Chircales, a screening presented by Jesse Lerner
Chircales, a screening presented by filmmaker, curator, and writer Jesse Lerner Thursday, January 20, 2022, 7 pm PST The event will be live-streamed on Zoom. RSVP for Zoom link . Real-time captioning provided. In conjunction with The Missing Circle , an exhibition curated by Magalí Arriola on view (by appointment) at KADIST San Francisco through January 22, 2022. • Ñores (sin señalar) , Annalisa D. Quagliata. 16mm transferred to digital file, Mexico, 3 min., 2017. • Chircales , Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva. 16mm transferred to digital file, Colombia, 42 min., 1972. Total running time: 45 min. Both films are subtitled in English This program brings together two films – one recent, one fifty years old – which represent what anthropologist Michael Taussig called the “spaces of death” in Latin America. Quagliata’s Ñores (sin señalar) is a response to the assassination in Mexico City of journalist Rubén Espinosa, along with four women – Nadia Vera, Alejandra Negrete, Yesenia Quiroz, and Mile Virginia, all social activists pushing for accountability, government transparency, and an end to femicides. Espinosa had left Veracruz after receiving death threats from the criminal organizations who were threatened by his reporting. Rodríguez and Silva’s Chircales , or The Brickmakers, is a powerful portrait of extreme poverty viewed through a Marxist analytical framework. Filmmaker, curator, and writer Jesse Lerner places the work in the context of both KADIST’s The Missing Circle exhibition that revisits the shared experience of death and extinction that has traversed Latin America since colonial times and radical and alternative Latin American filmmaking traditions. The special, one-night-only screening will be followed by a Q&A with Lerner. Jesse Lerner is a documentary filmmaker, curator, and writer based in Los Angeles. His short films Natives (1991, with Scott Sterling), Magnavoz (2006), and T. S. H. (2004), and the feature-length experimental documentaries Frontierland (1995, with Rubén Ortiz Torres), Ruins (1999), The American Egypt (2001), Atomic Sublime (2010), and The Absent Stone (2013, with Sandra Rozental) have won numerous prizes at film festivals in the United States, Latin America, and Japan, and have screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Sundance, Rotterdam, and Los Angeles Film Festivals. His books include The Maya of Modernism , F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing (with Alex Juhasz), Ism Ism Ism (with Luciano Piazza), The Catherwood Project (with Leandro Katz), L. A. Collects L. A. (with Rubén Ortiz Torres) and The Shock of Modernity .