Multi-Screening: The Crux, The Innocents, Petrykivka, No-Land: Life in 2223, Indiana Baby

Indiana Baby

Coming of age story about a girl longing to escape her rural, land-locked town and become an oceanographer.

The Crux

The Crux takes a hard look at issues facing today’s teens and families. From sexting and guns to the effects of parental death, it explores the choices that many teens face and the consequences of those decisions.

No-Land: Life in 2223

Human civilization was born in the ocean. Science research shows that all lives including humans originated from the ocean. The future of human beings would be closely related to the ocean as well.

Many forecasts show that in 2050, the rising seas will erase a large number of coastal cities. In the year 2223, the evolved humans are starting to build ‘No-Land’, a hypothetical underwater residential area in a parallel universe, set in the situation of the disappearance of land. Lei invites the viewer to enter this fantastical world and meet three underwater citizens. Licht (which appears as Lux in its virtual form) is your neighbour, Lacey is a landlord and collector, and Lachesis runs a delivery service. The fashion performance film illustrates characters and their surroundings through the use of colours, materials, the form of their bodies, and methods of filming. Lei depicts the scenario using mixed techniques including digital experiments from character modelling to digital fashion creation, and physical making processes from fish leather tanning to analogue photography, to celebrate the malleability of future human identities.

The Innocents

Follow two acclaimed musicians who are determined to use their talents to advocate for social justice. Allen Otte and John Lane tour the country with their performance of The Innocents - a piece created to shine a spotlight on the growing problem of wrongful convictions in the United States. Using a variety of found-object and home-made instruments, electronic soundscapes, and spoken texts, the performer-composers endeavor to explore various aspects of the issues surrounding wrongful imprisonment and exoneration in the American criminal justice system: mistaken identity, incarceration, injustice, politics, psychology, and resilience. The film culminates with a performance attended by Anna Vasquez - an exoneree, who spent 13 years in a Texas prison system for a crime which never happened.

Petrykivka

Petrykivka reconjures stories of heroism, everyday artifacts, and spaces decorated with floral folk imagery, remediated viral video, and footage of acts of resistance and survival. Using object-based and hand-drawn animation, this DIY experimental video poem vicariously witnesses and testifies to the transformative possibilities of imagination.