Breakaway Shorts

Join us for five contemporary short films exploring myth, history, identity, and meaning-making in the 21st century. These layered and personal films resist simple genres and meld documentary, diaristic, and experimental forms to raise questions around belonging, ownership, and authorship. (program approx. 65 mins., DCP and 16mm)

Curated by Cinéseries’s founding members. Be sure to stick around after the films for a lively conversation.

Program lineup

Occidente
(Ana Vaz, 2014, 15 mins., DCP)

In the words of filmmaker Ana Vaz: “Filming in Lisbon in search of the origins of our colonial history, I found copies. Brazilians, the new worlders fluent in glitz, entertain the Portuguese in awe and discomfort, colonial norms applied and reapplied. Chinese porcelain seems to signal hybrids to come: the Chinese dressed as Europeans, the Brazilian maid dressed as a 19th-century European servant. Porcelain from the 15th-century becomes reproducible ready-mades that set the tables for the new colonies—a transatlantic calling. Ouro novo reads new money. As a poem without periods, as a breath without breathing, the voyage travels eastward and westward, marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one’s place, one’s seat at the table.”

The Blazing World
(Jessica Bardsley, 2013, 19 mins., DCP)

A film about shoplifting, depression, and Winona Ryder, made of stolen materials. Consisting entirely of clips taken from existing films, this video essay, which ultimately turns out to be profoundly personal, explores possible links between depression and kleptomania.

The Male GaYze
(Jack Waters, 1990, 11 mins., DCP)

This video short presents an individual's observation of sexuality and power relations between men in a young African American dancer's reminiscence of his encounter with a famous Dutch choreographer. Approached from a personal perspective, the story is told in a casually direct voice-over read by the author/director.

The Glass Note
(Mary Helena Clark, 2018, 9 mins., DCP)

In this elliptical audiovisual diary, cinema’s extrasensory capacity is given surprising form. Here, what we see (the human throat, Gothic statuary, digitally generated furniture) often contradicts what we hear (birdsong, tightly wound rope, lithophonic stones), but the combined effect speaks to a utopian and universal ideal of filmic language.

Aubade
(Nathaniel Dorsky, 2010, 11 mins., 16mm)

From Nathaniel Dorsky: "An aubade is a poem or morning song evoking the first rays of the sun at daybreak. Often, it includes the atmosphere of lovers parting. This film is my first venture into shooting in color negative after having spent a lifetime shooting Kodachrome. In some sense, it is a new beginning for me."