Last Things + Optimism

media release: Thursdays at 7 PM • October 12, 19, 26 • November 2, 9, 16, 30 • January 25

Get ready for a new season of MMoCA Cinema.

Explore the range of the moving image – from recently restored and forgotten films to live cinematic performances shaped in the theater. Each evening is an opportunity to reflect, be challenged, and make connections with the world around you. 

MMoCA Cinema is a program of MMoCA’s education department and is curated by James Kreul. MMoCA’s film programming is generously funded by maiahaus, Venture Investors, LLC, and a gift from an anonymous donor.

Ticket Information

• MMoCA Cinema is $7 per screening, or free for MMoCA members and anyone age 18 and younger.
• Ticket sales begin at 6:30 PM in the Museum lobby.

Oct. 26:

Last Things explores evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks and various future others. The geo-biosphere is introduced as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures. (pythgorasfilm.com)

“Talk about rejecting empathy: Stratman’s haunting, iridescent work of science-nonfiction actively decenters the human perspective, narrating the history and the speculative future of the universe with rocks as its protagonists. The idea that minerals evolve over time—and preserve records of our world’s many lives—drives Stratman’s inquiry, which, as is often the case with her work, is at once dryly analytical, politically urgent, and cinematically riveting.” 

– Devika Girish, Film Comment

Deborah Stratman is an artist and filmmaker who investigates issues of power, control, and belief and explores how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Last Things was selected for the Sundance Film Festival and Berlinale in 2003, and was awarded the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Art Festival. It will be preceded by the short film Optimism, a portrait of Dawson City. 

This screening is presented in conjunction with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

Last Things | Deborah Stratman | 2023 | 50 minutes

Optimism | Deborah Stratman | 2018 | 15 minutes