EPFC is proud to be a Community Partner in the presentation of Miko Revereza’s No Data Plan as part of the 35th Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. A beloved member of the Echo Park Film Center family, Miko’s powerful new experimental documentary screens at the Downtown Independent in Los Angeles at 5 pm on Sunday, May 5.

More information and tickets here.

Named as one of 2018’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film to Watch,” director Miko Revereza challenges formal conventions of filmmaking while amplifying the voices of the underrepresented. Building upon his earlier work, Disintegration, 93-96, a poignant film essay concerning his family’s relocation from Manila to the US, Revereza harnesses the immediate tools at hand—his camera, his smartphone, his itinerant life, and his unique purview as a stranger in a strange land—to construct this evocative meditation on home and homelands.

Through static long shots and voice over narrations, Revereza records his physical and psychological journey from Los Angeles to NY aboard a cross-country train. The screen is confined to his point-of-view but this seeming restriction opens up a vast mental canvas for a rapid fire stream-of-consciousness that invite us in as confidentes and co-conspirators while in turn, keep us at a cautionary distance. In the spirit of Chantal Akerman’s NEWS FROM HOME, this alienation effect emulates Revereza’s own as he review his own uncanny sense of rootlessness and rootedness as a new American and specifically, a Filipino-American.

Over the course of his travelogue, we may question whether this qualifier – that proverbial hyphen – matter in this era of globalization where we are so connected through screens that national and ethnic identities blur in the disembodied void of the digital? Revereza wants you to decide yourself based on your own experience negotiating both local and global spaces – whether roaring along on the rails, traipsing across airport terminals, to meandering along familiar city streets on foot. Ultimately, his own train of thought crescendos to a near halt when border patrol agents enter the picture and reverie lay waste to grim reality. —Lindy Leong

Co-presented with Community Partners: Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance | Los Angeles (APALA-LA), Echo Park Film Center

10 CONSECUTIVE SATURDAY MORNINGS 10 AM  – NOON, BEGINNING SEPTEMBER 15

Dear Diary: What if women ruled the world?

We ask this question as a starting point to reexamine the history of non-fiction filmmaking. Using only works made by women-identified artists and filmmakers, we will focus on viewing and discussing works that emphasize personal lived experiences and perspectives as the source for art. We will watch works along the spectrum of non-fiction filmmaking, from experimental to diaristic, and from the observational to documentary. Students in the class will all produce their own non-fiction personal films, discovering how their own lives and experiences can be a powerful source for making art.

Instructors: Dicky Bahto and Penelope Uribe-Abee

This class is FREE to teens ages 12 – 19 with all instruction, materials and equipment provided at no cost by EPFC. Participants must be willing and able to attend ALL 10 SESSIONS!

A mandatory orientation session for all participating students and their parents/guardians will take place at EPFC at 10 am on Saturday, September 15.

SIGN UP HERE!

On May 22, 2016 I was part of the screening of “Sunset and Alvarado”. Our film was inspired by the original “Sunset and Alvarado” that was filmed in 2002. Students revisited the home of the Echo Park Film Center and learned about the establishments and the changes going on at the time. So much has changed!!!!! But looking at the flyer of the 2002 screening brings me joy to know that laughter, love, and food will always be staples of our youth screenings.

–Gemma Jimenez

LA AIR invites local artists to utilize EPFC resources in creating and premiering new, experimental, documentary, and personal work over a two-month period. Artists in residence also engage with the greater EPFC community via screenings, workshops and other events.

More info here!

A DAY IN THE SUN: NEW WORKS FROM THE ECHO PARK FILM CENTER

TONIGHT! Thursday, October 12 at 7 PM – FREE!

UWM Union Cinema

Experimental Tuesdays at the Union Cinema is a free series unspooling on most Tuesdays (and in this case a Thursday!) throughout the semester that shares contemporary and canonical experimental media. Presented by the UWM Union Cinema and the UWM Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres.

Free and open to all!

 
In recognition of their countless hours as the Center’s educators, programmers, projectionists and facilitators, Echo Park Film Center Co-op members were commissioned to make new experimental lens-based works exploring their relationships to Los Angeles. Coming from all walks of life, Co-op members include both experienced and self-taught filmmakers, queer identifying filmmakers, artists of color, art school graduates, and EPFC youth film program alumni.

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Program:

Quantum Identity Politics // Miko Revereza // Video // 10 min.
To be an undocumented immigrant in America is a performance. I am now exhausted of this performance. As long as documentation is used to exclude, deport, and incarcerate people by race and class lines, then our role as artists and thinkers is to decode, reconfigure, and subvert documents as conceptual play objects.

The Burning of Los Angeles // Cosmo Segurson // 16mm transferred to video // 4 min.
An interpretation of a painting described in Nathaniel West’s “The Day of the Locust” from 1939.

From Brooklyn to Broadway // Brenda Contreras // Video // 7 min.
The untold collection of short, bizarre narratives.

Angelus Novus // Gina Marie Napolitan // 16mm loop with 35 mm slides transferred to video // 6 min.
A hopscotch through our historical, geographical, and cultured memory. Los Angeles as a place of wilderness up-ended by human settlement, and subsequently, a place of human settlement up-ended by nature time and again. “This storm is what we call progress.”

A Beautiful Tragedy // Sharmaine Starks // Video // 15 min.
Inspired by the numerous candle light vigils that fill the alleys, parking lots and street corners of Compton, Watts and South Central LA.

Palimpsest // Penelope Uribe-Abee // Super 8 transferred to video // 3 min.
A look into the spiritual and phantasmic effects that gentrification has an identity, self and the landscapes that these ontological frameworks spring from.

Beauties // Lisa Marr // Super 8 transferred to video // 10 min.
A cinematic mash note to the Mack Sennett Bathing Girls.

Worlds Below, Or: Los Angeles Breaks Its Mother’s Back // Emett Casey // 16mm // 7 min.
A rhythmic study of cracks in Los Angeles sidewalks, and their relationship to free root structures.

Avanti Popolo (People Move Forward) // Paolo Davanzo // 16mm Dual Projection // 3 min.
A journey through the city on my bicycle shot on 16mm film and hand-processed. A look at the rapid changes happening in Los Angeles and a hope to reclaim the fragments of community life that are being taken away from us.

Filmmakers and EPFC Coop members Paolo Davanzo and Lisa Marr in attendance!

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This program has been made possible by a grant from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.

Launched in June of last year, the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts Artist Project Grants seek to further Mike Kelley’s philanthropic work and honor his legacy by supporting innovative projects with visual artists at L.A. nonprofit institutions and organizations. The goal is to benefit both visual artists and arts organizations alike and to support compelling and inventive projects in any medium, particularly work that is under-known, or has proven difficult to make or to fund.

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