The New York Film Festival’s annual Projections section presents a diverse  selection of film and video works from some of the most adventurous  moving-image artists in contemporary cinema. For this special event,  Acropolis Cinema and the American Cinematheque have partnered with Film  at Lincoln Center to present a two-part program of highlights from the 2019 Projections shorts lineup, including new works by Beatrice Gibson,  Tomonari Nishikawa, Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold, Ben  Russell, and Zachary Epcar. With its aim to “expand upon our notions of  what the moving image can do and be,” Projections is at the forefront of  bringing exciting and innovative filmmaking to US audiences. Acropolis  and the Cinematheque are proud to offer Projections a Los Angeles home,  and to provide local audiences with a unique taste of America’s most  storied film festival.

Projections LA is co-presented by Acropolis, MUBI,  and the American Cinematheque, with additional support and funding  provided by the Tadashi Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities.

PROGRAM 1: Signs of Life (5:00pm)

- The Prince of Homburg
Patrick Staff, USA/UK, 2019, 23m
Los Angeles Premiere
Patrick Staff’s vibrant, color-coded short, cleverly uses text from  Heinrich von Kleist’s 19th-century play of the same name to explore  themes of persecution and punishment, and to meditate upon contemporary  issues of gender, queer resistance, and the carceral state.

- Tyrant Star
Diane Severin Nguyen, USA/Vietnam, 2019, 16m
Los Angeles Premiere
The star-crossed melancholy of two separated lovers is memorialized in a  cathartic rendition of a beloved pop tune, intertwining the sensual and  the toxic within an urban periphery of Vietnam. Tyrant Star is a musical tale of postwar emancipation and trauma.

- Billy
Zachary Epcar, USA, 2019, 8m
Los Angeles Premiere
Zachary Epcar’s oblique psychodrama follows Billy and Allison through an  evening of ominous disturbances. As flames dance, flashlights flicker,  and domestic objects scatter in all directions, the couple’s home  becomes a theater of contemporary anxiety.

- Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters / Deux soeurs qui n’est sont pas soeurs
Beatrice Gibson, UK, 2018, 23m
Los Angeles Premiere
In Beatrice Gibson’s dream-logic thriller, based on a 1929 play by  Gertrude Stein, two amateur sleuths—played by filmmakers Ana Vaz and  Basma Alsharif—investigate a crime that may not have happened. Pushing  narrative beyond its limits to the point of abstraction, Gibson offers a  bewitching reflection on identity, motherhood, and storytelling itself.

PROGRAM 2: On the Move (7:30pm)

- Black Bus Stop
Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold, USA, 2019, 9m
Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold resurrect an informal  meeting ground for black students at the University of Virginia,  Charlottesville in the 1980s and ’90s in this ecstatic tribute. In a  collaboration with members of the student body, the filmmakers stage a  nocturnal celebration of this sacred and historic space through an  exuberant display of choreographed song and dance.

- Amusement Ride
Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2019, 16mm, 6m
Los Angeles Premiere
Tomonari Nishikawa’s latest visual sleight of hand, shot on 16mm with a  telephoto lens, observes the inner workings of a Ferris wheel, locating  intricate structural patterns and crosscurrents of movement from the  inside of a swinging passenger car.

- (tourism studies)
Joshua Gen Solondz, USA, 2019, 35mm, 7m
Los Angeles Premiere
A selection of still and moving images captured in over a half-dozen  locations around the globe have been transformed into a bracing, rapidly  unfolding cinematic travelogue in Joshua Gen Solondz’s lyrical film,  which finds unexpected parallels and echoes among its far-flung locales.

- Signal 8
Simon Liu, Hong Kong/UK/USA, 2019, 14m
Los Angeles Premiere
Simon Liu’s eerie, entrancing portrait of contemporary Hong Kong tracks a  series of strange disruptions to the city’s urban infrastructure.  Deceptively tranquil 16mm images of everyday life are accompanied by  muffled music cues, ominous radio transmissions, and intimations of an  impending hazardous event that may never arrive.

- Pelourinho: They Don’t Really Care About Us
Akosua Adoma Owusu, Ghana, 2019, 9m
In 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote to the U.S. Embassy of Brazil concerning  the country’s discriminatory attitude toward black immigrants. Akosua  Adoma Owusu conveys this correspondence through montage, juxtaposing  voiceover readings of the letters, sumptuous Super-8 footage shot on the  streets of Pelourinho, and interpolated images from Spike Lee’s  controversial music video for Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Really Care  About Us,” resulting in a film that swiftly traces nearly a century of  social unrest.

- COLOR-BLIND
Ben Russell, France, 2019, 30m
Ben Russell’s visually eclectic Super 16mm work of psychedelic  ethnography surveys the history of colonialism in French Polynesia  through present-day forms of ritualized dance, body art, and  woodworking. Shot between Brittany and the Marquesas Islands, COLOR-BLIND is guided by the spirit of post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, whose words and art appear throughout.