If a Tree Falls in a Forest

“Breaking Myths” aims to open the world’s eyes to the fragile and “catastrophic masculinity” of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, a fanatical far-right politician who can best be described as the Brazilian Donald Trump. The story is told through the lens of the critically acclaimed Brazilian filmmaker and LGBTQ activist Fernando Grostein Andrade (“Abe” Sundance 19), who directed, wrote, and produced the feature alongside creative partner Fernando Siqueira as the first release under his production company in California, Cosmic Dog Studios.

In 1934 an experiment by an amateur-scientist couple began. Named after a genus of moths, the Automeris Project placed a group of young children in an enclosed forest, leaving them to fend for themselves. On return visits, the couple presented self-made films, accompanied by live music, depicting the outside world. For them, these images were the perfect replica of reality seen in their expeditions. Nevertheless, the films were carefully framed, edited, and manipulated to induce a transformation and provoke the development of a new society.

Dr. Eva Ray is 90 years old. She lives in a house by herself outside of Philadelphia. Born in former Yugoslavia, her family fled the Nazis and settled in New York. As a biochemist she worked for NASA and retired in her late 50's. She got divorced after 40 years of marriage and spent her time volunteering in local politics. After many years of independence and freedom, she now feels a deep sense of restlessness and finds herself at a significant turning point. Weaving through her memory and her present, she asks herself what she will do next in what she calls her "final chapter."

This pseudo diary film is made of found materials from an unfinished 16mm film. Potenciais à Deriva is a film started by a Brazilian artist under a pseudonym while living in exile in Los Angeles, California. Isolated shots and previously assembled scenes reveal an intention to create a mysterious film comprised of disembodied interviews, empty rooms, radio recordings, soccer games, and sudden apparitions of the filmmaker that slowly ruminates on Brazil's colonial past, North American Imperialism and the military dictatorship of the time in a paranoid and anxious manner. Be aware that the film's final version never came to exist. This version presented is my mere attempt to produce a film with these otherwise lost images.

A cave named 'Gruta de las Pesadillas' was known to be a place whereby entering the cave with a torch or lamp, you would see your darkest nightmares reflected onto the shiny minerals from the inside. I was given access to a written document describing the experience of a man at the cave in 1914. He writes about leaving his house, going to the cave, and his experience there—This film is a visual and sonic recreation of the described event.

On an interstellar journey, a group of scientists studies the last living vestiges of Earth. The artificial intelligence, Museo, becomes a portal to the crew’s diaries and a fragmented archive of humanity. On Earth, the one believed to be the last of the humans traverses a ruined planet that is slowly recovering, little by little, from the apocalypse it endured.

A film that explores the intersection of a virtual and analog image. Through the hand-processed 16mm and 3D simulation, the film questions what remains.

In Stanislaw Lem's book of the same title, a paper-destroying blight obliterated much of Earth's written history—except for what's in the book. In this film, we look at a similar but unmarked future, perhaps one less distant than Lem's 3140s. Amid the rubble of an uncertain setting, the narrated soundtrack reads from the last surviving parts of some bound pages, perhaps a reporter's notebook, a dream diary, or a book manuscript.

Forms of the universe, rocky landscapes, and a green and lush human-made city. It originates from a dream I had; it is both mine and from a traveler aboard a spaceship. The dream and traveler belong within the universe of my film Fractais Tropicais. Here, the hopeful and utopian human-centric imaginary of space travel and the future, filled with surveillance, control, and illusions, all fleeting like the images a dream can contain.

iPhone video and SMPTE color bars were filmed on 16mm at 24fps. The digital overscan of the celluloid is played back at 0.24fps (1% of the original speed). The film is a sequence of 15-second shots in which the computer creates hundreds of frames sampling from three frames. It chooses how to build natural forms out of one of the standard test patterns of NTSC video created by The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

The great voyages to the "New World" were seen as expanding the frontiers of the visible and displacing those of the invisible, therefore maps from that time render the real and imaginary. The film follows a voyage of the Brazilian Military in search of an imaginary island with the same name as their country. In the myth from 1483 Brazil, or Hy-Brazil, is known to exist to the west of Ireland and above the Fortunate Islands. Visão do Paraíso is an examination of the capacity of the human imagination and computer simulations to construct environments. Amidst the fine threshold of the real, simulated, and imagined, the film analyzes the contemporary ideas of virtual reality and their ambition to expand the frontiers of the physical world into a "New World".

A visual accompaniment to Tōru Takemitsu's sonically sparse composition 'Corona for Pianist(s)'. Taking inspiration from the graphic score that interprets notes as circles and dots, the film focuses on the micro, elemental and sensual. Light flickering on water, the patterns of landscape, the movement of hands: here time is slowed and a great sense of focus is thrust upon us.

An imaginary look back at the present and distant past from the point of view of the year 2049. The return of an exile to Los Angeles decades after social and environmental collapse. He recreates the memories of his past (our present), and imagines the lives of those who inhabited his old apartment when he was gone. His sense of displacement elicits a meditation on place, memory and dream.

Two neighbors bond after a shared traumatic event, a continuous home development creeps into nature's threshold, and a community celebrates freedom. The Instability of Clouds navigates an ecosystem in decay and growth while traversing across its spaces of comfort, spectacle, and disaster. Through the observation and construction of facets within a suburban neighborhood in Southern California, connections between landscape, neighbors, and environment ruminate on the American Dream and its resonances.

A meditation on the relationship between humans, nature, and technology.

an excerpt of a conversation between James and I during the Fall of 2019 - Santa Clarita, CA