Cosmic Rage

The Sun Quartet I (2017), by Los Ingrávidos

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Cosmic Rage: A Fundraiser for the LA Tenants Union (LATU) & Community Self-Defense Coalition Los Angeles (CSDCLA)

Sunday May 17, 2026, 1:30 pm doors, program starts at 2:00 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057

NOTE THE CHANGE IN TIME

In person: Jazmin Jazzy Romero, gh0sttaste

Tickets: $15 or $25 general donation for admission, https://link.dice.fm/K0f4dce9f877

COSMIC RAGE is a program that presents formally subversive explorations of migration, empire, ritual and revolt. Curated in response to recent attacks against immigrant communities, the program asks us to honor the grief and rage within as a creative force that propels oppressed people towards action. These documentary, narrative and experimental works represent various perspectives by Latin-American, Black and immigrant filmmakers, all bursting with visions of rebellion and transformation. Food vendors will be present as well. Curated by Helen Peña

The films will be followed by a live performance with Jazmin Romero and a DJ set by gh0sttaste.

All proceeds will go towards supporting immigrant tenants and organizing efforts at LA Tenants Union (LATU) & Community Self-Defense Coalition Los Angeles (CSDCLA).

LA Tenants Union (LATU) is an autonomous tenant union organizing tenants fighting gentrification and displacement across LA neighborhoods, and is currently running a mutual aid fund for struggling immigrant members in crisis. https://latenantsunion.org/

Community Self-Defense Coalition Los Angeles (CSDCLA) has been a pillar across LA in organizing defense to support immigrant communities across LA county, and are raising money to support separated families with access to food, medical supplies, legal assistance, housing security and a means to contact their loved ones. @communityselfdefensecoalition

gh0sttaste is an alias of Los Angeles based multidisciplinary artist Ryan Luis Fuller. Inspired by ambience, emotion, memory, and rhythm..their work weaves a macramé of field recordings, archival material, and contemporary experimentation. gh0sttaste currently has multiple albums on the platform Nina and Bandcamp and is currently working on a new EP. Ryan Luis Fuller is the co-founder of Cine Apartamento, a Los Angeles–based non-profit dedicated to queer storytelling through film and the founder of an ambient club series Cleanse.

Jazmin Jazzy Romero is an artist and musician from Los Angeles, California. Playing with a mix of sound, movement, and material, she develops performance-based worlds where musical thinking becomes a method for story-telling. She engages with musical gesture and physical form to produce scores and compositions that materialize as performances, video, and sculptural assemblages. Her artworks are activated through liveness and collaboration, viewer interpretation, repetition, and variation where meaning is generated through encounter and exchange. She draws from both her formal musical training and embodied, intuitive processes, using composition as a way to translate personal and collective histories into spatial and sonic experiences. She is also a member of various performance and music production collectives, such as COQUETA. https://www.jazminromero.com/

gh0sttaste

Jazmin Jazzy Romero

The Sun Quartet I & II

By Los Ingrávidos, 2017, Mexico, 16mm trans to digital, color, sound, 8 min. (part 1) and 12:50 (part 2)

The Sun Quartet confronts the climate of corruption and violence that dominates contemporary Mexican leadership and militarism. Across its four parts, the series exemplifies the poetic operations of the collective, who reconcile elements ranging from improvisational music, superimposed cinematography, poetic texts both read and cast on screen, and documentation of protests. These elements assemble as a counter to official claims to truth regarding traumas as recent as the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa rural normal school that happened in Iguala, Mexico, and as distant as the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, a formative event in contemporary Mexican revolutionary consciousness. The Sun Quartet also summons resonances of older, unspeakable traumas, more distant still, rifts that recede deep into the past of Mexico, its genocides and massacres, the predation done in its name, its significance as a theatre to colonial ambitions. The Sun Quartet mixes phenomenological fascination with the terrifying climate of contemporary Mexican governance and the historical foundations of that terror.

Concrete Resources (Thank you for keeping me a company of images)

By Emir West, 2024, U.S. and Mexico, digital, color, sound, 9 min.

Through repeated interventions of war, resource extraction, and agricultural exploitation, U.S. and British powers have attempted to render Nicaragua a void along the Central American isthmus. Still, the country’s legacy as “the land of lakes and volcanoes” and “a country of poets,” creates a romantic image of its resistance. Cycles of trauma through memory had, studied, and inherited forge to become the image of place in diaspora— conflating realities and projections of placefulness. [Strobe/flash warning]

Dreams Like Paper Boats

By Samuel Suffren, 2024, Haiti, b&w, sound, 19 min

Edouard has been living in Port-au-Prince with just his daughter Zara for five years. Since his wife left, his daughter and him have only received a cassette from her, and that was a long time ago. After years of absence, what can we expect from a distant love?

My Caldera

By Cauleen Smith, 2022, U.S., digital, color, sound, 5 min.

“The imagery of the film is of volcanic scenes in various life stages, from pouring magma to inert mountain, with colors unnaturally saturated – purple, blue, and orange. The scratchy, chaotic aesthetic is created through Smith’s proprietary process of placing TikTok video stills onto 35 mm film, then rendering it in 4K as an artifact of the original footage. A driving, heavy metal soundtrack provides an apt audio accompaniment to the visual onslaught of nature’s rage. A common thread in Smith’s work, this exhibition looks to nature for an alternative – to draw an analogy to human dynamics.” – Morán Morán Gallery, https://cdn.contemporaryartlibrary.org/store/doc/33855/docfile/6656146a63a42e6f79ffb59c7d0f9c62.pdf

Trokas Duras

By Jazmin Garcia, 2025, U.S., 17 min

A visual journey through the interior landscapes of a Jornalero’s dreams, his waking reality in L.A., and what it looks like when a group of people relegated to serving others labors for their own elevation of body and spirit. An homage to the unique, idiosyncratic, and customized old pick-up trucks driven by Latino day laborers and the intimacy that is cultivated in and around them.

República

Director, Writer & Actress Grace Passô
Brasil, 2020, Portuguese, digital, color, sound, 15:35
Cinematographer / Sound / Editing Wilssa Esser
The pandemic brandishes the extent of the necropolitics operating in the country and its society goes through a crisis of ethics amidst a government which is the exact expression of colonialist power. República is a short film made at home, with a domestic structure, at the beginning of the 2020 quarantine, in downtown São Paulo, Brazil in the neighbourhood REPUBLIC.

Director, actress and screenwriter, with creations in theater and cinema. Several times awarded in these functions, the artistic work of Passo is widely recognized with notoriety in the Brazilian arts circuit. Among the films she acted are: Praca Paris (directed by Julia Murah), In the Heart of the World (Maurilio Martins and Gabriel Martins), Long Way Home (Andre Novais). Director of Vaga Carne (in partnership with Ricardo Alves Jr, from an authorial theatrical work ) and República, short film made during Covid epidemic . She was one of Falherty's New York 2021 guest artists. Currently, Grace is preparing an exhibition at the Bienal de Arte de São Paulo and is developing a feature-length project of her own.

Bethlehem Bandolero

By Larissa Sansour

Palestine, 2005, digital, color, sound, 3 min.

Bethlehem Bandolero is a kitsch video featuring Sansour herself as a Mexican gunslinger arriving in Bethlehem for a duel with the Israeli Wall. Wearing a big sombrero and a scarf, the artist walks the streets of Bethlehem and greets the locals before taking off for her final showdown.