Director Basma Alsharif's Ouroboros speaks of the need to forget trauma in order to survive, and in so doing forging the ignorance necessary for trauma to repeat itself. The film takes the idea of the eternal return, the Ouroboros (the symbol of the snake eating it’s own tale which is the title of the film) and applies it to the Gaza Strip, Alsharif's homeland, as a place where the end of civilization has begun. There, even the ruins of civilization's past have been ruined. And rather than imagining that this is the end, it’s really just a beginning. 

The film takes place in the course of one day, in 4 places: France, Italy, Gaza and California, and follows one character who has just had his heart broken and embarks on a journey to escape his pain, weaving all four sites together as though they were 1 single location. By the end of the day he is back where he started, able to fall in love again and ultimately to have his heart broken again. This narrative's focus is to collapse the current condition in the Gaza Strip with a universal one, carrying an ever unresolved past.  Alsharif questions the function of representation and entertainment both in cinema and music and the history of exploiting different cultures, especially as it relates to oppressed people in settler colonialist countries. 

This film opened at the 2017 Whitney Biennial 

Directed by Basma Alsharif

Cinematography by Ben Russell

Sound by Federico Chiari

Starring Diego Marcon

Produced by 

Momento ! (France)

IDA.IDA (France)

Galerie Imane Fares (France)

IDIOMS Films (PALESTINE)

Rogue Iniki Productions (USA)

Skylar Rousrae is part of a group of archaeologists digging near Bakersfield, California. As they come closer to a discovery, Skylar starts feeling inexplicably connected to the fossil they are searching for. As a result, and parallel to the dig, Skylar begins to slip from reality into the unburied chaos of her personal life. She abandons the dig site and travels by foot through Bakersfield to find answers to the fossil's origins and her strange connection to it. 

Part psychological drama, part Odyssean comedy, Bakersfield  is a feature length film centered around a woman experiencing an unsettling connection to an ancient artifact. Through this  connection she is propelled to explore the buried corners of her psyche to determine if her experience is real or imagined and its significance to her life.

Bakersfield makes heavy use of location to explore the influences that capitalism, industry, and nature may have on a person grasping around for meaning in their life.  The city of Bakersfield, CA is in the most oil producing county in the United States,  the third most productive agriculture county, and other industries include natural gas, aerospace, mining, petroleum refining, manufacturing, distribution, and meat processing. It is also the third most polluted city in America. A smog swathed nexus of production and nature, Bakersfield felt a fitting landscape for a character attempting to defog her interior lens.

Filmed August/September 2016. Coming Soon. 

Directed by Ella Andersson

Cinematography by Brett Milspaw

Location Sound by Matthew Doyle

Starring Kate Adams

Produced by Nour Mobarak, Rogue Iniki Productions

(from Program Notes)

The Sleeping Poet and the Jongleuse is a lecture of sorts focused on the tale of a 1925 banquet in honor of Symbolist poet Saint-Pol-Roux that became a battle between the young Surrealists and the aging Symbolists. The Surrealist's interventions were spurred on by a combination of factors including: Poet-turned-Ambassador Paul Claudel's recent insults to the Surrealists in the paper; France's military support of the civil war in Morocco; and Madame Rachilde's isolationist commentary against the intermarrying of French and Germans. It all ended at the police station, Surrealists and Rachilde booked with the "charge:" BRAWL BETWEEN INTELLECTUALS.

Written and directed by Shana Lutker, The Sleeping Poet and the Jongleuse is a multi-media performance. The collaging of memoirs, poetry, newspaper accounts, historical essays and music in Lutker's play draws out the web of political, artistic and intellectual motivations of the Surrealists and their associates that have emerged from her research, as well as her own investments and associations. Part of the fourth chapter in Lutker's ongoing series, Le "NEW" Monocle: The History of the Fistfights of the Surrealists (2012-), the play is related to Paul, Paul, Paul, and Paul, her 2015 exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. 

Narrator - Eli Diner

Actor 1 - Alex Bistrevsky

Actor 2 - Dmitrious Bistrevsky

Actor 3 - Melissa Kaplan

Actor 4 - Nour Mobarak

Piano - Jay Israelson

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Producing Curator - Alexandra Gaty

Producer - Nour Mobarak, Rogue Iniki Productions

Curator - Lauri Firstenberg with Catherine Taft

Production Assistance - Patrick Woody, Lyubov Solovena

Editors - Jessica Davies, Eli Diner, Andrew Zipern

Translators - Emilie Craig, Dorna Khazeni

Produced with LAXART. LAXART's programs are produced with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Getty Foundation; The National Endowment for the Arts; The Pasadena Art Alliance; and The Stratton-Petit Foundation.