Sun, 9 JUL, 21:15 - Teatro Municipal de Vila do Conde Sala 2

Deborah Stratman Shorts 1

Optimism

USA, Canada, DOC, 2018, 15'

Made up of loose portraits of icy Dawson City, located on the border between Canada and Alaska – the mythical setting of the 1986 Klondike Gold Rush. “Optimism” is a gaze under the transformation of that territory. It starts with the foundation of the city and moves through the permanent confrontation between man and nature.

From Hetty To Nancy 

Greece, Denmark, EXP, 1997, 44’

The stoic beauty of the Icelandic landscape forms a backdrop for a series of witty and caustic letters written at the turn of the century by Hetty. The film juxtaposes Hetty's ironic cataloguing of the petty social interactions of her companions with historic accounts of catastrophes that reveal the Icelandic people subject to the awesome forces of nature.

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Mon, 10 JUL, 19:30 - Teatro Municipal de Vila do Conde Sala 2

Deborah Stratman Shorts 2

Musical Insects

USA, EXP, 2013, 7’

The temporality of film takes on the temporality of a printed work. An homage to a Bette J. Davis’ illustrated text, itself an homage to the small music makers of the insect world.

Ray's Birds  

United Kingdom, DOC, 2010, 7´

Ray Lowden keeps seventy-two large birds of prey, five deer and some wallabies at his place in Northumberland, England. He’s had ten days off in twelve years and loves what he does. The film is a little homage to his variously coy, imperious, curious, stubborn, and comic raptor menagerie.

…These Blazeing Starrs!

USA, EXP, 2011, 14’

Since comets have been recorded, they’ve augured disaster: catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval, and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage.

Immortal Suspended   

USA, DOC EXP, 2013, 6’

The idea of suspension is evoked on shifting registers – as levitation, cessation, preservation, and suspense – and located in sites whose identities slip as we track through a space within a space. This video essay on levitation, UFOs and ancient Asian dreams consists of one long shot recorded at a Smithsonian Museum of Art warehouse in Washington.

Second Sighted 

USA, EXP, 2014, 5’

Obscure signs portend a looming, indecipherable slump. An oracular decoding of the landscape transformed by the combination of the new and the old in a dystopian collage. “Second Sighted” is the construction of a surreal stratification of material, ranging from computer-generated images to archive footage of satellites.

The Magician's House  

USA, EXP, 2007, 6’

Sometimes the supernatural lingers plainly in the most ordinary places, secret only in so much as its trace goes unnoticed. Both a letter to a cancer-stricken alchemist-filmmaker friend, and a quiet tribute to the vanishing art of celluloid, “The Magician’s House” is full of ghosts.

Vever (for Barbara) 

USA, 2019, 12’

In 2018, Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) approached Deborah Stratman to create a film from unpublished images shot by Hammer during a trip to Guatemala in 1975. Recorded during the civil war, the images show a rural Guatemala where leftist forces, backed by Maya indigenous and poor farmers, defy governmental authorities.

Untied  

USA, EXP, 2001, 3’

A small portrait of the volatility of intimacy, and of breaking free from abusive cycles. Made in response to a year of collapsing relationships and violent accidents that left Stratman broken, dislocated, and stuck in her apartment.

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Qui · Thu, 13 JUL, 21:15 - Teatro Municipal de Vila do Conde Sala 2

Deborah Stratman Shorts 3

It Will Die Out in the Mind 

USA, EXP, 2006, 4’

A short meditation on the possibility of spiritual existence and the paranormal in our information age. Texts are from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker” in which the Stalker’s daughter redeems his otherwise doomed spiritual journey. She offers him something more expansive and less explicable than logic or technology as the conceptual pillar of the human spirit. 

The Illinois Parables  

EUA . USA, DOC EXP, 2016, 60’

A suite of Midwestern parables that question the historical role belief has played in ideology and national identity. Each one is linked to a city of Illinois which in a sense represents all the diversity of the United States of America. “The Illinois Parables” is a synopsis of the history of this North American state from prehistoric times to the present day.