Free admission!

Join us for a special program featuring the video works of Ahree Lee. The program will play on continuous loop on Saturday, November 16th and Sunday, November 17th from 11am to 5pm.

Program

Bojagi (Memories to Light)
2015, digital video with sound, 15 minutes

Bojagi (Memories to Light) is inspired by Korean wrapping cloths, or “bojagi”, which women traditionally pieced together out of scraps of spare material, creating an heirloom full of beauty and utility from what would otherwise be waste. Often made by mothers for their daughters before getting married, bojagis served as a memento from the past that bridged the transition from childhood home to future home. The artist reimagined the bojagi as a video that uses home movies from Asian American families to create a collective wrapping cloth of memories.

Thanks to Center for Asian American Media and the families who donated their home movies to the Memories to Light archive (caamedia.org/memoriestolight/).

Music by Nathan Melsted.

Zero
2011, digitized Super-8 film, 3 minutes

Zero is one of a suite of three pieces that repurpose super-8 home movies from the artist’s childhood. In Zero, the artist edited together all the zoom shots in all her family home movies into a continuous loop that doubles in speed with each repeat. Zooming is a common technique made easy by the presence of a zoom button on the movie camera, which adds emphasis to whatever happens to be in the center of the frame and attempts to close the distance between observer and observed. However, as the speed of the shots approaches asymptotic zero, it becomes clear that the camera is on a collision course with a subject it will never reach.

Panorama
2011, digitized Super-8 film, 2 minutes

Panorama is one of a suite of three pieces that repurpose super-8 home movies from the artist’s childhood Editing together all the panning shots from her parents’ home movies, it explores how camera motion implies a kind of search that mirrors the search of the home movie photographer – for a new sight, for an experience, for a moment to capture for posterity.

Pattern : Code
2019, digital video, 1 minute

Pattern : Code reactivates the innate connections between weaving and computing, and examines the interrelationships between technology, craft, and women’s labor. Archival footage from industrial weaving and computer operations is edited together and overlaid with weaving and punch card patterns, to create this comparison of modes of technological production by women in factories and offices.

About the artist

Ahree Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist working in video, new media, and textiles. She came to her art practice through an unlikely path: working in user experience (UX) design at Apple and HP Labs. She uses patterns and algorithms interchangeably to show that the line between craft and technology is arbitrary and often based on gender-biased valuations of female labor.

Lee received her B.A. from Yale University in English literature and a M.F.A. in graphic design from Yale School of Art, where she studied under Sheila de Bretteville.

Her many commissions include the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Irish Museum of Modern Art; the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; the 01SJ Biennial; the International Short Film Festival in Leuven, Belgium; the International Festival of Video Art of Casablanca; and the Sundance Channel. Her Webby-nominated video Me was shown by Steve Jobs at the D5 tech conference, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of the Moving Image, New York. Me currently has over 9 million views.

Lee’s awards include an artist residency at Santa Fe Art Institute; a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award nomination; an Artist Fellowship Grant in film and video from the state of Connecticut; and an artistic career development grant from Asian American Renaissance. Her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Metropolis, and Fast Company.

https://www.ahreelee.com

This screening is presented as part of UCR ARTS’ AAPI Film Series Supported by the Voy and Fay Wong Family Endowment. This program is also shown in conjunction with the exhibition Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World

Synopsis

The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut. Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital—head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha)—plus their coworker, cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia’s film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is courted by a doctor at her hospital; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her strict Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside village with equal radiance, articulated by her superbactresses and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence. All We Imagine as Light is a soulful study of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood, in all its complexities and richness.

Trailer

Film Details

Director: Payal Kapadia
Studio: Janus Films
Running Time: 118 minutes
Country: India
Release Year: 2024
Rated: Unrated

Reviews

“Payal Kapadia delivers a memorable and compassionate slice-of-life drama, making a clear statement about the constraints faced by working-class women in India.  ” – Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, Empire Magazine

Synopsis

This screening has been postponed to a later date due to technical issues. UCR ARTS will announce the rescheduled date in the coming weeks.

Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite—until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. With its aching musical soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past 25 years of cinema.

In the Mood for Love will be followed by In the Mood for Love 2001, a previously-unseen 9 minute short film by Wong Kar Wai.

Trailer

Film Details

Director: Wong Kar Wai
Studio: Janus
Running Time: 98 minutes
Country: Hong Kong
Release Year: 2000
Rated: Unrated

Reviews

“In the Mood for Love is probably the most breathtakingly gorgeous film of [2000], dizzy with a nose-against-the-glass romantic spirit that has been missing from the cinema forever.” – Elvis Mitchell, New York Times

Synopsis

The marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles has long since grown cold. Though rumors of affairs and a divorce abound, peace is ordained for the Christmas festivities at the Queen’s Sandringham Estate. There’s eating and drinking, shooting and hunting. Diana knows the game. But this year, things will be profoundly different. SPENCER is an imagining of what might have happened during those few fateful days.

