This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
Welcome to the Featured Film page for Bridge Video, now with more free access. Click here for our Fall 2024 program lineup. New all-original films, exclusively available on Bridge Video are posted here weekly on Fridays Sept-Dec & Feb-June. Click here to subscribe & view our entire collection of under-represented categories of film and video.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "These Yellow Stars of Ours” (Oct. 3-Oct. 9)
“These Yellow Stars of Ours” is an experimental documentary film chronicling two individuals fleeing war-torn Vietnam, falling in love, and the subsequent inheritance of diaspora bestowed upon their two sons.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "huracán” (Oct. 17-Oct. 23)
An inner hurricane summons errant images and drifting fragments of time, dragging them toward a threshold that resists form. A voice, part invocation, part echo, emerges from within the storm. Between the lived and the imagined, memory disintegrates and reconfigures, not to be understood, but to be felt. This is a ritual of passage: where chaos becomes a kind of language, where what is lost is not retrieved, but transformed, and what dies, opens.
COMMENTARY On Jennifer Reeder’s “Perpetrator” (on the Occasion of its Arrow Video Release), Ducournau & Resonances of the New French Extremity
Masterfully challenging Western notions of queer liberation, the debut graphic novel of South Korean comic artist Yudori seems anything but introductory. At the center of the period piece lies a Dutch housewife, Amélie, shackled by a loveless marriage and 16th-century patriarchal norms. Fascinated by physics and the mechanics of flight, she forms an unlikely partnership with her husband’s enslaved mistress, Sahara, as they attempt to design a hot air balloon capable of carrying them both to freedom.
Raging Clouds begins with a classic formula: smart female protagonist in a time when women aren’t supposed to be smart. Yudori delivers the expected amount of feminist one-liners for such a story, satisfying despite the fact that rich white women lamenting married life stopped being revolutionary about ten years ago. “You leave me alone with my own vice, as I leave you to do whatever you like with your slave,” Amélie responds to her husband’s upteenth attempt to quell her scientific experimentation (or as he calls it, sorcery). “See you in hell, my husband.” Equally expected yet satisfying is the result of his later appropriation of her and Sahara’s balloon.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "The Vortex We Made When We Fell, or so the story goes” (Oct. 10-Oct. 16)
As a recursive, never completed practice of genre subversion, the work belongs somewhere in the middle, in the void, in the failed attempt to pin down some objective reality. The video was collaborative, improvised and completed in one take. I provided performers with costumes, a location and a prompt. A couple lives in a haunted house and is visited by a priest who attempts to exorcise the home. We subjected cliches to reality and saw what happens when real people do their best to negotiate an unfamiliar circumstance. The house played an important role as it represented an iconic cliche and a part of the colonial imaginary. Researching the house I learned that, although built in the 18th century, it had been renovated to look more modern, then stripped again, in later years, to look original. However its lost original furnishings were replaced with fake and decontextualized period objects. The house itself became the exercise in memory I attempted to tell through the story. An eternal recurrence, a recycling of memory with no end or definite beginning and no concrete reality.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Social Media Delivers People” (Oct. 3-9)
Social Media Delivers People is a video art piece that critically examines the role of social media in the commodification of users. Drawing inspiration from Richard Serra and Carlotta Schoolman’s 1973 work Television Delivers People, this piece reimagines the critique for the digital age, exposing how social media platforms transform users into products for advertisers. Through a blend of AI spoken text, calm visuals, and bland corporate motivational instrumental music, the video reveals the unseen mechanics of surveillance capitalism—where engagement is monetized, data is harvested, and attention is the ultimate currency. Social Media Delivers People confronts viewers with their own complicity in a system that trades connection for profit. The work serves as both a warning and an invitation to reclaim digital agency, urging audiences to rethink their participation in the social media economy.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Monster Me” (Sept. 26-Oct. 2)
An ancient monster emerges from the “Old Faithful” geyser at Yellowstone, attacking an artist doing a residency and wreaking havoc in Jackson Hole.
