TENDING THE ORCHARD: BILL BASQUIN, ALISON O’DANIEL & RODRIGO REYES
November 9, 2024
Join the Roxie community for an afternoon of films and conversation with three Bay Area filmmakers who will share a program of their short non-fiction films. Tending the Orchard – taken from the one of Bill Basquin’s films of the same name – explores the complexities and nuances of relationships impacted by separation and access, the collective desires to communicate and share intimacy and the dynamic interplay between land, identity and history. Using the medium to experiment with form, sound, and imagery provides the connective tissues that bring these films together for the first time. Even more, their curiosity to explore storytelling possibilities opens up and invites new perceptions and experiences of the world around us.
Curated by Gina Basso, in collaboration with the Roxie Theater and the filmmakers with a post show Q&A!
The first edition of BAY VISIONS: A new, ongoing series spotlighting local filmmakers!
BAY AREA NOW 9
August 2023 - February 2024
BAN9 exhibition, member of the curatorial counsel, film + video.
Curated programs:
Canyon Cinema: Contemporary Bay Area Film, organized in partnership with Canyon Cinema. October 14, 2023.
San Francisco Cinematheque: Contemporary Views from the Bay Area, organized in partnership with SF Cinematheque. October 23, 2023.
Canyon Cinema Across Time and Space, looping film program. November 1 - 30, 2023.
Prismatic Permutations: Expanded Cinema Performances, looping film program. December 1 - 30, 2023.
fragments: films by Emily Chao. January 1 - 31, 2024.
California Newsreel - Forward to the 6th Decade, organized in partnership with California Newsreel. January 13, 2024.
Color in Twelve Parts by Leah Rosenberg, looping film program. February 1 - 29, 2024. Commissioned by Gina Basso in association with YBCA.
These programs were scheduled but were canceled or moved to other locations due to the ongoing controversies at YBCA:
Leah Rosenberg: Color in Twelve Parts. With live music by Kim West and John Davis. April 21, 2024. Co-presented with Counter Pulse and San Francisco CInematheque. Commissioned by Gina Basso.
Untitled: Sound & Images, co-organized with Artist Television Access. NEW LOCATION: The Lab, SF. April 12, 2024
This Room is Nothing Without You: Experimental Animation & Expanded Performance. Featuring Jeremy Rourke, Meghana Bisineer, Lydia Greer and Kathleen Quillian. Shapeshifters Cinema, Oakland, CA. March 23, 2023.
Updates on the ongoing issues YBCA:
ARTICULATE EMOTION: DOCUMENTARIES BY CHRISTINE CHOY
December 10 - 11, 2022
Presented at Roxie Theater SF, CA
Press about the show!
“You cannot structure film with logic. Film is emotion. Emotion is universal. When you are able to articulate emotion, it is so universal…How you grab this universal feeling with any subject, and you can share it with different people and nationalities, that is what I am trying to communicate with my films. Once you are able to catch emotion in a film, the logic comes through.” – Christine Choy.
Christine Choy, a maverick of Asian American independent filmmaking, has spent her career producing and directing social justice documentaries that probe the seams in the American fabric to explore complex histories of race, gender, class and economic forces. Since 1972, Choy has directed, co-directed and produced over 70 documentaries chronicling resistance movements, social activists, racial disparity and lived experiences of immigrants. Articulate Emotion offers but a brief foray into the documentary world of Christine Choy and includes several of her most revered works, including a recently restored version of the Oscar nominated film Who Killed Vincent Chin? The legacy of her documentary practice has inspired a new generation of filmmakers, including many who have studied with her at NYU and embraced her work and activist approach. This series celebrates her contribution to documentary filmmaking and coincides with the special presentation of The Exiles, starring Christine Choy!
Curated by Gina Basso.
CROSSROADS 2022
August 26 – 28, 2022
Festival Trailer produced by Gina Basso, view here.
San Francisco Cinematheque’s annual film festival. CROSSROADS 2022 featured 10 curated programs.
67 works of film, video and performance by 71 artists representing 18 countries and territories.
