Reed O'Beirne

A wordless woman rises to confront herself through a dance of self-liberation. Featuring choreography and dance by Carolyn Pavlik, along with an original soundtrack by Robin Guthrie, the film evokes a mystical story-line of struggle and release.

Created by animating MRI scans, PHANTOM LIMBS peers deeply into the physical body to conjure inner space as an enveloping world of light breaking upon the mind. Set to music by Seattle band, St. Kilda.

While St. Paul is said to have received his revelation from a celestial third heaven, our unseen narrator challenges you to decipher a revelation of the terrestrial everyday here and now, the impossible conundrum of reality. You are invited to enter a prismatic rumination on perceptions of spacetime, along with the related confines of language and the complexity of perspective. Revelation 360 poses spatiotemporality as an interrogation, giving you the freedom to navigate through time and space, while indicating the limitations of our conceptions, inevitably tied down by our situated experiences and the circumscriptions of language. The narrator sees you and offers suggestions for your interpretation that are both certain and uncertain, reassuring and unsettling - leaving you as both the watcher and the watched. When does it start, where is the middle, and how does it end? Are these even the right questions?

Ominous cinegrams of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia print, intercut, like cascading scythes, with depictions of a woman in a field, evoking repetitions that exist in harvest rituals, as well as in gestures of madness. Specters of familial anxieties creep into this loose take on the myth of Poludnica (“Noonwraith” or “Lady Midday”), a Slavic harvest spirit that could cause madness in those who wandered the fields alone.

Fused with the poignant words of a Moroccan human rights activist Rachida Madani’s poem, Tales of a Severed Head, Her Plot of Blue Sky is a relational glimpse into the joys and struggles of a group of Amazigh women in a care home in Sefrou, Morocco. While the women engage in creating visual diaries of their everyday lives, many of their experiences of abuse, alienation, loss and poverty, are captured in one particular resident’s story.

A subtle movement of dancer’s arms invites three panels of film into one frame in this micro-symphony of sound and image in which the changing light evokes the passing of time. Human and non-human, interior and exterior co-exist in this highly improvisational yet serendipitous portrait of the forever-changing city of Seattle. Collaborating to subdivide a 16mm film frame into thirds, Caryn Cline, Linda Fenstermaker and Reed O’Beirne present their separately shot segments simultaneously within one spatial plane. From the interplay of these three points of view emerges a cinematic conversation based on a horizontal compositional logic within the shared frame. This combined connotative relationship between the subframes evokes a spectacle of fractured spatial and temporal perspective.

Weaving together film, music and poetry, "Last of Our Kind" transforms the memory of a lost love into a ritualistic incantation of longing. Action is exaggerated and time seems to blur, as the lovers' tale unfolds poetically into a modern interpretation of the Persephone myth. Shot entirely on Super-8 - the movie traces the poem, line by line, throughout the city of Seattle in sequences of time-lapse photography blended with live-action that collapse and rearrange time and events into memories. Shot as a silent film, "Last of Our Kind" features an original soundtrack created by Robin Guthrie interwoven with a voiceover recitation of Rick Linville's poem.

By presenting three filmmakers’ work simultaneously within a single 16mm frame, Tri-Alogue #2 offers a complexity of perspective that undermines the omniscient cinematic gaze and evokes a deeper relational mystery. Collaborating to subdivide a 16mm film frame into thirds, three lmmakers present their separately-shot segments simultaneously within one spatial plane. From the interplay of these three points of view emerges a cinematic conversation based on a horizontal compositional logic within the shared frame.