January 14-20, 2022

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Expedition Content (Dir. Ernst Karel & Veronika Kusumaryati, 2020)

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Time: 2:30pm & 7:30pm daily

Location: Lumiere Music Hall

Address: 9036 Wilshire Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA 90211

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Exclusive Los Angeles theatrical engagement!

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An immersive marvel of sonic ethnography, Expedition Content—the latest film produced by Harvard's famed Sensory Ethnography Lab (Leviathan, Manakamana)—draws on audio recordings made by recent college graduate and Standard Oil heir Michael Rockefeller as part of the 1961 Harvard-Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea that set up tents among the indigenous Hubula (also known as Dani) people.

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In their nearly imageless film, Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati document the strange encounter between the expedition and the Hubula people. The work explores and upends the power dynamics between anthropologist and subject, between image and sound, and turns the whole ethnographic project on its head.

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Screening with: Single Stream (dir. Pawel Wojtasik, Toby Kim Lee, and Ernst Karel, 2014; 23 min.)

TRT: 101 min.

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Advances the possibility of a purely sonic cinema.

Leo Goldsmith, The Brooklyn Rail

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A sonic journey that interrogates how images are produced and who produces them.

Clayton Dillard, Slant Magazine

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What Expedition Content does so adeptly is to make audible and legible those voices that have been silenced through omission.

Stephanie Spray, Non-Fiction Journal

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[In revisiting this story], Karel and Kusumaryati touch on an issue of immense scope: the relationships that forge ideologies, representations and the destiny of entire peoples.

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian, Cinema du réel

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Raises questions about colonial ethnographic research and also experiments with a proposal in which the narrative arises from the experience of the explorers in the place and that of the viewer sitting in the movie theater.

Ivonne Sheen, desistfilm

February 18, 2022

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A Night of Knowing Nothing (Dir. Payal Kapadia, 2021)

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Time: 8:00pm

Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

Address: 2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057

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Los Angeles premiere!

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Through fictional love letters found in a cupboard at the Film and Television Institute of India, we meet L, a film student writing to her estranged lover while he is away. Gradually we’re immersed in the drastic changes taking place at the school and in the lives of young people across the country as they take to the streets to protest widespread discrimination.

 

In her debut film, Payal Kapadia deftly merges reality with fiction, weaving together archival footage with student protest videos to create a vital tapestry of the personal and the political. With its dreamlike editing rhythms and a revelatory use of sound, A Night of Knowing Nothing—which won the best documentary prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival—is both an essential document of contemporary India and a nostalgic look at youth fighting the injustice of their time.

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The best film of the year...wondrous, trancelike.

Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune

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Foregrounds cinema itself as a site of resistance.

Michael Sicinski, MUBI Notebook

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One of the best student films ever made...imbued with a sense of history unfolding in the moment.

Siddhant Adlakha, Indiewire

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Extraordinary...a hypnotic essay about the loss of innocence and the spark that inspires one to fight.

Pat Mullen, POV Magazine

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A fervent cinétract on love and revolt...alluring in its mix of sensuality, intimacy, and collective movement.

Andréa Picard, ICA Frames of Representation