Astria Suparak
Press for KEEP IN TOUCH!

THE INDEPENDENT FILM & VIDEO MAGAZINE:
Several of NYUFF's most appealing shows were produced by guest curators like... "Keep In Touch", curated by Astria Suparak and Lauren Cornell, featured such highlights as Jacqueline Goss's THE 100TH UNDONE, a whip-smart, unsettling and oddly touching reflection on the genome, cloning advances, and the "post-human" future. Seth Price's hilarious TRIUMF deflates American frontier mythology and macho bluster with an inspired rant, while its picture-perfect autumnal tableau sports the most vivid foliage to be found this side of a Sirk melodrama. Other selections by Leslie Thornton, Stephanie Barber, and Zakery Weiss attested to the curators' gossamer touch with heavyweight artists and themes. -Ioannis Mookas, "When They're Bad, They're Better: The 9th New York Underground Film Festival



DAS KURTZFILMMAGAZIN:
Curatorial hit - tours USA

Following the resounding success of her programme at the Anthology Film Archives (NYC), curator Astria Suparak is now taking ["Keep In Touch!"] on a tour of five American cities. In New York the programme of short films and videos- by Miranda July, Seth Price, Bjørn Melhus and others - interspersed with audio pieces, received accolades from both filmmakers and the press. According to Bjørn Melhus: "The room was packed like I've hardly ever seen in a cinema, the audience loved it and we all had a wonderful, stimulating evening. I was so happy to finally be able to watch videos in a cinema instead of an exhibition room". Amy Taubin commented in the Village Voice: "Peripatetic curator Astria Suparak has an eye for the strange and ineffable". The young curator (23) is currently at work preparing further programmes.



CASHIERS DU CINEMART:
It may just be my hazy memory, but I swear that the New York Underground Film Festival I first attended four years ago has little in common with the one I saw this year. That's no criticism though. Unless of course you consider tighter, smarter films and a more sharply focused curatorial mission liabilities...

But on the arty front, Astria Suparak's Keep in Touch! program definitely took the cake ..Her selections, they're certainly unpredictable, and often take you by surprise. Typical was Seth Price's TRIUMF, a good-humored satire on political campaign bonhomie. A Lincolnesque woodchopper with an appallingly fake coif delivers several versions of a monologue on the good character and moral uprightness that Ronald Wilson Reagan brought to the White House. It's plainly tongue in cheek, yet not condescending. There's no hectoring; Price just reminds you that platitudes and cheery pictures can't substitute for substance. For a "political film," it's remarkably disinterested.

Even more peculiar are Leslie Thornton's HAVE A NICE DAY ALONE and Stephanie Barber's DOGS. Thornton's film draws from her epic PEGGY AND FRED IN HELL, and touches on many of the same themes: childhood, language and sociology. Based on a series of what appear to be elliptical PowerPoint slides, dissolving into close-up images of peculiar looking children, HAVE A NICE DAY ALONE mimics a scientific presentation which lacks some element critical to understanding its intended sense. It's like a computer is trying to organize data based solely on patterns, without any rules as to what constitutes a meaningful relationship. Barber's DOGS is easy to hate, but its cloyingly sophomoric patter deepens the longer you listen. The 15-minute film consists of nothing more than several angles on two garishly crude hand puppets of dog heads, bobbing as they "talk" to each other. The dialogue is maddeningly poorly recorded, but their conversation is one typical of tipsy aimless bohemians chatting at a party. Both participants are sensitive and thoughtful, and yet incapable of meaningfully communicating with one another. They discuss matters of consequence - mental health, love, art and artmaking, and yet when the conversation ends it is gone, and you're left with just the image, the nodding heads, and the cartoonish grins of the puppets. -Brian Frye

INDIEWIRE:
Zakery Weiss' "Untitled" attacks the subject of artistry by creating a piece that took on the form of a preamble in which he self-consciously mocks the honesty of art. Seth Price's "Triumf" presents a charismatic fictional drinking buddy of Ronald Reagan who continually repeats the same story, ad nauseum. The result is an experience where the audience is taken in by the charm of this stranger, yet confronted by the repetitive nature of storytelling. -Tim LaTorre

Audience responses:
I'm really appreciating at the moment the art of the story retold, the truths & histories that change, the tales created, the versions and embellishments when they're repeated in what would seem to be a monotonous way... I love it when I'm not sure at first the level of someone's seriousness because they're so convincing. Thank you for showing that!

(If you would like to send a response to the screening, please email to the address below)

For more information contact:

Astria Suparak / a@astriasuparak.com
PO Box 1813, Stuyvesant Station / New York, NY 10009
http://www.astriasuparak.com