Opening Night Party – Let’s Dance!

Bowery Film Festival is proud to screen the following selections:

• 3.O.W. – ALIEN’S CODE

  Directed by Maria Brodskaya aka ÅMBE
  

  VR Music Experience, the first of its kind fully hand-drawn in Virtual Reality music & lyric 360-degree Video. This immersive art piece is based on the philosophical idea that a mortal life on Earth is a temporary escape from eternity... It brings you to an abstract place in the space-time continuum, to a series of primordial emotions, ranging from love, pain and desire, to creation and destruction.

• Crystallize

  Directed by Roger Spy
  

  'I gave you freedom of thought, but you never used it anyway'. The themes of Crystallize couldn’t be clearer; creation, destruction, suppression and ultimately, with Roger’s help, total freedom of expression. The only things holding us back are ourselves, and the crushing weight and expectation of 2500 years of human history. So, repeat after me, prisms not prisons.

• Wind It

  Directed by JIHYE
  

  'Wind It' is a song out of Kahli Abdu's new album titled 'Book of Solomon'. This video is part of remaking of the portraits on the church and museum walls I saw growing up and still see to this day when we speak of the 'classics' and the divine.

• Orgullo

  Directed by Dylan Golden
  

  ORGULLO follows the story of Xiomara, a strong Latina mother living undocumented with her two teenage boys Gabe and Jorgie. Xiomara, Gabe, and Jorgie are aware of the country’s current events against their community, especially the ICE raids. Despite these hardships, the family chooses to live their life with love over fear every single day.

• Tulipomania: On the Outside [Spinello remix]

  Directed by Cheryl Gelover & Tom Murray
  

  Dramatic, dark and dubby, Tulipomania: On the Outside [Spinello Remix] features vintage objects animated frame by frame as torn paper and tape collages on thousands of individual sheets of black paper. Celebrating a quaint naiveté, the animation was inspired by the addition of a space-age era broadcast layered into the remix by Spinello aka Shane Woolman. Woolman, a London-based producer/remixer hosts shows on NTS Radio, Resonance FM and New New World. He works at The Wire magazine and also DJs as part of The Wire Soundsystem.

• VEGAN

  Directed by Carlos Lavezzari
  

  Jodi 10k, a member of the New York rap group, sLUms, delivers an artistic and powerful performance in his song Vegan. NNN founder Carlos Lavezzari delivers striking imagery to go with Jodi's music. Viewers will see through the eyes of the artist.

• Because

  Directed by Abby Ahmad
  

  The song 'Because' is an anthem for present-tense living. A proposal to not get caught up in the desperation of results, but to communicate in both art and life with clarity, endurance, and patience. Amidst our human tendency to analyze the past and anticipate the future, it is a reminder to inhabit the moment we are in. The film is an homage to home movies and music videos from the 1980s. These disparate vignettes represent the many shades of our memories. Sometimes literal, sometimes allegorical. Sometimes clear, sometimes crude. It is a collage of both the conscious and subconscious.

• Paresthesia

  Directed by Davey White
  

  A music video from Pterodactyl problems following one of their characters.

• Kill

  Directed by Kyle Andrews
  

  Kill is the latest music video of the self-described 'Lazy Punk'- band WHAT WOULD TILDA SWINTON DO. The band gathers around an elaborate dinner table portraying the members of a bourgeois yet average family. Bloody steaks and well-done meats, phallic vegetables, various kinds of bread and rich sweet dishes are calling to mind images of an opulent feast of a Caravaggio painting or an Arcimboldo study. No one dares to make make eye contact with one another. You can cut the tension in the air with a knife. By slowly zooming in on each performer’s face, we dive into their fantasies: each person playing brutally with the food that surrounds them - stabbing the steak, slashing the vegetables, ripping the bread cold-bloodedly. All are metaphorical acts of violence against the other “family members”. As the song becomes faster and louder, the zooms become faster and the violence intensifies. At the climax, the band members break out of their imaginative circumstances and start a food fight in reality - deconstructing the dinner table and the scene completely.

• KISS ME MALIBU

  Directed by Mikel Arraiz
  

  Horror-comedy film about the insecurities and overthinking that TV shows, religion, culture and belief systems create in us during male-female relationships and in courtship. It makes fun of us and the roles we take in that process, without making any moral judgements. The story is narrated through a song.