Acropolis welcomes Toronto's Blake Williams for two evenings of eye-popping 3D cinema. First, on October 18 at the Culver Theater, we present a double bill of the co-directed feature A Woman Escapes and a program of the filmmaker's stereoscopic 3D shorts, followed on October 19 at 2220 Arts + Archives by a curated selection of multi-dimensional experiments by a number of Williams' heroes and contemporaries (details to be announced).
About the program:
A Woman Escapes (Dir. Blake Williams, Sofia Bohdanowicz, and Burak Çevik, 2022, 81 min)
Audrey lives alone in Paris after moving there to tend to the home of her recently deceased friend, Juliane. Moving through the days without motivation or a sense of purpose, she tries to re-establish her footing in the world by beginning video correspondences with two filmmakers—Burak, who lives in Istanbul, and Blake, who lives in Toronto. This exchange of words and footage initiates a healing process, but the nature of the interaction is not what it seems.
Preceded by:
No Signal (Dir. Blake Williams 2009, 5 min)
A consumer-grade DLP projector is powered on without connection to an external source, thus prompting the device’s default ‘No signal’ message. The artist’s hand waves through the projected message, creating something out of nothing.
2008 (Dir. Blake Williams, 2019, 12 min)
Pictures of blooming cherry blossoms, radiant colour fields, and domestic miscellany are re-photographed off the screen of an obsolete televisual device. Images rise upward, the left greets the right, and a new season arrives, telling an impressionistic story of transition, unity, and companionship.
Laberint Sequences (Dir. Blake Williams, 2023, 20 min)
Shot in and around the Laberint d’Horta in Barcelona, the film charts several journeys into the garden in search of its centre, where a statue of Eros waits. As the film navigates the maze’s false pathways, its recursive structure begins to crack, and a mysterious underworld floods its gates.
FELT (Dir. Blake Williams, 2025, 15 min)
A man sees mountains and sets out to recreate them. During a traverse across the Western United States, we observe familiar sites in a new light, and the world gets lost in the fold.
TRT: 133 min + 15 min intermission
In person: Blake Williams
“No filmmaker since Ken Jacobs has been so consistently committed to exploring the aesthetic potentials of 3D technology” — Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope
"As much a lament for old friends as it is for old mediums and technologies, laying them lovingly to rest, but [A Woman Escapes] also embodies the steady absorption of the human psyche into the cinematic." —Siddhant Adlakha, Truthdig
"[An] intimate epistolary film... Campbell gives an interior performance that evokes the thoughtful focus she brings to her collaborations with Bohdanowicz, enact[ing] a kind of communion through voice and image." —Nicolas Rapold, The New York Times
"[A] cinematic exquisite corpse... Armed with the power of prosumer technology, and woven throughout with mesmerizing 3D sequences, [A Woman Escapes] invites audiences to see through the eyes of their remote tour guides." —Caroline Glum, Screen Slate
"Forsakes Bressonian austerity and completely embraces the ornaments of its own narrative - twists and artifice and a profusion of images and colours. A Woman Escapes sets out a trajectory that seems to turn cinema into a manifesto for healing." —Louise Martin Papasian, FIDMarseille
(Available to download after screening date)