Presented at GRAY AREA, SF, CA.
seen only, heard only through someone else’s description
McEvoy Foundation for the Arts - Guest Curator
Jan 14 - April 30, 2022
seen only, heard only through someone else’s description engages filmmakers and artists whose interdisciplinary practices draw from performance, film, photography, research, and writing. The program’s title stems from Audience Distant Relative (1977) by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982)—a poem, performance, and mail art piece that uses language to unravel dynamics of distance, visibility, hearing, and communication. Program includes a rare presentation of Cha’s film Permutations (1976), still featured on the left.
The program is organized in two sections of experimental short films by women and nonbinary artists from the 1970s through the 2010s. Session One – Sometimes We Stand Alone explores personal identity and history through experimental processes and found footage. Session Two – Drawing Energy is concerned with communities of women and their collective power to document and deeply engage with artistic, cultural, or familial lineages. The collected works interweave varied perspectives to probe formal tensions between the moving image and still photography. Featured filmmakers include Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Brenda Contreras, sair goetz, Onyeka Igwe, Lily Jue Sheng, Lucy Kerr, Deborah Stratman, Tina Takemoto, and Paige Taul, among others.
Presented in conjunction with Image Gardeners, an exhibition of modern and contemporary photography from the McEvoy Family Collection. The exhibition identifies an emergent vision of womanhood through photographic representation. Sessions One and Two screen sequentially, for eight weeks each, throughout the run of the exhibition.
NY Times post about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, from their belated obituary series, Overlooked No More.
Related screening:
Living in Mirrors: the life that belongs to me — special screening presented on Feb 5, 2022 at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts. Co-curated by Gina Basso and Steve Polta, artistic director, San Francisco Cinematheque
Alfred Leslie. The Last Clean Shirt. 1964.
Film Series: EXHIBITION REFLECTIONS
October - November 2021
In my final Film series at SFMOMA I decided to celebrate the work of visionary artists with exhibitions currently on view at the museum.
December 1 - 31. A rare screening of the avant-garde film The Last Clean Shirt (1964) is a collaboration between filmmaker Alfred Leslie and O’Hara, who wrote the subtitles. Presented in conjunction with Joan Mitchell.
November 1 - 30. Wu Tsang’s 2012 film WILDNESS (still featured above), a non-fiction portrait of the Silver Platter, a Latino LGBTQ bar in Los Angeles. Presented in conjunction with Tsang’s exhibition, Moved by the Motion.
October 14, 2021. Diana Markosian film pick Minari presented in conjunction with her exhibition Santa Barbara, a body of photographic and video work that taps into the artist’s personal experience of immigration, family history, and the American Dream.
Watch Steven Yeun, Diana Markosian and Chris Gayomali in conversation. Recorded at SFMOMA on October 14 following the presentation of Lee Isaac Chung’s film Minari.
More details at SFMOMA Film
untitled (teeming), Gina Basso, 2021. 4 min.
CROSSROADS 2021
Festival of Artist Made Film + Video
past screening: September - October 2021
untitled (teeming), 2021, 4 min. Digital Video. Gina Basso.
Official Music video for teeming by Animated Matter.
Screened in Program 7.
Undulating surfaces, shifting horizons and perspectives merge with layered landscapes shimmering in hyper-saturated color and textured brilliance. Within the liminal space of sea and land, a shapeshifting woman - the mythic Selkie - breaks through the surface in an endless search for her lost love.
This project is a collaboration with ambient duo Animated Matter for their song teeming. Handmade animated sequences and still photography combine with found footage to create a kaleidoscopic, vivid and vibrant video that finds inspiration in early silent film color techniques, microscopic studies and psychedelic abstraction. shot, animated, and edited by Gina Basso.
untitled (teeming) was listed in Ficks’ Picks on 48 Hills!
“Gina Basso’s gorgeously-constructed meditation captures a perfect blend of playfulness and poignancy. Made up of handmade animated sequences, still photography, and found footage, this project is a collaboration with ambient duo Animated Matter for the musician’s song ‘Teeming.’ It screens as part of the livestream program ‘no more carefree laughter’ and the in-person program ‘need falls away.”’ Screens as part of Program 7: ‘no more carefree laughter’…”
If you would like a viewing link, please let me know!
Animated Matter's album Selkie is available here. Their eight track debut interprets the Scandinavian, Scottish and Celtic myth of the Selkie: a tragedy of impossible land/sea romance between a man and a shapeshifting seal/woman.
CROSSROADS 2021 Festival Trailer by Gina Basso + Kim West