The short films of four CalArtian alums and faculty, many of which play with memory and archival photos, were showcased at the Crossroads Film Festival in San Francisco. Presented by San Francisco Cinematheque, the festival ran from Aug. 29 to 31.
Heehyun Choi (MFA Film/Video 21) describes her 19-minute film, This Isn’t What It Appears (2022), as a way to “reconstruct and radicalize” archival photographs of Korean women taken in the 1950s by American soldiers. “This film attempts to reveal the camera within the frame, not as an omniscient eye but as a reciprocal medium that subverts the hierarchy in an image,” the artist writes in the program. The film screened as part of the Crossroads Program 4 on Aug. 30.
Born in Seoul, Choi did a post-graduate teaching fellowship at CalArts in 2021. In 2024, she received the 2024 Korea Arts Foundation of America Award, a biennial art award that recognizes artists with Korean heritage working in the U.S.
“What impressed us most about Choi’s work was its sophisticated handling of ideas, seen and unseen, to expose a social critique of what it means to be a woman filmmaker in Korea,” said the KAFA jury of their decision.
School of Theater faculty Janie Geiser’s 2024 film Slideshow made its Bay Area premiere on Aug. 30. Geiser found slides at a flea market in the 1990s; they revealed images of daily life in the former East Germany, before the Berlin Wall came down. “Working repeatedly with these found images, I came to feel that I knew these people, as they emerged across multiple images of families at home, friends sharing meals, outdoor gatherings, travel, work, and school. However, I can’t really know them…. I can only sense their acetate traces,” she writes.
“We perceive Geiser at work, moving and organizing the images we see in front of us like an in-person demonstration. It’s a highly polished film that also conveys serendipity,” said critic Michael Sicinski in his review.
It follows It passes on (2023) by Erica Sheu (Film/Video MFA 22) also made its Bay Area premiere at Crossroads on Aug. 30.
Sheu is a Los Angeles-based Taiwanese filmmaker who explores synesthetic qualities of memory and celluloid film.
“This film creates a container for a private ritual to reconnect to Kinmen, a Taiwanese island, during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in the 1960s,” Sheu writes of the film, which “reimagines her father’s childhood experience” in “a tender gaze [that] attempts to look through and experience beyond the light glares as if understanding a silent parent in the crack of the historical events.”
Sicinski put it on his list of 25 Great Experimental Films of 2023.
I Carry the Universe with Me (2024) by Film and Video faculty Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu (Film/Video MFA 15), made its North American premiere at Crossroads on Aug. 31 as Part of Program 8 of the fest.
The film contrasts footage shot in the Gold Rush era in Newhall, California, to parallel images taken of the spot where the William S. Hart Museum now stands.
“History does move along a timeline, but the footprints under our feet have faded. Virtual space replaces traditional expeditions. In the computer-derived world, one hundred years is just a number,” wrote Liu.
The filmmaker uses AI to generate descriptions based on image analysis programs: “I was curious about how artificial intelligence described the images I took of the world. Realities and hyperrealities are woven together as if this is the prototype of the myth of modern life…. They are false references, not the images themselves…. we may have to ask whether the real me lives in the virtual world, or the virtual me lives in the real world.”
Critic Alex Fields praised Liu’s use of “staccato editing and shadowy superimpositions.”
“It is a film of such readily apparent beauty that at first glance, a viewer might not notice how densely structured it is,” he wrote in his review. “This is a film to get lost in, one that courts confusion but never frustrates.”
