That's a misleadingly linear description of the film; it's actually cleaved into two parts which would seem back to front if we were following the stories of specific people. The first section observes life in the squat where the residents support each other as they face eviction threats and the bureaucracy of asylum-seeking, while the second part looks on as other people make the rough sea passage.
At SF State, local artist Liz Hernández launched The Office for the Studio of the Ordinary, a residency-turned-research institution. The artist and over 150 students joined in what she called an "artistic conspiracy," celebrating everyday moments and hidden narratives across campus. The culminating exhibition included (among many other creative exercises) black-and-white photographs of the team in action, a tower of ceramic trophies, an illustrated myth of campus resistance and animal liberation, and an archive of dreams.
In his short film Papers (1991), the Japanese artist Yoshinao Satoh assembles thousands of newspaper images into a transfixing animation. Moving through a flurry of Japanese characters, moon phases, Go games, house plans and faces that grows ever faster, Satoh creates a mass-media collage that seems to anticipate the age of information overload. Amplifying the frenzied pace and mesmerising effect, he pairs the imagery with a propulsive work by the US composer Steve Reich.
Easily one of the most surprising and captivating films of NYFF63, 40-year-old Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze's film gorgeously captured his country's hypnotic landscapes via the unique camera choice of a mid-2000s Sony Ericsson phone. What he has achieved is an abstract beauty combining the look of the Dogme95 avant-garde filmmaking movement with the contemplative thoughtfulness of Abbas Kiarostami and Frederick Wiseman.
The show features painting, sculpture, photography, film and assemblage, tracing how artists working in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and New York grappled with identity, sexuality, race and power in ways often overlooked in canonical art histories. Though the women's liberation movement didn't enter wider public consciousness until the early 1970s, Sixties Surreal showcases how women artists were creating an early feminist aesthetic and imagining new fields of possibility for themselves and their work.
A cofounder of New York's Anthology Film Archives, Sitney coined the term "structuralism" to identify the minimalist, formalist experimental film that arose in the 1960s, writing extensively about the form in a manner that was as clear and straightforward as his stated disdain for prestigious prizes.