Free Space: What you can watch

September 17–October 11—Film Activism: Cinetracts Expanded

• Program 1
Screening Tuesdays & Sundays at 1 PM; Wednesdays & Saturdays at 4 PM, and Thursdays at 6 PM. Approx. running time: 46 mins.

This Must Be the Place by Cameron Granger
As the filmmaker notes, the work was "inspired by the people that have helped me find homes in the many places my travels have taken me to, and the people that were ripped away from theirs many years ago on the mother continent." (2018, 4:32)

When it Rains by Charles Burnett
What would you do if your mother, your sister, or your neighbor didn’t have the money to pay rent, and the landlord wouldn’t budge? Babu has the answer. (1995, 13:25)

Ududeagu by Akwaeke Emezi
Ududeagu is a contemporary visual folktale rooted in concepts of loss, leaving, and loneliness; shot within acknowledged private and intimate spaces. It follows a cultural pattern of intergenerational storytelling and also functions as a gendered self-portrait in which the subject’s male body becomes a proxy for the filmmaker's. (2014, 1:44)

Cotton Ikebana by Cauleen Smith
In this meditative reflection, the artist arranges cotton flowers according to Japanese art of ikebana, a traditional practice of flower arranging. (2020, 6:44)

Can’t Make Three With Two by Cameron Granger
This is the last piece made in an extended collaboration between the artist collaborated with his mother. It's dedicated to his grandma, or Gaga, Pearl. (2018, 5:44)

Reckless Eyeballing by Christopher Harris
"Borrowing its title from a Jim Crow-era law that prohibited black men from gazing at white women, this optically printed, hand-processed film is a hypnotic inspection of sexual desire, black identity, and film history."—Eric Crosby, Wisconsin Film Festival. (2018, 13:39)

• Program 2
Screening Tuesdays, Thursdays, & Sundays at 4 PM; and Fridays & Saturdays at 1 PM. Approximate running time: 50 mins.

More Dangerous Than a Thousand Rioters by Kelly Gallagher
An experimental animated documentary exploring the powerful and inspiring life of revolutionary Lucy Parsons. (2016, 6:19)

Uprising in Jazak by Želimir Žilnik
People from the Jazak village in Serbia's Fruška Gora mountain region share dramatic stories of how they fought undercover against occupation forces during WWII. (1973, 17:22)

Oneiromancer by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
This is the first of a series of works on the sensorial unconscious of the Puerto Rican anti-colonial movement. It centers on the figures, places, and leftover materials of the members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, a clandestine group sentenced to life in prison for the political crime of seditious conspiracy. (2017, 25:32)

• Program 3
Screening Wednesdays & Thursdays at 1 PM; Fridays at 4 PM, and Saturdays & Sundays at 11 AM. Approximate running time: 60 mins.

H-E-L-L-O by Cauleen Smith
Greetings to mankind! The five-note sequence of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) is performed outdoors by New Orleans musicians at sites in their city that are loaded with memories. (2014, 11:06)

Braddock Food Bank by Tony Buba
This finds the filmmaker struggling over whether he should make a film about a food bank, or just use the money to donate food to the bank. In the end, he leaves it up to the viewer. (1985, 4:32)

Day in the Life by Karrabing Film Collective
One of the Karrabing's most stirring and direct films, Day in the Life depicts obstacles encountered across four points of their day. A multilayered hip-hop soundscape sees helpless statements by white media make way for the Karrabing's ultimately empowering words of resistance. (2020, 32:37)

Farmacopea by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Farmacopeas are catalogs of plants and their uses. Farmacopea is a film on the relationship between historical processes and the natural landscape of Puerto Rico. The Caribbean has been thoroughly transformed physically, through introduced species, agriculture and development, but also through its visual representation as an undifferentiated tropical place for tourism, service and folklore. (2013, 5:38)

Sine at the Canyon Sine at the Sea by Kelly Gabron by Cauleen Smith
Started as a video designed to be background eye candy at an outdoor performance event, this work evolved into a protest against the reverberations of the neofascist nonsense percolating in American culture. (2016, 7:06)

October 13–November 8—Sequence 01: Diasporic Reckoning

Titles and screening times to be confirmed.

NO EVIL EYE, the radical microcinema project from artists and curators Rooney Elmi and Ingrid Raphael, will share a new program of short film selections for the Wex.

NO EVIL EYE presented a popular program of shorts at the Wex in May 2019 for Flyover Fest, which went on to screen at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn. Elmi has also been a guest of the Wex to introduce a 2019 screening of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas as part of the Columbus Black International Film Festival and to lead a Q&A with Shakedown director Leila Weinraub during the 2018 Unorthodocs fest. Raphael has also shared her talents with the Wex as a past intern, working to support marketing and education efforts.

November 10–December 27: Everybody’s got a little light, under the sun

Titles and screening times to be confirmed.

The final microcinema program in Free Space will be a curatorial project by Cameron Granger. A Cleveland native, Columbus College of Art & Design grad, and 2017 resident of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Granger was a contributor to the annual Ohio Shorts programs in 2017 and 2019. His art and curatorial work has also been seen at venues including Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Photography, New York's Flux Factory, Oakland's Ctrl+Shft gallery, and ROY G BIV Gallery and Skylab in Columbus.