Conversation on Comfort Behavior

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Comfort Behavior

Films Screening July 22-25, 2021

Live Discussion with Filmmakers and Programmers on July 22, 1 pm PDT, 4 pm EDT

Films available at:

https://www.lafilmforum.org/schedule/summer-2021/comfort-behavior/ 

A sunburn across the bridge of your nose. A warm belly on a cold rock. Do you remember what it was like to run so fast that you can hear your heart beating in your head? An examination of texture, the internal, and the floating bits on the tops of your eyes. These films showcase the idea of play, pain, and the memory of an outside world materially experienced, not unlike dairy cows experiencing grass for the first time in a year.

Sunning is considered a comfort behavior in many animals. A tactile experience of facing the sun to warm oneself raises body temperature and reduces heart rate. After a prolonged period of languid gestures, we need to bask to remember. This program showcases films that warm up our bodies, hearts, and minds slowly re-acclimatizing to the world from outside. Using light, animation, and emotional memories, these filmmakers explore the tangible possibilities of a world best experienced through touch.

This program presents the work of filmmakers and artists Anouk De Clercq and Tom Callemin, Elena Duque, Anu-Laura Tuttelberg, Timoteo Guillem, Josh Cloud, and Nazlı Dinçel.

Programmed by Jordan Wong & Sam Gurry.

Ticketing for Comfort Behavior: Sliding Scale, requested $12 for general admission, $8 students/seniors, $0 for Filmforum members, at https://watch.eventive.org/comfortbehavior/play/60e77ed5a748f1008d8084cc

Bios:

Anouk De Clercq explores the potential of audiovisual language to create possible worlds. Her recent work is based on the utopian idea of ‘radical empathy’. She has received several awards, including the Illy Prize at Art Brussels in 2005 and a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention in 2014. Her work has been shown in Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, MAXXI, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, BOZAR, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlinale, Ars Electronica, among others. Anouk De Clercq is affiliated to the School of Arts University College Ghent as a visiting professor. She is a founding member of Auguste Orts, On & For Production and Distribution and initiator of Monokino. Anouk De Clercq is the author of Where is Cinema, published by Archive Books.

Elena Duque is a Spanish-Venezuelan filmmaker, curator, writer and teacher. As a filmmaker, she has completed several animation and experimental short films, such as Cómo hacer un fanzine, exhibited in the art center CA2M in Madrid, De cara a la galeria, that premiered in Curta 8 (Curitiba, Brasil), La mar salada, programmed in the festivals Transient Visions (New York), Moving (Kioto) and Florida Experimental Film Festival, Pla y Cancela, selected in Verín and D'A in Barcelona, and in the exhibition Cibermujeres in the Neomudéjar Arts Center in Madrid and Valdediós (2019), part of the Official Section of Punto de Vista Festival in Pamplona, and selected in festivals such as London Animation Film Festival, Les Inattendus (Lyon), Milwaukee Underground Film Festival and Experiments in Cinema.

Anu-Laura Tuttelberg graduated with a MA degree in animation at Estonian Academy of Arts in 2013. She made her first animation, Fly Mill (Kärbeste veski, 2012), a puppet film, as her graduation film. Fly Mill has screened at about hundred festivals around the world and won more than 20 prizes including 6 Grand Prix. Her first film after graduation, a short animated film, On the Other Side of the Woods (Teisel pool metsa), premiered in June 2014 at Annecy International Animation Festival. She has made set designs for several short stop motion animations and given workshops of stop motion animation. Her new puppet film “Winter in the Rainforest”, which is a co-production with Estonia, Mexico and Lithuania, has screened at the Annecy and Zagreb International Animation Festivals.

Teo Guillem is a director that has been working for more than ten years in films, commercials, music videos and opening titles for feature films since 2007 when he established Dvein, a production company and directors collective that with a background in fine art and design, that

is well-known for their style that merges the physical with the digital world to craft a distinctive aesthetic with an experimental, design-driven culture at its core. Teo’s directorial work with Dvein had a wide success in commercials and films and been featured in multiple festival and exhibitions around the world such as Saatchi & Saatchi’s New Director Showcase (France), OFFF Festival (Spain & France), F5 (United States), or ArtFutura (Argentina). His short film Magma (2013), was awarded in AICP Awards, the Australian Animation Festival among others and is part of the permanent collection of MoMa in New York. Aside other awards and recognitions he has also been awarded with the City of Barcelona Award on Film (2012) and the Fine Arts Medal of San Carlos University in Valencia (2013).

Josh Cloud is a multimedia visual and video artist located in Los Angeles CA. His practice has recently expanded from illustration and animation to now include a wide variety of 3D processes, including ceramics, weaving, woodwork, and printmaking. His sculptural works have an aged aesthetic quality, somewhere between art object and artifact, existing somewhen between times. These works hope to resurface and reanalyze the past––questioning which histories are inflated and which are compressed, who holds the power to make such decisions, and how that power can be claimed by an individual in the present through object making.

Nazlı Dinçel’s hand-made work reflects on experiences of disruption. She records the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation and desire with the film object: its texture, color and the tractable emulsion of the 16mm material. Her use of text as image, language and sound imitates the failure of memory and her own displacement within a western society. Born in Ankara, Turkey, Dinçel immigrated to the United Sates at age 17. Dinçel resides in Milwaukee, WI where she is currently building an artist run film laboratory. She obtained her MFA in filmmaking from UW-Milwaukee. Her works have been exhibited globally including the Museum of Modern art in New York, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Vienna Modern art Museum, Buenos Aires International Film Festival, Walker Art Center and Hong Kong International Film Festival. She was recently a 2019/2020 Radcliffe Institute fellow for advanced study at Harvard University, and a 2019 Emerging Artist recipient of the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship. In addition to exhibiting with institutions, Dinçel avidly self-distributes and tours with her work in micro-cinemas, artist run laboratories and alternative screening spaces in order to support and circulate handmade filmmaking to communities outside of institutions.

Sam Gurry is an interdisciplinary filmmaker living in Los Angeles. They view animation as a seductive series of images, each one an opportunity to reimagine our own social understandings of the interpersonal. By utilizing domestic objects and heightened ephemera, their work showcases tactility at its core, both of the matter and of the spirit. Their films untether the liminal restrictions between documentary, animation, and imagined realities.

Their award-winning films have been in the official selection at the Toronto International Film Festival, SXSW, Slamdance, Ann Arbor, Rotterdam, and the Ottawa International Animation Festival amongst others.  Sam holds an MFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts. They are currently an assistant professor at California State University, Los Angeles & lecturer at New York University, Los Angeles.  They perform as one half of expanded cinema duo Saint Victoria’s Incorruptible Body providing guitar and vocals.

A collector of souvenir state spoons and overpriced Uni Alpha Gel lead pencils, Jordan Wong is a Chinese-American experimental filmmaker driven by emotional honesty and analog processes. His films have screened internationally, including DOK Leipzig, NewFest, Animafest Zagreb, Japan Media Arts Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where he was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker for the film "Mom's Clothes".