All You Cannot See (24 minutes)
by Gabriela Novogratz, MVA 2023
All You Cannot See: Diary of a Woman with Endometriosis examines endometriosis as it is experienced by the women who are bear the burden of the disease. Specifically, the film follows one young woman, Samantha, amidst her journey of reclaiming her life from the throes of, in her own words, “an illness that stopped everything in its tracks.” As we get to know Samantha, our understanding of this debilitating disease unfolds. Through every wince, doctor’s visit, story, cramp, selfie, and day spent stuck in bed, the film becomes a mosaic, a messy portrait of a chronic illness that is raw, honest, and purposefully incomplete.
Bonnie Brae & 6th, Los Angeles (29 minutes)
by Laura Catania, MVA 2023
Bonnie Brae & 6th, Los Angeles explores the intersection of kinship, culinary tradition, and belonging in a portrait of a Guatemalan-specific street vending community. Street vending plays a major role in the cultural identity and history of Los Angeles, where the ubiquitous rainbow umbrellas and tamale carts are seen, heard, and smelled all over the city. On the corner of Bonnie Brae and 6th Street, near MacArthur Park, endless varieties of homemade traditional cuisine are sold day and night to this largely Guatemalan-dominant corridor of the city. Despite street vending becoming legal in 2018 after years of harassment and fines, it remains entrenched in the informal economy with many bureaucratic and economic obstacles preventing vendors from fully complying with updated regulations. Through conversations with the filmmaker, Bonnie Brae & 6th, Los Angeles highlights the professional and personal lives of four street vendors that are navigating complex layers of transborder identity and longing for home. These intimate and moving interviews ask us to consider aspects of immigrant life that are often overlooked in the narrative surrounding the politics of vending in Los Angeles.
Cleaving East Pender (31 minutes)
by Kayla Cao, MVA 2023
Cleaving East Pender offers an observational journey into Vancouver's diverse Chinese community. The film explores diasporic cultures, family-building, home-building and community-building in Canada. The theme of homesickness also comes through in my exploration of what it means to hold onto Chinese culture outside of China. Through moments of reflection captured in spaces like homes, grocery stores, and East Pender, the street that runs down Chinatown, it portrays the city's rich tapestry of relationships among Chinese immigrants of all ages. From the early immigration waves in the 90’s to new immigrants arrived last year, the Chinese community's complexity defies a single stereotype. The film aims to showcase the multifaceted nature and the beauty of Chinese identities, fostering empathy and understanding.
Feeling Freedom: The Enchanted Art Object (23 minutes)
by Tanya J. Matthews, MVA 2023
Feeling Freedom: The Enchanted Art Object, is an experimental film that explores the rich and dynamic space of memory and repair in the afterlife of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Inspired by Gullah Geechee folklore surrounding the Legacy of Igbo Landing and the Gullah seeking ritual, the film centers on Charleston, South Carolina, known as both the Holy City and Capital of Slavery in the United States. How do we continue to move, to feel, to love…to dream freedom when we are also holding what is heavy? How do we make meaning, make repairs and find resolution?
A spectral ethnography, this film illuminates the tensions between "absence" and "presence" that we must navigate when inheriting ancestral freedom dreams, and those mysterious sensations associated with ancestral callings. Through a series of dialogues with Gullah Geechee elder and poet, Yvette Murray, and Charleston’s first poet laureate, Marcus Amaker, this project opens a portal into their processes of repair and the crafting of selves in the African diaspora.
Longing is Not Enough (27 minutes)
by Leonardo Nussenzveig MVA 2023
Longing is Not Enough is an exploration of various types of Cape Verdean music through the lens of a word that lacks an English definition, “saudade”. In this documentary, Leonardo Nussenzveig, the filmmaker, recalls his experience with saudade while visiting his grandparents in Brazil, setting the stage for an individualized definition that is most closely translated as “missing someone.” However, he then poses the question of what saudade means when it is used by a people to express a communal identity reflected in their music. What is the historical significance of this word? How does it permeate Cape Verdean identity and experience? How does it act as a cultural touchstone from which music can be made? The answers to these questions are juxtaposed with musical performances by singers and instrumentalists with a great breadth of knowledge of Cape Verdean music. Emotional, economic, and historical contexts prime the viewer for a deeper understanding of the music and of the festival showcased in the last quarter of the film: the Festa San Jon, a midsummer festival celebrated in Cape Verde on the Northernmost island of Santo Antao.
Pursuing Play (24 minutes)
by Elaine Wong, MVA 2023
Pursuing Play is a video game-inspired ethnographic film about how various young adult gamers think, feel and play in a capitalist world. The film uses the narrative style and game mechanics typically found in the Visual Novel video game genre to explore concepts of agency, coziness and relationships between the virtual and the real. By "conversing" with these gamers, the audience gains insight into how specific video games can offer unique and nuanced emotional value that other activities may not. Pursuing Play urges a wider recognition of the distinct self-care platform video games provide, which can have a long-term impact on shaping the emotional health of modern everyday life.
You Never Die (23 minutes)
by Qira Kong, MVA 2023
Four women, both religious and secular, share their stories in You Never Die about navigating grief and connecting with their passed loved ones through a temple in Chinatown, Los Angeles. Thien Hau Temple, originally built primarily by Vietnamese refugees, houses altars for Buddhist and Daoist deities, as well as a dedicated altar for Mazu, also known as Thien Hau. Mazu is a sea goddess who has blessed the Vietnamese refugees for their sea journey to the States. She often protects people on maritime journeys and serves as a mother figure for many of her followers. In addition to these altars, the temple holds an ancestral altar where visitors can place memorial tablets for their deceased loved ones. Three of the four women featured, including the filmmaker herself, have engaged in this act of remembrance and prayer, a central practice that the film explores. With inquiries into presence extending across time and space through sounds and symbols,
You Never Die explores the coexistence and co-living of the living and the dead, attempting to manifest that the deities and the spirits of ancestors and loved ones are an ever-present part of many people’s narratives.