PART-TIME shorts presented by Now Instant Image Hall
7:00pm
Now Instant Image Hall
with Rachel Walden and Kim Torres in person, Q&A moderated by Al Warren
5:00pm
Now Instant Image Hall
with Mike Stoltz, Ren Ebel, and Alison Nguyen in person, Q&A moderated by Emma Kemp
As an extension of Now Instant’s social and curatorial practice, PART-TIME is a collection of six new moving image works drawn from the worlds of fine art, experimental film, and narrative cinema that impel the structural capacities of the form.
Holographic Will
Los Angeles Premiere. Mike Stoltz, U.S.A., 2023, 5 minutes
A structuralist interpretation of the constant crisis of increasing home rental prices. The film swirls through the filmmaker’s apartment, flickering frame-by-frame through the halls and rooms of his rent-controlled apartment in Los Angeles. Filmed while the building was being sold to new owners, the destabilizing visuals and relentless percussive rhythm create sensations in the body similar to those caused by housing precarity.
History as Hypnosis
West Coast Premiere. Alison Nguyen, U.S.A., 2024, 25 minutes
A speculative road movie that unfolds through cultural memory of the US war in Vietnam, the film follows three women, recently reprogrammed by an artificial intelligence that has wiped all traces of their previous lives, as they journey through an uncanny desert landscape to a nearby metropolis. Freely combining genre, fact, and fiction, the film draws on its Southern California locations’ postmodern glass facades, mimetic architecture, and roadside infrastructure — markers of car culture’s entanglement with American expansionism and cinema history alike — to uncover the more ineffable links between collective consciousness and the Cold War military-industrial complex. -Sophie Cavoulacos, MoMA
Solo La Luna Comprenderá
Los Angeles Premiere. Kim Torres, Costa Rica/U.S.A., 2023, 18 minutes
As a magical moon creeps in the twilight, different timelines entwine in the town of Manzanillo, located in the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. The youth and the elderly unite and collide in a tale where the town is able to exist as it is: both beautiful and abandoned, mysterious, and monotonous. As if in a dream or a memory, mixing a documentary style and science fiction, this story is a search for the complexities of what it means to grow up in a place like Manzanillo.
Otherhood
West Coast Premiere. Deborah Stratman, U.S.A., 2023, 3 minutes
Mother and child confront the other. Meanwhile, some ladies are thinking.
In a Nearby Field
North America Premiere. Laida Lertxundi and Ren Ebel, U.S.A., 2023, 16 minutes
A family of three lives in an apartment in the Basque Country. Domestic chores and everyday gestures are superimposed onto green landscapes. The filmmakers and their stand-ins reinterpret fragments of a diary. Music fills the house while children's drawings come to life.
Lemon Tree
West Coast Premiere. Rachel Walden, U.S.A., 2023, 18 minutes
It’s Halloween in America and a father is taking his son to the fun fair. To impress him, he steals a magician’s rabbit, and off they go on a wild and frantic car ride. As the drive progresses, the big kid shoots up, while the son, a quiet little adult, must hold things together. There is a trade-off for the power of magic.