Cinetracts '20

On Thursday, October 8 at 7pm EST, the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University will debut the films commissioned for its Artist Residency Award project Cinetracts ’20. A virtual screening of the 20 short works will be presented on the center’s website, wexarts.org.

The international slate of contributors includes more than 20 filmmakers: Natalia Almada (Mexico/San Francisco, CA), Tony Buba (Braddock, PA), Charles Burnett (Los Angeles, CA), Tamer El Said (Egypt/Germany), Akwaeke Emezi (Nigeria/US), Su Friedrich (Brooklyn, NY), Kelly Gallagher (Syracuse, NY), Cameron Granger (Columbus, OH), Christopher Harris (Iowa City, IA), Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation, WI), Karrabing Film Collective (Australia), Bouchra Khalili (Morocco/Germany), Gabriel Mascaro (Brazil), Rosine Mbakam (Cameroon/Belgium), Natasha Mendonca (India), Sheilah and Dani ReStack (Columbus, OH), Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (Puerto Rico), Cauleen Smith (Los Angeles, CA), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), and Želimir Žilnik (Serbia).

The initiative was inspired by Cinétracts ’68, a radical project in which French filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker responded to the political uprising in Paris of May 1968. Anticipating a politically tumultuous 2020, Wexner Center Film/Video curators David Filipi, Jennifer Lange, and Chris Stults invited artists to capture “the zeitgeist in your own backyard,” in hopes that a global portrait would emerge from this index of diverse locales. The project was launched in 2019, supported by a 2019–20 Wexner Center Artist Residency Award, and called upon both established and emerging filmmakers to participate.

In line with the Cinétracts ‘68 manifesto, artists were given a set of guidelines with which to work: Films should be two minutes in length, shot in one day, all sound must be native to the footage, and the completed work should indicate the date and location of the production. The COVID-19 pandemic and months of protest in response to police violence against the Black community led many filmmakers to reconsider their original concepts.

Included in the finished contributions are portraits of specific times and places, such as Tony Buba’s record of a protest demanding a civilian review board for police in his native Pittsburgh and a glimpse of Serbian life on the day of the country’s fraught 2020 parliamentary election by Želimir Žilnik. A number of the films further reflect how the present is inextricably linked to the past, from Kelly Gallagher’s stop-motion consideration of the abolitionist history of her current hometown of Syracuse to a cinematic statement by Karrabing Film Collective on the ancestral resilience that informs current generations of Aboriginal people’s resistance to the enduring effects of colonialism.

In discussing their work on Cinetracts ‘20, several artists spoke of how the project provided more than an opportunity to make something new and distinctive.

“I’m someone who works in a very solitary manner and in 2020, I’ve really been thinking about the ways collaboration can gesture toward solidarity and community with others,” said Gallagher. “The idea of this project and all of us working together, if separately, and just the joy of creating was emotionally quite a welcome gift.”

As Christopher Harris shared, “So many of the filmmakers who are also included are people whose work is deeply important to me. They’ve encouraged me and challenged me to try to make the best work I can make.”

Following the premiere of Cinetracts ’20 on October 8, the program will be available to view indefinitely at wexarts.org. Additionally, other works by Cinetracts ’20 contributors will be available through the website the week of the premiere, along with conversations with select filmmakers. Three programs of short films by Cinetracts ’20 participants will also screen throughout September and October as part of Free Space, a gallery-based initiative that launched on September 17.