2022 Emerging Artists Showcase
Join us in celebrating the Short Films made by our Emerging Artists Filmmakers! This showcase features films and filmmakers you won't want to miss!
Q&A Following the Showcase with moderator Emilie Upczak!
Emilie Upczak is an independent filmmaker, Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts, and the Interim Faculty Director of the Brakhage Center for Media Arts at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Emilie holds a BA in Comparative Religious Studies also from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an MFA in Film from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is a Rotterdam Producers Lab alumni and an Andy Warhol Foundation Grant recipient.
Emilie spent ten years developing her practice while living in Trinidad and Tobago, where she also worked as the Creative Director for the trinidad+tobago film festival spearheading the Caribbean Film Database and Caribbean Film Mart. Emilie’s video installations have been exhibited at PG Contemporary in Houston, AIR Gallery in Brooklyn and the Festival International Signes de Nuit in France. Her short films have played at a number of Caribbean and African Diasporic Film Festivals as well as at Clermont Ferrand and MIPTV markets. Emilie’s debut narrative feature, set in Port of Spain, Moving Parts, is available through Indiepix on Amazon.
Emilie recently completed the narrative short, Silt, a proof of concept for a narrative feature film, to be set on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon, and she is working with the University of Colorado Archives on a new project surrounding the life and work of Ann Roy, an American poet, mystic and feminist activist.
Emilie spent ten years developing her practice while living in Trinidad and Tobago, where she also worked as the Creative Director for the trinidad+tobago film festival spearheading the Caribbean Film Database and Caribbean Film Mart. Emilie’s video installations have been exhibited at PG Contemporary in Houston, AIR Gallery in Brooklyn and the Festival International Signes de Nuit in France. Her short films have played at a number of Caribbean and African Diasporic Film Festivals as well as at Clermont Ferrand and MIPTV markets. Emilie’s debut narrative feature, set in Port of Spain, Moving Parts, is available through Indiepix on Amazon.
Emilie recently completed the narrative short, Silt, a proof of concept for a narrative feature film, to be set on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon, and she is working with the University of Colorado Archives on a new project surrounding the life and work of Ann Roy, an American poet, mystic and feminist activist.
EMERGING ARTIST FILMS
Run Time: 2 hrs
Sino Ako
A second year Filipina coding student struggles between her family's desires for her to become a nurse while discussing the future with her Filipina academic advisor, and ultimately makes a pivotal choice for her career.
A second year Filipina coding student struggles between her family's desires for her to become a nurse while discussing the future with her Filipina academic advisor, and ultimately makes a pivotal choice for her career.
ALL MINE
A Music Video
A woman goes from fifth wheeling a double date to celebrating her own self love.
A Music Video
A woman goes from fifth wheeling a double date to celebrating her own self love.
寒窗暖阳
Winter Glass Glare
A Chinese international student has to break a years-long secret a day before graduation when the father comes to the U.S.
Winter Glass Glare (2021) was my senior capstone project for the BFA Cinema Studies program at the University of Colorado Boulder. I came to the US alone when I was 15 as an international student, pursuing a high school degree in New York, Long Island. Then moved to Boulder, Colorado, for my higher education.
As the end of my academic career was a year away, I wanted to make something relevant to my identity for the past 9 years. Based on a true story from our screenwriter Huilan Xu, we delved into our own memories and created this story that's close to our hearts. With dialogues that we heard from our older generations growing up, I hope to build a tender connection with the audience raised with both western and eastern cultures and values.
Winter Glass Glare
A Chinese international student has to break a years-long secret a day before graduation when the father comes to the U.S.
Winter Glass Glare (2021) was my senior capstone project for the BFA Cinema Studies program at the University of Colorado Boulder. I came to the US alone when I was 15 as an international student, pursuing a high school degree in New York, Long Island. Then moved to Boulder, Colorado, for my higher education.
As the end of my academic career was a year away, I wanted to make something relevant to my identity for the past 9 years. Based on a true story from our screenwriter Huilan Xu, we delved into our own memories and created this story that's close to our hearts. With dialogues that we heard from our older generations growing up, I hope to build a tender connection with the audience raised with both western and eastern cultures and values.
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Core
After several miscarriages, a woman must decide how to handle her friend’s pregnancy announcement. |
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MAA
Filmed over the past two years in Kolkata, India; Ontario, Canada; and Denver, Colorado, Maa is a documentary film following a fatigued octogenarian's dream of gazing upon Niagara Falls before her last breath. Told from the perspective of the daughter, who is also the filmmaker, it is a film about deferred dreams. As the film progresses, it begins to delve into broader, more universal themes touching on depression through the lens of loneliness and the influence of spiritualism. In March 2020, global pandemic hit the world, the West Bengal Government declared a lockdown due to COVID-19, and Maa's trip to see the Niagara Falls, got cancelled a second, and perhaps the final time, during the production of the film. This shifts the documentary's tone and the Falls metaphor to that of her loved ones who elude her in an unrelenting pandemic. The film follows her through five months of complete isolation inside a 932 sq ft. apartment, and suicidal ideation, during all-India lockdown. As Maa's health deteriorates, so do her chances of seeing the Falls and her daughter that lives half a world away. As the film concludes, the fight has left Maa. Her lust for life has been swept away by the fury of the pandemic. Forced into further isolation, the film Maa is a testament to the year 2020, which challenged the human spirit in ways unknown to us.
Filmed over the past two years in Kolkata, India; Ontario, Canada; and Denver, Colorado, Maa is a documentary film following a fatigued octogenarian's dream of gazing upon Niagara Falls before her last breath. Told from the perspective of the daughter, who is also the filmmaker, it is a film about deferred dreams. As the film progresses, it begins to delve into broader, more universal themes touching on depression through the lens of loneliness and the influence of spiritualism. In March 2020, global pandemic hit the world, the West Bengal Government declared a lockdown due to COVID-19, and Maa's trip to see the Niagara Falls, got cancelled a second, and perhaps the final time, during the production of the film. This shifts the documentary's tone and the Falls metaphor to that of her loved ones who elude her in an unrelenting pandemic. The film follows her through five months of complete isolation inside a 932 sq ft. apartment, and suicidal ideation, during all-India lockdown. As Maa's health deteriorates, so do her chances of seeing the Falls and her daughter that lives half a world away. As the film concludes, the fight has left Maa. Her lust for life has been swept away by the fury of the pandemic. Forced into further isolation, the film Maa is a testament to the year 2020, which challenged the human spirit in ways unknown to us.
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Heart Sutra
Heart Sutra: An Augmented Reality Installation is a futurist expression of the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra, integrating chanting in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. It draws upon the sacred expressive traditions in chanting, drumming, architecture, ink art, and figurative representations of the divine found throughout the Buddhist world. Meanwhile, the artists, who are classically trained in these traditions, intentionally transpose these time-tested expressions with algorithm-driven futurist visual dynamics and technology-packed acoustic techniques such as electronic music and surrounding sound. The result of the multimedia collaboration is then video mapped onto Stanford University’s sacred historical monument, Memorial Church. Altogether, the augmented reality piece incorporates layers of complexity and symbolism. That is the message and metaphor of this piece: we build a future not on an empty slate but by fully acknowledging the nuances of the past and carrying forward that which is life-giving. |
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