Impermanencia
Emily Apter & Elijah Stevens (in post-production)
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In 2017, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake shook Mexico, ravaging Permanencia Voluntaria, a shoestring archive of low-brow popular cinema high in the mountains of Tepoztlán. In the aftermath, Viviana, the archive’s founder—whose grandfather’s films are deemed the worst and most beloved in Mexican history—is working to restore the damaged celluloid and preserve the legacy of Mexican B-movies. Impermanencia explores the fragility of film in the face of environmental disaster, digital media, and cultural erasure.
Learning About Flowers and Their Seeds
Emily Apter & Annie Horner, 2021, 4 min.
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Found footage educational videos and Super 8 of Vermont forests combine into a landscape film (of sorts), reflecting on the digital and analogue technologies that mediate images of nature.
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Festivals & Screenings: Prismatic Ground (NYC), Screen 25 Cinema (London), MFJ "Isolated Experiments" (NYC)
Bliss.jpg
Emily Apter & Elijah Stevens, 2023, 10 min.
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A travelog through the familiar and unfamiliar terrain of digital landscapes. Pairing 16mm footage of computer desktop backgrounds with soundscapes of sites of technological extraction – precious metal mining, smelting foundries, microprocessing plants, and data farms – Bliss.jpg excavates and examines the geological and geographical sites that produce our virtual worlds.
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Festivals & Screenings: Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (International Premiere), Tacoma Film Festival (US Premiere), Light Matter (NY Premiere), Glued & Screwed #14: Cyberfeminism (Chute Film Coop x The Hague)
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Hammer of Eden
Emily Apter & Annie Horner (in development)
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Hammer of Eden is a hybrid sci-fi documentary that explores overlapping histories of seismic oil drilling, the Iraq War, and autotune software. Structured as a satirical “hero’s journey,” the film follows a fictional hip hop artist through a futuristic digital landscape as he makes sense of autotune’s technological and militaristic roots. Both campy and meditative, Hammer of Eden explores the interplay of nature/technology and cultural production/resource extraction, highlighting the role of myth-making in US media and imperial history.