Nature is a Language (16mm & 35mm)

This program includes the West Coast premiere of Johann Lurf’s Forever...Forever (Austria, 35mm, 21 min), one of the most astonishing films of 2026. Over the course of twenty-two months, Johann Lurf fixed the gaze of a specially developed 65mm camera on a single viewpoint of a lake. What begins as a quiet observation of nature gradually transforms into a monumental image of cosmic motion. “At once intimate and cosmic, Forever...Forever  collapses the scales of human and geologic time, immersing us in the everyday and the infinite” (Leo Goldsmith).

Also showing is Daïchi Saïto’s earthearthearth, a thirty minute 35mm film shot in the Atacama Desert, spanning the border between Chile and Argentina, where “the boundaries between terra firma and yawning firmament dissolve in a hallucinatory explosion of color and light...Saïto’s earthearthearth expresses a near-religious awe of the natural world even as it proposes that the Earth’s myriad wonders only become fully perceptible through art” (Ari Osterweil, Artforum, 2021).

Other works in the program include Seattle filmmaker Luke Sieczek’s film Elsewhere (2005, 16mm, 6 min); Slow Volumes (2019, 35mm, 4 min) by Mike Gibisser; Alexandre Larose’s brouillard #14 (2013, 35mm, 10 min); Emily Richardson’s Red Shift (2001, 16mm, 4 min); No Land (2019, 16mm, 1 min) by Emily Chao; Falling (2014, 16mm, 6 min) by Rob Todd; Bart Vegter’s Space-Modulation (1994, 16mm, 1 min);  and Orchard (2004, 8 min) and Micromoth (2000, 6 min), two 16mm films by Irish filmmaker Julie Murray.