Gleaners Film Festival
Run Time: 180 min.
Gleaners Film Festival is an annual, non-profit exhibition and celebration of marginal cinematic forms, subjects, and communities. Situated in the city of Lancaster, PA, the festival brings together independent local, national, and international work that is often overlooked by dominant industry and mainstream cultural platforms.
The first iteration of this new, annual festival will take place on September 22-24, 2022. All programs, with the exception of the special event with John Waters, will be free and open to the public. While future iterations of the festival will hold an open call, this year the festival’s directors have curated the program by invitation.
Friday, September 23, 1:00-3:30pm
Instructions on How to Make A Film
2018, Nazli Dinçel, United States, 13 minutes (digital file)
Shot at the Film Farm in Mt. Forest, this comedy is a quest about performance, educational voiceover, analogue filmmaking, ASCII, language, ethics of ethnography and narrative storytelling under a metaphor of instructions to farm land. Text by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Wikihow/shoot-film.
Civil War Surveillance Poem (Part 1)
2020, Mitch McCabe, United States, 15 minutes (digital file)
The first chapter of a five-part feature-length, speculative nonfiction film contemplating a new American civil war via call-in radio, twenty years of verité footage from the filmmaker’s archive, and robots.
Baltimore
2021, Margaret Rorison, United States, 22 minutes (digital file)
Catalogs the landscapes and architecture of the filmmaker’s hometown of Baltimore City. Personal and observational, this 16mm film, shot from 2016 to 2018, explores exterior spaces, material and psychic fragments of historic buildings, many of which have been demolished or renovated since the completion of the film.
Malembe
2020, Luis Arnías, Venezuela/United States, 13 minutes (digital file)
Through its rhythmic montage and mix of observational and surreal imagery, Malembe forges oblique linkages between the United States and Venezuela, conveying the strange dissociation of being uprooted, of living between places.
Little Sky
2021, Jess X. Snow, Canada/United States, 14 minutes (digital file)
Follows the journey of Sky, a Chinese American pop star who returns to the city they were raised in to find their estranged immigrant father. Haunted by their childhood memories, Sky risks their non-binary identity to end the cycle of violence in their family.
Renowned experimental filmmaker Roger Beebe, whose films have shown around the globe from Sundance to the Museum of Modern Art and from McMurdo Station in Antarctica to the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square, comes to Pennsylvania to present a program of his multi-projector performance. In his recent films, Beebe explores the possibilities of using multiple projectors—running as many as 8 projectors simultaneously—not for a free-form VJ-type experience, but for the creation of discrete works of “expanded cinema.” These films are simultaneously performance films (as they can only be screened with Beebe actually running the projectors—and running from projector to projector), technological demonstrations (with a parade of different modes of image making and presentation—16mm and super 8mm film alongside video and digital formats), and significant aesthetic works in their own right.