Trailer

Film Details

Director: Pablo Larraín
Studio: NEON
Running Time: 117 minutes
Country: UK, USA
Release Year: 2021
Rated: R

Reviews

“Spencer knows that Diana is headed on a tragic path. Its triumph is that it allows her one last joyride- rooftop down, arms in the air- to break free before the inevitable comes knocking.” – Adam Graham, Detroit News

Upcoming Films

Synopsis

Belfast is a movie straight from filmmaker Kenneth Branagh’s own experience. A nine-year-old boy must chart a path towards adulthood through a world that has suddenly turned upside down. His stable and loving community and everything he thought he understood about life is changed forever but joy, laughter, music and the formative magic of the movies remain.

Trailer

Film Details

Director: Kenneth Branagh
Studio: Focus Features
Running Time: 98 minutes
Country: UK
Release Year: 2021
Rated: PG-13

Reviews

“There is something genuinely bold in giving a movie about Belfast in 1969 the warm glow of the everyday. It reminds us that life goes on.” – Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine/Vulture

Upcoming Films

Synopsis

The audacious new film from writer-director Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine), starring Simon Rex in a magnetic, live-wire performance, Red Rocket is a darkly funny and humane portrait of a uniquely American hustler and a hometown that barely tolerates him.

Trailer

Film Details

Director: Sean Baker
Studio: a24
Running Time: 128 minutes
Country: USA
Release Year: 2021
Rated: R

Reviews

“[A] deliriously funny and deviously satirical new comedy about a very specific, finely sketched specimen of parasitic American hustler..” – A.A. Dowd, AV Club

Upcoming Films

Synopsis

Screened publicly just once before it was banned and then lost for decades, this rediscovered jewel of Iranian cinema reemerges to take its place as one of the most singular and astonishing works of the country’s pre-revolution New Wave. A hypnotically stylized murder mystery awash in shivery period atmosphere, Chess of the Wind unfolds in an ornate, candlelit mansion where a web of greed, violence, and betrayal ensnares the heirs to a family fortune as they vie for control of their recently-deceased matriarch’s estate. Melding the influences of European modernism, gothic horror, and classical Persian art, director Mohammad Reza Aslani crafts an exquisitely controlled mood piece that erupts in a stunningly subversive final act in which class conventions, gender roles, and even time itself are upended with shocking ferocity.

Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée laboratory (Paris) in collaboration with Mohammad Reza Aslani and Gita Aslani Shahrestani. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Trailer

Film Details

Director: Mohammad Reza Aslani
Studio: Janus Films
Running Time: 93 minutes
Country: Iran
Release Year: 1976 / 2021
Rated: Not rated

Reviews

“Aslani pulls story threads together with an elegant moving camera that doesn’t immediately give up all the secrets a scene may contain.” – Glenn Kenny, The New York Times

Upcoming Films

Synopsis

Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) and his young nephew (Woody Norman) forge a tenuous but transformational relationship when they are unexpectedly thrown together in this delicate and deeply moving story about the connections between adults and children, the past and the future, from writer-director Mike Mills.

Trailer

Film Details

Director: Mike Mills
Studio: a24
Running Time: 108 minutes
Country: USA
Release Year: 2021
Rated: R

Reviews

“A tremendous showing from Joaquin Phoenix, operating at a register he’s rarely found before. It’s a career best for him – lovely, empathetic, humane.” – Angelica Jade Bastién, Vulture

Upcoming Films

Synopsis

Two women, Janis and Ana, coincide in a hospital room where they are going to give birth. Both are single and became pregnant by accident. Janis, middle-aged, doesn’t regret it and she is exultant. The other, Ana, an adolescent, is scared, repentant and traumatized. Janis tries to encourage her while they move like sleepwalkers along the hospital corridors. The few words they exchange in these hours will create a very close link between the two, which by chance develops and complicates, and changes their lives in a decisive way.

Trailer

Film Details

Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
Running Time: 120 minutes
Country: Spain
Release Year: 2021
Rated: R

Reviews

“The somber meets the surreal in a gorgeous movie with one of Penelope Cruz’s best performances.” – Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times

Upcoming Films

Synopsis

Joel Coen’s bold and fierce adaptation of Macbeth, a tale of murder, madness, ambition, and wrathful cunning.

Trailer

Film Details

Director: Joel Coen
Studio: A24
Running Time: 105 minutes
Country: USA
Release Year: 2021
Rated: R

Reviews

“Every beat of “The Tragedy Of Macbeth” a cinematic flourish, a tale told by a master full of sound and monochrome fury.” – Bob Mondello, NPR

Upcoming Films