally and internationally.
NOTE: This program will take place at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard.
In conjunction with exhibition The Artist’s Museum at the ICA, exhibition artists Anna Craycroft and Pierre Leguillon will appear in a two-part program at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at 24 Quincy Street in Cambridge.
4–6 PM: TALK
Anna Craycroft and Ann Reynolds in conversation: “Creative Research” Should be an Oxymoron
Introduction by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator at the ICA
6–8 PM: SCREENING + PERFORMANCE
Pierre Leguillon: The Promise of the Screen
(Seating first come, first served)
Artist Anna Craycroft and art historian Ann Reynolds will be in conversation about Craycroft’s project for The Artist’s Museum at the ICA, The Earth Is a Magnet, which traces relationships between photographer Berenice Abbott and nine contemporary artists, and about Reynolds’s forthcoming book, In Our Time, which addresses the cinematic and social circumstances of various intergenerational creative communities in New York from the 1940s through the 1960s.
Following will be Pierre Leguillon’s performative work The Promise of the Screen (2007–), which doubles as a film screening and a speakeasy, dedicated to the peripheral aspects of cinema. For the CCVA, Leguillon will present The Photography Manual, an anthology of film sequences “to teach, to frame, to trigger, to illuminate, to develop but also, perhaps, to commit suicide with the camera.” The film montage is based on technical and popular books preserved at the Société française de Photographie in Paris, detailing the multiple uses of the medium, from fashion photography to judicial photography, amateur photography, or photojournalism.
PARTICIPANT BIOS
Mining fields like education, cinema, psychology, literature, and art history, Anna Craycroft examines cultural models for fostering individuality. Through drawings, paintings, videos, sculptures, furniture, installations, books, workshops, or curatorial projects she works thematically on a single thesis over a series of exhibitions. Craycroft has had solo shows at the Ben Maltz Gallery at the Otis College of Art and Design; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon; the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas; Tracy Williams Ltd in New York; Le Case del Arte in Milan, Italy; and a two-person exhibition at REDCAT Gallery in Los Angeles, Sandroni Rey in Los Angeles, and the Fundacio Miro in Barcelona. In November 2016, she debuted a major new commission, The Earth Is a Magnet, as part of The Artist’s Museum.
Ann Reynolds is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In her research and teaching, she focuses on 20th and 21st-century art and visual culture in the United States and Europe. Her recent publications include essays on Joan Jonas for the 2015 Venice Biennale; the experience of remoteness in relation to land art (Centre Georges Pompidou Spring 2015); Bob Fleischner, Jack Smith, and Ken Jacobs’ film Blonde Cobra (Criticism Spring 2014); and Charles Simonds’ Urban Dwellings (Dumbarton Oaks, 2011). She is the author of Robert Smithson: Learning From New Jersey and Elsewhere (MIT Press, 2003). She is currently working on a new book entitled In Our Time, as well as co-curating an exhibition focused on the magazine View (1940–47).
Pierre Leguillon, born in Nogent-sur-Marne, France, in 1969, lives and works in Brussels. His works, performances, and projections have been the subject of many monographic presentations, notably at Raven Row (London, 2011), Mamco (Geneva, Switzerland, 2010), Moderna Museet (Malmö, Sweden, 2010), the Musée du Louvre (Paris, 2009), and Artists Space (New York, 2009). The artist, whose work La grande evasion (The great escape), 2015, is included in The Artist’s Museum, presented two installations at the 2013 Carnegie International, held in Pittsburgh in 2013: A Vivarium for George E. Ohr and Dubuffet Typographer, the latter accompanied by a book published by (SIC) in Brussels. A laureate of the Villa Médicis in 2003, Leguillon teaches at HEAD (Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design) in Geneva.
Film by Pierre Leguillon; Production: Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; Photo Expert: Aurélien Mole; Camera: Julien Crépieux; Editing: Adrien Faucheux; Production assistant: Olivier Strauss. Thanks to Clément Chéroux, Paul-Louis Roubert, and Sam Stourdzé.