Shorts Block #5 - AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS - FOUR SHORT FILMS from THE USA

11AM at the Midtown Cinema

Shorts Block #5 - AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS (11AM: 78min)

"甜腻腻 Thick & Sweet" by Yinan Wang/Digital/USA/15min
---The uprooted, the American dreams, the thick and sweet sauce, and an empty dining hall—too much for one to face and survive. It is far easier to demolish a closed restaurant. Composed of cutouts, reenactments, found footage, and fragments of earlier films, the work attempts to rebuild personal and collective memory while reflecting on the immigrant experience through the Americanization of food.

"Same Water" by Martine Granby/Super 8, 16mm, MiniDV/USA/22min ---Drawing from institutional and personal archives, this film revisits a colored-only riverside recreation space that existed alongside a celebrated white-only water park, exposing the layered histories of segregation and unequal access to nature and leisure in Jim Crow America.

"Marratein, Marratein" by Julia Yezbick/Super 8, 16mm/Lebanon, USA/25min ---Letters to a maternal ancestor reflect on identity connected to ethnic heritage, while also embracing a broader notion of family beyond bloodlines. Weaving images and sounds from the filmmaker’s personal ties to two cities—Detroit and Beirut—the film poses the central question: How do we belong to each other?

"Learning from Learning from Las Vegas" by Gillian Waldo, Sam Taffel/16mm/USA/18min ---An experimental adaptation of the seminal architectural text Learning from Las Vegas (1972) by architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. The film details the evolution of their relationship, explores the motels, neon signage, and wedding chapels described in the book, and asks what lessons can we glean from the contemporary landscape of Vegas.