Film Diary NYC is a festival of diary films, home movies, and personal documentary. Culminating a week-long showcase of over 130 films, Oceans of Time is the festival’s Closing Night, featuring a diverse section of new work from these modes of personal cinema, including the New York premieres of Liz Roberts' MIDWASTE and Devon Narine-Singh's OCEANS OF TIME. There will be a Q&A panel with filmmakers in-attendance followed by a reception.
Festival passes available via Millennium Film Workshop.
CANYON ECHOES.mp4
Dir. Hunter Blue, 2022, USA, 21 min
In Canyon Echoes.mp4, My Mother and Grandfather attempt to extract archival video from the family camcorder. In the process of doing so they transport the viewer back and forth through memories spanning decades. Bringing us in on a journey about the ghost of our descendants and the malleability of old video material and how it offers us strange shapes and configurations of love and time.
EASY GO
Dir. Grace E Mitchell, 2021, USA, 7 min
Depression, fetish and friendship. A shapeshifting portrait of healing bodies & eroding landscape.
INVISIBLE
Dir. Alejandro Hinestroza, 2022, USA, 2 min
How can one stay invisible in a society that's constantly trying to monetize everything you love and hate?
OCEANS OF TIME
Dir. Devon Narine-Singh, 2022, USA, 11 min
Oceans of time is part of an ongoing series of works dealing with memory, music, and illness.
MIDWASTE
Dir. Liz Roberts, 2021, USA, 23 min
Midwaste addresses the Midwest region, midlife, and various notions of wasted, telling the story of Liz Roberts' relationship with heroin over several decades. Her connection to drug subculture is inextricable from her relationship to the camera. She started making Super 8 films as a teen, shooting friends she became intimate with in circles of drug use. Her methods are palpable and relational; retracing her steps, interviewing friends about their memories of the past, and revisiting footage taken at various stages of her youth.
WILDERNESS DAYS
Dir. Jason Younkman, 2021, USA, 11 min
Summer(s) in New York City reassembled as a scrolling (de)collage.
COCONUT
Dir. Jard Lerebours, 2022, USA, 3 min
A short diary film detailing the director’s trip to his mother’s homeland of Jamaica to bury his grandmother and caretaker. Coconut is a public declaration of love for Gladys Austin.
PIGEON
Dir. Skum King, 2022, USA, 2 min
A simple 2 minute video of my neighborhood's pigeons filmed on a TR-416 Hi8 tape camera, in January of 2022.
THE___________WORLD
Dir. Peixuan Ouyang, 2021, China/USA, 18 min
A personal essay about connection and disconnection, in and through different realities.
STATIC
Dir. Ilina Bhatia, 2022, USA, 2 min
A filmmaker introspects on her childhood feelings of anger through the constant sensation she describes as static.
STRANGE LONGINGS, TRACING THE BLOCK
Dir. Ricky Danielle Ford, 2022, USA, 10 min
Originally created as a gift for the filmmaker’s grandmother, Strange Longings, Tracing the Block follows her path to school 56 years ago, from 139th to 147th street, where she grew up in Harlem. Having been away for more than 20 years, the film was not only a gift, but the beginning of a spiritual journey, linking familial stories to tangible locations and breathing a new life into memories shared over Sunday dinners and framed photographs. As the first video contribution to her family archive in 10 years, the film also serves as a marker for both the drastic changes of the city and the remnants that continue to withstand the tests of time.