Christopher Harris – Experimental Shorts

FIlm - Wed 22 November 2023
WORM Rotterdam
Start → 20:30
End → 22:30

Filmmaker present! Screening will be followed be a discussion led by multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Robert-Jonathan Koeyers

Short film program consisting of three films by North American filmmaker Christopher Harris, known for his unique approach to African American historiography through the lens of experimental cinema. His 16mm films and moving image installations have screened at the Locarno Film Festival, IFFR, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Arsenal Berlin, and many other festivals and exhibition venues.

still/here – is a meditation on the vast landscape of ruins and vacant lots that constitute the north side of St. Louis, an area populated almost exclusively by working class and working poor African Americans. Though it constructs a documentary record of blight and decay, still/here is a refusal of closure that dwells within the space of rupture and confronts the presence of a profound absence.
–– Christopher Harris

Reckless Eyeballing – Taking its name from the Jim Crow-era of black criminals staring at white women, this hand-processed, optically-printed amalgam reframes desire by way of everything from D.W. Griffith to Foxy Brown and Angela Davis: ‘Your lover belongs to this band of murderous outlaws.’
–– Cinematexas International Short Film Festival

Dreams Under Confinement – Frenzied voices on the Chicago Police Department’s scanner call for squad cars and reprisals during the 2020 uprising in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, as Google Earth tracks the action through simulated aerial views of urban spaces and the vast Cook County Department of Corrections, the country’s third-largest jail system. In Christopher Harris’s Dreams Under Confinement, the prison, and the street merge into a shared carceral landscape.
–– New York Film Festival