Thursday, May 25 at 8 PM                                                                         

LA AIR invites local artists to utilize EPFC resources in creating and premiering new, experimental, documentary, and personal work over a two-month period.

For her culminating event as artist in residence at the Echo Park Film Center, interdisciplinary artist and writer, Gelare Khoshgozaran presents Abbas Kiarostami’s “First Case… Second Case” (قضیه شکل اول… شکل دوم‎‎). Originally shot in 1979, revised and released in 1981 (after the Islamic Revolution in Iran) “First Case… Second Case” introduces two hypothetical scenarios in a classroom. A student disrupts the class while the (biology) teacher is drawing an elaborate diagram of an ear on the chalkboard. The teacher asks a group of seven students to name the culprit. In the first scenario the students resist naming the culprit at the price of being suspended for a week. In the second scenario one of the students names the culprit who would then get punished so the other six would return to class. Kiarostami presents these two hypotheses to the then key figures of the education system in Iran as well as influential thinkers and activists with conflicting political views and affinities to different political parties and asks them to comment on both scenarios. The film was banned after its premier in Iran.

The screening will be followed by the artist’s presentation of her ongoing project, tentatively titled “Medina Wasl: Connecting Town.” about the role of fiction and simulacrum in the U.S. Military training sites of War of Terror. Shot on 16mm film during the artist’s residency at the Echo Park Film Center, this quasi-documentary connects the current day militarized landscape of the Mojave desert with that of Shatt al-Arab through embodied experiences of remembering in the desert while the artist/documentarian/actor is dressed as a teenage Iranian soldier in the war with Iraq. Lastly two new animations made during the artist’s residency will be screened to close the night.  FREE EVENT! FILMMAKER IN ATTENDANCE!

This residency and screening is made possible thanks to a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Doors 7:30 pm; FREE EVENT.

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