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Event Series Event Series: Bushman

Last Things

February 3 @ 8:00 pm

Playing in the CCA Studio

Part of CCA’s new Auteur Film Series: Deborah Stratman’s LAST THINGS, along with two additional short films

Feb 2-11: Playing daily at 3:00pm, 8:00pm (no screenings Monday and Tuesday)

Last Things (2023, 50 mins, 16mm) looks at evolution and extinction from the perspective of the rocks and minerals that came before humanity and will outlast us.

With scientists and thinkers like Lynn Margulis and Marcia Bjørnerud as guides and quoting from the proto-Sci-fi texts of J.H. Rosny, Deborah Stratman offers a stunning array of images, from microscopic forms to vast landscapes, and seeks a picture of evolution without humans at the center.

“What happens to us / Is irrelevant to the world’s geology / But what happens to the world’s
geology / is not irrelevant to us.” -Hugh MacDiarmid

“Astounding” – Robert Koehler, Cinema Scope

“An entrancing blend of hard science and ephemeral existentialism” – Michael Fox, KQED

“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

“The film in actuality is a gorgeous, almost dystopian exploration of history as a geological survey.” – Joshua Brunsting, Criterion Cast

Director/writer: Deborah Stratman
Run time: 50 min.
 Film: Documentary

ALSO SCREENING: It Will Die Out In The Mind (2006, 4 mins, video) is a short meditation on the possibility of spiritual existence and the paranormal in our information age. LAIKA (2021, 5 mins, video): Some forms we can only know by their shadow. In homage to the spirits of space test dogs, or any being we use in the name of progress. Film score by Olivia Block.

About the Filmmaker

Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work that investigates issues of power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool and time to be supernatural. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, public speech, sinkholes, levitation, orthoptera, raptors, comets, evolution, extinction, exodus, sisterhood and faith. She’s exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA (NY), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hammer Museum (LA), Witte de With (Rotterdam), PS1 (NY), Tabakalera (San Sebastian), Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), Yerba Buena Center (SF), MCA (Chicago), Whitney Biennial (NY) and has done site-specific projects with venues including the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Temporary Services, Hallwalls, Mercer Union and Ballroom Marfa.

Stratman’s films have been featured widely at festivals and conferences including Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, Oberhausen, True/False, TIFF, Locarno, Rotterdam, the Flaherty and Docs Kingdom. She is the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim and USA Collins Fellowships, an Alpert Award, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Award and grants from Creative Capital, Graham Foundation, Harpo Foundation and Wexner Center for the Arts. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.

$13

Note: Tickets are only $3.00 for EBT cardholders

1050 Old Pecos Trail
Santa Fe, NM 87505 United States
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(505) 982-1338
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