Shot from miniature hand-made paper and cardboard models and sets combined with video sequences, the monster, Satyrius Marinus, from a seventeenth century engraving, comes back to life and bursts from an “Old Faithful” calendar image, surprising a tour bus full of Asian tourists among others. An innocent artist is accosted while taking a shower by this terrifying beast with a wicked sense of humor, as Donald Trump`s victory speech plays on her laptop.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "The Breathers ” (May 30-June 5)
Using Stacy Hardy and Daniel Borzutzky’s collaborative long-form poem The Breathers as a point of departure, the cinepoem of the same name will discuss breath as a form of resistance, asphyxiation in Africa and the Americas, and collaborating with musicians as a form of writing.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Vollúpya” (May 23-29)
In a post-apocalyptic future, an intergalactic explorer lands at an abandoned museum on a quest to find traces of his long-lost ancestors, and ends up being teleported to the dance floor of a Brazilian queer nightclub in the 1990s.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Kinky and Loving It” (May 16-22)
KINKY AND LOVING IT delves into the world of Black Rope play and BDSM impact play, examining the profound impact of these practices within the kink community and addressing the role of race within this context.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Ghorba (غربة)” (May 9-15)
A visual poem examining notions of exile, intergenerational migration, and memory between Cairo, New York and Kuwait.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "My Cosmos Is Mine” (May 2-8)
(water is life, and wet is motivation)
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Reversal” (April 24-May 1)
REVERSAL combines images and sounds from movies released or broadcast in 1973, the year the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade. In the strange new reality ushered in by the Dobbs decision, the slogan "We won't go back" is recalled with bitter irony. This collage piece evokes the spectre of regression and repression that has followed the Court's decision.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Resilience” (April 18-24)
Amidst a world of constraints and challenges, a woman's unwavering pursuit of liberation becomes a beacon of resilience and hope.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Invisible World” (April 11-17)
To apply for an accessible or Crip parking placard, a doctor within the state must approve the application. As part of the application, there are six medical conditions which qualify a person for a placard. These conditions include: (1) cannot walk two hundred feet without stopping to rest; (2) cannot walk without the use of an assistance device; (3) is restricted by lung disease; (4) uses portable oxygen; (5) has a cardiac condition; (6) is severely limited in their ability to walk due to an arthritic, neurological, or orthopedic conditions. Many people with disabilities are included in these categories, and many are not. This film is a record of my introduction to healthcare in the state of Utah. My processing of the appointment and consequential aftermath as a video object serves as a reclamation and assertion for understanding disability and the physical world otherwise.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Meteorite” (April 4-10)
A short Sci-Fi. A Meteorite hits earth and chaos is upon us.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Ravage Part A” (March 28-April 3)
We're all just admins of thought! Amid a small-town war, a mediocre call center contractor gets a suitcase for her fatuous small talk.
This rough-edged sketch mixing performance art living and film is a study of the phone call, American doofiness, and blank minds under the reign of the corporate call script. Everyone is impotent in the institutional setting.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Le Cosmos” (March 21-27)
A letterbox searches for the meaning of life.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Eve’s Ribs Lilith’s Lungs” (March 14-20)
An experimental cinepoem, Eve’s Ribs Lilith’s Lungs viscerally offers a woman’s journey from traumatized entrapment in the patriarchal ribcage of Eve’s assigned image, to release, rebirth and rediscovery of her own image in the joy of Lilith’s lungs.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "Fumble” (March 7-13)
Fumble (2024) is a series of lighthearted performative vignettes that explore the duality of immigrant and queer life—the longing to return to the familiar geographic, cultural, and bodily coordinates of one’s past, alongside an equally compelling desire to assimilate into a new culture and identity. Through a collection of absurd scenes depicting both the attempts and failures to fit in, the film illustrates the felt incongruities of this experience in a hybrid form.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "The Very First Time” (Dec. 20-26)
A diary piece reflecting on the time, community, love, and anxiety...oh and also Dominican food.
