Carte blanche to the Millennium Film Journal

► Celebrating the release of MFJ 83, this program gathers works discussed in the issue, engaging with the notion of “circulation” at multiple scales: blood flowing through veins, bodies moving through cities and countries, capital and information disseminating through nation states in a global economy. Movement is the only constant, the fall of old regimes and the rise of new ones, ad infinitum – film is no exception. 

“In 2025 we endured the tragic loss of a pair of artists, who in life were united in love: Florence Jacobs, in June, and in October, Ken Jacobs. Together they were the prime movers behind our organization, putting sweat, ingenuity and vision behind a utopian idea that we all might be able to share the tools, knowledge, space, and resources required for filmmaking, and forge an alternative community of cinema opposed to the practices of capitalism and industry.”
– Joe Wakeman, Exec Dir. Millennium Film Workshop 

Screening introduced and followed by a discussion with Grahame Weinbren and Nicky Hamlyn.

Curated by Grahame Weinbren, Vince Warne and MFJ editors.
Texts excerpted from Millenium Film Journal and Filmmakers Coop Catalogue.

► Screening: 

Nissan Ariana Window
Ken Jacobs
1968, 16mm (digital), color, silent, 12’

“Nissan Ariana Window is 3/4’s of our daughter’s name. She was just a kid when these pictures were taken. Some were taken before she was born: pregnant Flo together with pregnant cat China sunning themselves under the skylight. Andrew Noren likes the movie.”
– Ken Jacobs (Filmmakers Coop Catalogue)

The Scent Sang a Song
@welcometo_blue
2025, digital, 2’50 
+ A selection of short works throughout the program

“There’s a pervasive sense of voyeurism, a loneliness, a fascination with light, movement, a blurry shoegaze haze, tiny slices of infinity. Many of them—notably, the extraordinary 2.5-minute short film The Scent Sang a Song—seemed to be filmed in an abandoned elementary school, a liminal space of fluorescent light fixtures, chain-link fences, portable classrooms, windows overlooking palm trees silhouetted against a dark sky.”
– Vince Warne (MFJ 83, Spring 2026)

L’incanto
Chiara Caterina
2021, 8mm & 16mm (digital), 20’

“The images are dynamic, each shot an immediate, palpable connection with the eye of the cinematogapher. Visual montages are set in apposition to selected fragments of dialogue, not to illustrate events described but to comprehend them. I found myself reading the voices into the images, not through definable rhetorical devices like metaphor or illustration. The images function not as a window into a past reality, but as surfaces in tense balance with their pictured subjects.”
– Grahame Weinbren  (MFJ 76, Fall 2021)

WALD (The Forest)
Christoph Janetzko 
2023, digital, 13’

“The location is the Harz Nature Park, a forest in the German low mountain range. It is undergoing a slow process of dying. The landscape is employed not as a starting point or background for projection of the filmmaker’s imagination; rather, the film represents a turn towards a non-filmic reality: we are invited to reflect on the issue of climate change and its consequences, just as other experimental filmmakers address sexual diversity, racism or feminism. Janetzko's experimental film points beyond the immediate sensory film experience to a meditation on a global social challenge.”
– Ulrich Stein (MFJ 81, Spring 2025)

Full Out 
Sarah Ballard 
2025, 16 mm (digital), 14’ 

“Ballard calls to mind the notion of cinema as a type of hypnotism and reverie both exhilarating and disorienting: the sheer, gravity-defying, delirious movement of both the cheerleaders and the camera brings the film round (and round) to first experimental cinematic principles again, while also resonating with a long, cyclical history of the allure and uneasy ethics of imaging women’s states of being.”
– Sarah Keller (MFJ 83, Spring 2026)

REPEAT AFTER ME 
Open Group 
2024, digital, 15', with audience participation

“Open Group is a well-known Ukrainian artist collective founded in Lviv in 2012. The current permanent members are Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach and Anton Varga. [Repeat after me] is in several ways a unique work, making unusual, specific demands of its viewers and offering a uniquecinematic experience in return.
Men, women, old, middle aged, young. One by one they stare into the camera, identify themselves, and shout, yowl, grunt, hiss, roar the sounds of war. After producing the extended sound of war weapons or warning sirens, the performer issues the command:  ‘Повторюй за мною’ – 'Repeat after me.'” 
– Grahame Weinbren (MFJ 82, Fall 2025)

Approx TRT: 80 mins

The Millennium Film Workshop gratefully acknowledges support for the Millennium Film Journal by the following individuals and organizations: Deborah and Dan Duane; Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation; C. Noll Brinckmann, anonymous donors; and New York State Council on the Arts. Special thanks to Magda Savon for introducing us to the Open Group.

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