Jeanne Liotta will introduce 7 of her films in the ETNA lab. The screnning is purposed and programmed by Filipe Afonso. 

Primarily described as a filmmaker, Liotta is also a researcher, professor and a multi-media artist. Her latest body of work takes place in a constellation of mediums investigating the cosmic landscape at a curious interesection of art, science, and natural philosophy. Her film "Observando el Cielo" received the Tiger Award for Short Film at the Rotterdam Film Festival and was named TOP Ten 2007 on Artforum Magazine as well as Top Ten of The Village Voice and one of the ten best experimental films of the decade by Film Comment. Her work has been represented in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, The New York Film Festival, KunstFilm Biennale, Cologne; The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Museum of Modern Art; and The Sundance Channel among others. She has received awards from The Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts and The Museum of Contemporary Cinema.

This second year of ARKIPEL International Documentary & Experimental Film Festival will have a special theme, Electoral Risk, which is trying to see how cinematic reading of democracy, activism, politics, and civil power today. Changes in geo-economic and global geo-political issue have changed so much our view of everyday reality, which also have shifted the order of social life.

Various socio-political events that show tendency of ‘civilian power’ occurred lately in the Middle Eastern countries, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, have questioned the meaning of democracy. The concept of democracy is adopted from the ‘West’, which means, the power is in the hands of people to determine all matters relating to the direction of their lives, in practice it is not going well. On the other hand, the development of technology, especially in media and information technology—cinema has become one of its parts, it has shown how the civil power ‘criticize’ state policies.

Join Mono no aware for an intimate screening presentation of recent works by Stephanie Gray presented with live poetry readings. Among the works being shown are several city-symphonies about her former hometown, Buffalo, NY; a film of a certain vanishing Coney Island; pockets of mysterious places in lower Manhattan; and atmospheric and wind-driven portraits of streetscapes in Queens and Chinatown. Her work is motivated by a sort of philosophical conversation with the city, “even if I don’t always know what it means or what it is, the filming makes sense of it in a kind of magic way. The city speaks and makes meaning, of both the past, present and future and where do memories fit in?” Her relationship with New York is intimate, and her ability to capture the subtle whispers amidst the chaos allows one to see the invisible.