Program of Short Films by AMI Instructors:

** Reception to follow, with the filmmakers! **

Works to be screened (in alphabetical order, by filmmaker's name):

1) Bill Brown: Document (2012, 2:12 min, USA, in English, B&W, Digital)

2) Josh Gibson: Nile Perch (2013, 16:47 min, Uganda/USA, in English, B&W, Digital)

3) Jim Haverkamp: It Had Wings (co-dir. Ellen Hemphill, 2015, 10:05 min, USA,
     in English, Color, Digital)

4) Casey Herbert: Death of a Princess [Excerpt] (1999, 7:27 min, USA, Color, Digital)

5) Shambhavi Kaul: Night Noon (2014, 11:37 min, USA/Mexico, Color, Digital)

6) Steve Milligan: Time Set Free (2014, 11:26 min, USA, Color, Digital)

Bill Brown: Document  
(2012, 2:12 min, USA, in English, B&W, Digital)

Laser printer transfer of heavily redacted C.I.A. Inspector General's Special Review of Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities, September 2001- October 2003.

 

 

"Secrecy, censorship, covert operations—as film. The slow, partial revelation of text as stream of information and the precisely timed soundtrack describing this sequence speak to the abundance of information and records that belie, yet exist among, a general lack of control and knowledge. The film isn’t about secrecy but becomes its representation." --Harvard GSD, Landscape Representation III (2013)

 

 

 

 

About the filmmaker:

 

 

 

"Bill Brown likes to travel. But his favorite destinations lie along the back-roads and quiet corners of the American landscape: places over and under-looked, the hidden and the long forgotten [...] In his films, zines (Dreamwhip #’s 1 – 15) [...] and recent live performances, the people and places he describes are never denied their fundamental mystery; instead Bill invites us to join him in a thoroughly absorbing conversation he is having with the people and places that he meets. It’s one of those conversations where it’s so easy to lose track of time." -- Luke Sieczek, Northwest Film Forum

 

 

 

 

Josh Gibson: Nile Perch
(2013, 16:47 min, Uganda/USA, in English, B&W, Digital)

 

 

In flickering black and white, Nile Perch tracks a fish from a fisherman’s line on Lake Victoria in Uganda to export commodity. This hand-made film is a modern-day parable of the effects of globalization on Africa as well as meditation on the economic and ecological impact of an invasive species.

 

 

-- Winner of Black Maria Film Festival Stellar Jury Award (Grand Prize for 

 

Documentary)!

 

 

 

 

About the filmmaker:

 

 

 

Josh Gibson is moving image artist and Associate Professor of the Practice at Duke University. His films and videos have screened nationally and internationally and have won 17 major festival awards in the past several years.

 

 

Nile Perch was one of the 15 Cinema Eye Honors finalists for Best International Short Documentary of 2013.

 

 

His current projects explore the intersection of non-fiction practice with hand-made cinematographic explorations.

 

Jim Haverkamp: It Had Wings
(co-dir: Ellen Hemphill, 2015, 10:05 min, USA, in English, Color, Digital)

 

 

 

 

A widow, alone at home, sees something heavenly and wounded fall into her backyard. The old woman, coffee mug in hand, naturally tries to help. In this redemptive tale, written and narrated by Allan Gurganus, the ordinary goes briefly mythic. Kindness becomes what might save us yet.

 

 

 

 

About the filmmakers:

 

 

 

Jim Haverkamp is a filmmaker and freelance video editor based in Durham, NC. His short fiction and documentary films have screened around the world, including the London Underground Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Black Maria Film Festival, the Maryland Film Festival, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Jim’s most recent film, co-directed with Ellen Hemphill, is Archipelago/CINE’s It Had Wings. For Archipelago Theatre, Jim designed for The Narrowing, Out of the Blue, and Stealing Home, and with Ellen Hemphill for Duke Theater Studies’ production of A Doll’s House. Other video for theater designs include I Love My Hair When It’s Good: & Then Again When it Looks Defiant and Impressive (40 A/M), The Italian Actress, Goin’ a Buffalo, Fistful of Love, and Europe Central (Little Green Pig). Jim also teaches for Duke Unversity’s film, theater, and documentary studies departments. His work can be seen at jimhaverkamp.com.

