VIDEO RITUALS: DAVID FINKELSTEIN & ERICA SCHREINER

VIDEO RITUALS 

 New video works by David Finkelstein and Erica Schreiner. 

Millennium Film Workshop presents Video Rituals, new works which explore the use of video as a medium of magickal transformation. The program will be the World Premiere of David Finkelstein’s new feature film Dirt, a poetic examination of the soil, and the energies buried within it. The film will be preceded by Blue Transcendence, a short by Erica Schreiner, a montage of blue butterflies, a performance in blue, and time lapse of a candle burning during a magical spell.  A collage of poetic imagery, music, and invocatory language, Dirt follows two men in a series of esoteric experiments. Their words take us to unexpected landscapes, populated by revengeful toasters, flying fiddles, an unusual game of tennis, and a mountaintop crowned with an electric guitar. A postmodern video opera, Dirt bathes the viewer in music, language, and visual spectacle. 

This program is organized by Erica Schreiner for Millennium Film Workshop.

 ERICA SCHREINER’s work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and film festivals, including The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, The Bill Hodges Gallery in NYC, Nick Knight's SHOWstudio, Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, The Portland Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and Performance Space New York. She is currently a Soho House fellow. 

 DAVID FINKELSTEIN is a Guggenheim Fellow in film/video. His video work has been featured in numerous film festivals around the world and has won awards at 28 of them. In 2013, he was an invited artist at the Traverse Vidéo Festival in Toulouse, France. His two feature films premiered at New Filmmakers in New York. He has had solo screenings of his films in Bilbao, London, Porto, New York, Chicago, Portland, Austin, North Carolina, Minnesota, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. His work has been funded by The Fund for Creative Communities, The Field, Movement Research, Meet the Composer, The Brooklyn Arts Exchange, BACA, and other sources.  

Dirt is a brilliant film and a work of extraordinary beauty. Finkelstein has created something which inhabits the most elusive of cinematic spaces — a terrain which if ventured openly, penetrates the psyche in ways few films manage.  --filmmaker Christian Serritiello 

 If you surrender to the manic maximalism of this symphonic, psychedelic cinema, you will be transported beyond yourself to a place where everything (past ghosts, repressed history, buried treasure, the ashes of a friend) has been returned and reduced to the earth, yet where dirt itself has been revalorised as not just resting ground for the dead, but as fertile medium for future growth.  --Anton Bitel in Projected Figures