Mills Folly Microcinema

press release: Join us for an evening of recent short experimental films on Wednesday, July 28, at 8:00 p.m. (Please note later start, closer to sunset.) Admission $5.00, free for ALL members. Seating is limited, and doors open at 7:30 p.m. A $1 fee will be added for single admission credit card charges, but no fee for multiple admissions ($10 or more).

Mills Folly programmers have been busy surveying recent online experimental film festivals this past Spring, and we will present programs of short films and videos during our Summer 2022 season.

Two Sisters | Magdalena Bermudez | 2021 | 8 minutes: A history of sister portraiture is reanimated by nascent datasets, as portraits dodge derogatory categories by paradoxically inhabiting both one and multiple bodies. Featured at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Audience Award winner at the 2022 Milwaukee Underground Film Festival. 

Magdalena Bermudez is an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and her work has been screened at the Black Maria Film Festival and Anthology Film Archives.  

Flowers blooming in our throats | Eva Giolo | Belgum, Italy | 2020 | 8.5 minutes: Everyday occupations, some domestic tools, fruits, light, rope and many hands. Hands that dig in the earth, that cut, that cook, that touch, rip, wash, squeeze, erase, press, push. The sound of domestic spaces and its silence. Red flowers one summer. Flowers blooming in our throats is a cinematic poem in response to the worldwide pandemic of 2020. Commissioned and produced by In Between Art Film for the project Mascarilla 19 – Codes of Domestic Violence. It was nominated for The European film award and awarded the Top Prize at THIS IS SHORT 2021, received the National Award Special Mention at Lago Film Fest 2021, the jury special mention at First Crossings Festival and the Critics’s jury award at 25FPS Festival.

Eva Giolo is an artist working across film, video, and installation. Her work has been exhibited at Sadie Coles HQ in London, WIELS in Brussels, MAXXI in Rome, GEM in the Hague, BOZAR in Brussels, M HKA in Antwerp, Kunsthalle Wien, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and major film festivals like Rotterdam, Viennale, FID Marseille, Cinéma du Réel, Punto de Vista and Courtisane. 

Golden Jubilee | Sunil Sanzgiri | 2021 | 19 minutes: What is liberation when so much has already been taken? Who has come for more? Golden Jubilee, the third film in a series of works about memory, diaspora and decoloniality, takes as its starting point scenes of the filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India, created using the same technologies of surveillance that mining companies use to map locations for iron ore in the region. A tool for extraction and exploitation becomes a method for preservation. The father, sparked by a memory of an encounter as a child, inhabits the voice of a spirit known locally as Devchar, whose task is to protect the workers, farmers, and the once communal lands of Goa. Protection from what the filmmaker asks? Sanzgiri’s signature blend of 16mm sequences, 3D renders, direct animation, and desktop aesthetics are vividly employed in this lush, and ghostly look at questions of heritage, culture, and the remnants of history.

The title "Golden Jubilee"—referring to both a forgiveness of debt and the 50th anniversary of liberation—thinks through how we can understand anti-colonial liberation struggles at a time when neo-colonial and neo-imperialist devastation still threatens the lives and land across the Global South.

Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. His work spans experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, and contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture and diaspora in relation to structural violence. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology in 2017.

Home When You Return | Carl Elsaesser | 2021 | 30 minutes: "Superimposing the stories of two women—the filmmaker’s late grandmother and the amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin—Home When You Return explores the psychogeographies of mourning through a variety of modes, from documentary to melodrama. Emptied and put up for sale following its matriarch’s passing, the family home becomes the site of a winding tour through polymorphic representations of the past in media and memory." - NYFF Currents description.

Carl Elsaesser's films have been screened at the New York Film Festival, Walker Museum of Art, Prismatic Grounds, and Union Docs. In 2016 he received the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award for Emerging Experimental Video Artist at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. 

Mills Folly Microcinema showcases nationally recognized experimental film and video art work from the festival and microcinema circuit. We network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at at Project Projection events.

Mills Folly Microcinema is funded in part by grants from Dane Arts and the Madison Arts Commission, with additional funds from the Wisconsin Arts Board.