 

 

 

Ellen Hemphill is Artistic Director, Managing Director and co-Founder of Archipelago Theatre Company in Chapel Hill, NC. She has recently directed for Archipelago/CINE:  It Had Wings (co-directed with Jim Haverkamp), The Narrowing, Out of the Blue, The Woman in the Attic, And Mary Wept, A New Fine Shame, Snow, Amor Fortuna, Blue Roses, Eulogy for a Warrior, Ten-in One, Those Women, Landscape, Silence and Night, Binky Kite and the Oxymorons, The Abdication, and Escurial. Ellen is also a singer and performer and wrote and performed in the solos Another Time, Another Place…Someone Else, Cassandra’s Lullaby, and She Didn’t Like the Moon Without Clouds.  She is an Associate Professor with Theater Studies Department at Duke University since 1993 and directed their productions of: The Crucible, The Trojan Women and Exit the King and A Doll’s House. Ellen has also taught Voice and Gesture with the American Dance Festival (1992-2014) and is a long time member of the Roy Hart Theatre of France, where she worked and performed for 13 years. An example of her teaching work can be seen on this site under Outreach. Ellen is also a private consultant for professionals seeking to improve presentation skills through Cardea Consulting. Ellen currently lives in Chapel Hill, N.C.

 

 

 

 

Casey Herbert: Death of a Princess [excerpt]  
(1996, 7:27 min, USA, Color, Digital)

Having created numerous informational animated graphics for CBS News, Herbert’s company was engaged to produce the most comprehensive accident recreation of the Princess Diana accident in the Paris Alma Tunnel.

Working with French, British and American forensic analysts, the filmmakers generated a number of physically accurate 3D visual recreations of the moments leading up to, and including, the automobile crash which killed Princess Diana. This work, along with interviews at the studio, were part of CBS News 48 Hours episode Death of a Princess.

 

 

The segment includes created sequences, interviews with Erin Moriarty, French forensic footage, etc. as an excerpt from the 48 Hours episode.

 

 

 

About the filmmaker:

 

 

 

Casey Herbert is the owner, creative director and chief pixel wrangler of Flying Foto Factory, Inc. The company provides services in developing electronic media and marketing across networks of computers, on interactive multi-screen displays, mobile devices, web sites or social networks.

 

 

 

 

 

Shambhavi Kaul: Night Noon
(2014, 11:37 min, USA/Mexico, Color, Digital)

 

 

 

Unmoving rock collapsed to ocean—geology’s “thrust and fold”—becomes the unlikely habitat for two actors’ shadowy encounters with sand, waves, night, desert, dread, calm, trepidation and escape.

 

 

 

"Shambhavi Kaul's Night Noon sets up dialectical dread in Death Valley with a series of uncanny shots of eroded, geological formations and dunes that seemingly fold into night skies and shimmering waters. Beginning in Zabriskie Point, the film surreptitiously crosses over into Mexico, its creative geography never far from our cinematic memory." -- Andréa Picard

 

 

 

 

About the filmmaker:

 

 

 

Shambhavi Kaul's cinematic constructions conjure uncanny, science-fictive non-places. Described as creating “zones of compression and dispersion,” her work utilizes strategies of montage and recirculation, inviting an affective response while simultaneously measuring our capacity to know what we encounter. She has exhibited her work worldwide at venues such as the Toronto International Film Festival, the Berlinale, The New York Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Edinburgh International Film Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the 2014 Shanghai Biennale and recently, her first solo show with Jhaveri Contemporary, in Mumbai. Shambhavi Kaul was born in Jodhpur, India and currently lives in India and the United States where she is a Visiting Artist at Duke University.

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Milligan: Time Set Free
(2014, 11:26 min, USA, Color, Digital)

 

 

 

Time Set Free is an excerpt from an hour-long hybrid live music/film performance called Corduroy Roads, which took as its starting point the famous Gardner and Barnard civil war photographs housed in the Rubinstein Library Archive.  This piece has been re-edited to fit one screen from the original two, and features a recording of the original music by guitarist and composer William Tyler.  The performance was commissioned by Duke Performances, shepherded and produced by Aaron Greenwald, and was configured for the stage by theater director Akiva Fox.  It premiered at Tim Walter’s Durham Fruit and Produce Company in November 2014.

 

 

 

About the filmmaker:

Steve Milligan received his first camera credit for Stephanie Johnes' jumprope documentary Doubletime, which opened the South by Southwest Film Festival in 2007. Since then he has served as cinematographer on more than a dozen feature documentaries, as well as innumerable short form docs, commercials, narrative short films, and music videos. His collaborators include Kirby Dick, David Gelb, Brian McGinn, Oscar winners Vanessa Roth and Doug Blush, and Emmy winners Gary Hawkins, Ted Bogosian, and Nancy Buirsky. Films containing his images have shown at a list of festivals it would be tedious to reproduce. He is currently working on several films about pigs.

Steve is a production teaching fellow at Duke University, where he teaches cinematography.

Cost: Free and open to the public

Sponsors: The Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), with support from the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS).