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Theatre Archive

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Always Moving / Magical in Motion By LAURA HEIT + MONA HUNEIDI

Screened June 2024 – September 2024

“I am interested in everything that is opaque, that which takes place in secret and behind curtains or in the shadows. My aim is not to make clear or justify, rather I aim to watch/show as if in a dream. My work focuses on the minutiae of human behavior, obsessive habits, arduous matters of the heart, betrayal, espionage and inexplicable phenomenon. These themes are the impetus and the architecture that builds the sets, the mise en scene and the characters I create. 

I use wood, glass, transparencies, wire weaves, paper dolls, found objects, doll parts, shadows, tea leaves and texture to create space and the characters that inhabit it. I believe that everyday articles are curious when taken out of context and that still objects, no matter how pedestrian, are magical in motion.”  —  MONA HUNEIDI

Always Moving / Magical in Motion features the stop-motion, live-action puppetry, hand drawing and computer animation in the short films of artists Laura Heit and Mona Huneidi. Sometimes fantastical, sometimes abstract, sometimes in orbit, these films visualize the things we cannot see, fears, hypothetical stars, moments inside catastrophes, and the future. On view at The Sou’Wester’s Red Bus Microcinema, 3728 J Place, Seaview, WA, June – September,  2024, with screenings at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. daily. A special closing event attended by filmmaker Laura Heit will take place in September. More details to come.

Laura Heit is an interdisciplinary artist who currently lives and works in Portland Oregon. Her work has been exhibited and screened in the US and abroad, at venues including Track 16 (Los Angeles, CA), Boise Art Museum (Boise, ID), Adams and Ollman (Portland, OR), The Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, OR), The Schneider Museum of Art (Ashland OR), She Works Flexible (Houston, TX), REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), MoMA (NYC, NY), Millennium Film (NYC, NY), Pompidou (Paris, France), TBA Festival (Portland, OR), the Guggenheim Museum (NYC, NY), Walt Disney Hall (Los Angeles, CA), and Detroit Institute of the Arts (Detroit, MI) among others. Her grants include; 2016 Oregon Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowship, Artist Project Grant Regional Arts & Culture Council including the 2014 Innovation Award, The British Council, and the MacDowell Colony. She has previously held positions at PNCA as chair of Animated Arts, SAIC, and Cal Arts where she was co-director of the Experimental Animation Department. Her book Animators Sketchbooks was published in 2013 by Thames and Hudson. 

Mona Huneidi is an animator/filmmaker who was born and raised in Kuwait. She went to primary schools in Lebanon and Kuwait and arrived in the US in 1980 to pursue her education. She holds a BFA in Filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. She worked as an assistant producer for television productions in Kuwait in the late 80s and early 90s. Upon returning to the US, she joined the pre-production team at Imago Theatre working as a puppeteer, a dramaturg, prop master and a set dresser. She earned a Drammy award in 2004 for the projection design on the play Missing Mona. She writes, creates and produces her own animated films, which have been shown locally at Performance Works Northwest, Imago Theatre Cabaret and PCC’s Art Week. Her work has also been screened internationally at  Festival Du Cinéma Bruxelles, Festival De Cine Internacional De Barcelona, Animacam Online Animation Festival Galicia, and the Cannes Short Film Festival.     

Curated by Nikki Cormaci

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Wide Blue Yawn – An experimental documentary film by Eva Knowles

Screened Dec 2023 – June 2024

The idea for Wide Blue Yawn occurred to Eva after observing a UFO while alone on the beach in October 2020. She always had a powerful relationship to the Long Beach Peninsula, having grown up coming here for family getaways since she was a child–and so, after her mysterious encounter she decided to embark on deeper research of this place and make a film about it. Wide Blue Yawn attempts to capture layers of history at the mouth of the Columbia River and to honor the specific feelings evoked by the rugged pacific northwest geology, the spiritual presence of the first human inhabitants (the Chinookan people), and all that has unfolded since Lewis and Clark hit the scene in 1805. Wide Blue yawn spans centuries and wonders at how we ended up here, in our strange present reality.

Eva Knowles was born in 1990 and grew up in Bonney Lake, Washington. Her films are shot with a handheld digital camcorder and have an intimate and personal feeling. As an artist Eva is concerned with the mysterious, the sublime, and the mundane. She has worked as a teacher, a farmer, and also practices reiki. She has many projects in the works about fascinating topics.

Contact: email: eeva.knowles@gmail.com / instagram

Curated by Nikki Cormaci

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Lindsay Costello

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As part of Arts Week 2023:

“PENNY the Conduit” by Kelly Nesbitt

PENNY is a film about mourning the recent loss of my father, burnout from working in the ICU, and finding solace through the use of play – as exemplified by the character Penny’s awkward yet earnest commitment to meditation, nature worship, and conversations with a radically different kind of deity. Penny is a conduit who expresses our collective grief and despair, yet exemplifies the unquenchable hope that lies deeper in the human heart. Death, mourning, and healing are overt themes of this piece. Kelly Nesbitt (she/they) is a transdisciplinary artist, culture weaver, humor healer, and frontline healthcare worker. Nesbitt’s performances employ drag costuming, makeshift props, and lowbrow intermedia aesthetics. Films experiment with imagery and sound design through the use of audio mash-ups and sync-error humor (where the recorded score and movements are purposely out of sync). Nesbitt embodies endearing forms, utilizes self-referential humor, and plays with the concepts of mask/counter-mask – while playing the underdog. Watch “Penny the Conduit” now.

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Rachel Slater in collaboration with Janet Goulston

“Tell me a story, Mama” Rachel Slater is a dance film artist and educator based in New Orleans, LA, and Portland, OR. She is currently an MFA Candidate at Tulane University. Slater is in Portland this spring caring for her mother. Together they are urgently working on a family storytelling recording project before cancer claims the memories. 
Tell me a story, Mama shows artist Rachel Slater facing her mother, Janet Goulston’s stage 4 cancer diagnosis. Together they gather Goulston’s stories and collect the history no one else knows, including her days protesting the Vietnam War and performing in street circuses in San Francisco. 
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Sanford & Gosti

Suspended Rocks at SeaviewSANDFORD&GOSTI have merged their work for single artistic events. Having worked side by side since 1976, they decided to present their work under a single signature in 2000. The works produced alternatively by both artists find in each other motivation and stimulus, inventiveness and dialogue from the first phases of ideation and realization. SANDFORD&GOSTI enact their project titled ACTIONS PER in/FINITE FORMS, carry forward the idea of RECURRENT FLUCTUATION OF EVENTS (WAVES OF re/ACTION) and the periodicity of actions hypothesis. Their artistic media include installation, performance, video and digital photography, and silkscreens. “Suspended Rocks” is an expression of the need for balance and contrast, structure and tension, harmony and inclusivity. It illustrates the simultaneous existence of manmade and natural objects. It reflects the concept of “sustainability” – a fragile transparent ecosystem that sustains the weight and solidity of human impact – and of contrasting identities that work together to create a single world. The installation may be seen as reflecting a cosmos, a world, a nation, a landscape, a city, or an individual person. It embodies a sense of delicacy and at the same time of respect, and as you say, “dignity” in difference.

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Structures of Nature & Structures of Form by Ben Popp

Program Notes: 

Structures of Nature and Structures of Form are two programs investigating the ways in which cinematic stories can be constructed. While the substance of each work may be different, they all begin with editing and animation as the basic core building blocks with a mind towards how a work may be sculpted rather than simply put forward in a traditional linear fashion. Incorporating improvisation, repetition, looping, and spirals as metaphors for how a piece may unfold, the program is broken into two distinct themes. 

Structures of Nature deals with works that have been made in tandem with the natural world in large part from diary based expeditions in which images taken at a specific moment in time are later re-constructed to expand upon the notion of what existed in that particular moment in time. The films Yard Sitting, Oceanic Rounds, An Eastardly Journey, Coastal Observations, Windy Beach Morning, and An Afternoon Stroll at Thousand Acres Park, were all made with a still camera and combining multiple images together in repetitive loops with live and recorded audio to both mimic the natural world, while also diving deeper into what may exist in a plane just on the other side of our own perceptions. East Lake Sans Souci and HearNW were both shot on a Super 16mm camera in which the image extends into the area upon which a soundtrack might traditionally be laid, so that the image itself is creating sound. These two films expand upon this notion of what a photographed nature sounds like, both as improvised and composed layering of sound and image. Home is Heart is a hand drawn stop motion animation utilizing loops to examine how our breath, and pumping blood is directly tied to the continual rhythms of our home, Earth. Finally EARTH by the Cult of Ma and Quilt Patch Landscape incorporate digitally edited found footage and hand made direct animated loops to create “still moving images, or matte based films” in which the axis of linearity extended into the “z” or inwards, rather than the traditional “y”, or left to right. Similarly to the films listed in the first program, Structures of Form offers a glimpse into alternative methods for storytelling. Que Pasado, Episode 8 of the Lyric Project, The Oregon Fruit Tramp, and DEVOUR all embody live action narratives utilizing repetition, re-timing, and re-mixing, to help drive stories of loss, change, and trickery. Les Images Des Une Image, Blackhole Anteater Plays Home, A Growing Seeds Animation, and Juxtaposition are documentaries on an idea, persons, and places created as improvisational experimentations involving a single image, a musician, a group of 3 year olds, and the colors and shapes in an urban setting. Flip Flop, A Thauma-Tale, and Between the Lines, are animation based works using hand drawings, cut out, and digital effects to bring a story down to its most simplistic level, an action that sets off a path to other actions. Finally Words is a work playing with timing, re-structuring, repetition, and cyclical improvisation, as three words continually change to create different emotional statements.

Ben Popp is a filmmaker, animator, curator, and educator. Born in New Mexico where he was first introduced to animation and home movies using the family VHS camera. In 1999 Ben moved to Milwaukee Wisconsin where he got his hands dirty with 16mm in large part due to the Riverwest Film Co-Op and the kind hearted Micalea O’Herlihy. He returned to NM to finish a degree in Media Arts from the University of New Mexico before heading to Chicago where at the School of the Art Institute he began to work more with matting, and combining super 8, 16mm, and digital media, beginning to understand more the idea of structuralism and how this particular medium might be sculpted by time. In 2007 he received his MFA and moved across the country to Portland, Oregon. Here Ben co-found a microcinema, Grand Detour, with artists Dustin Zemel, Hannah Piper Burns, and Karl Lind. The cinema programmed works by both local, regional, and touring media artists. During this time Ben began teaching animation and video to youth throughout the greater Portland area while also teaching workshops at colleges such as Pacific University and Dartmouth College. In 2012 Grand Detour, now under Ben and Hannah Piper Burns created the Experimental Film Festival Portland, a five day festival highlighting single channel, multi-channel, and performative works from local, national, and International media artists. In 2014 Ben was awarded the prestigious Oregon Media Arts Fellowship and the following year took over the long-running Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival for the Northwest Film Center. He is currently the Head of Artist Services for the Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow and teaches animation through Portland State University’s School of Art + Design. 

Curated by Nikki Cormaci

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ALWAYS PREGNANT PAUSE by SAM TAM HAM

SAM TAM HAM is an interdisciplinary artist from Aotearoa New Zealand, based in Portland, OR (stolen Chinook territory). Their practice functions more like an ecology than a discipline. A messy but creatively and critically fertile nexus of intersecting inquiries. Whether as film, sound, installation, writing, painting, or performance, Sam has worked across the globe presenting work at Whitechapel Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Issue Project Room (NYC), ARTSPACE Aotearoa (NZ), Transmediale (Berlin), and much more.

In ALWAYS PREGNANT PAUSE, sam presents four artist film-works shot on celluloidal moving image film. Each film is a no-edit single-take shot employing the full end-to-end length of a roll of film (both 16mm & super 8) as parameters for determining the length of a
performance. Treating the material film like a stage or a canvas where defined physical limitations intrinsically dictate the shape of that which inhabits them. Although a variety of concepts are explored across the 4x works, they’re all pregnant pauses. Prefaces to
meaning. Rather than explaining themselves with easily consumable deliverables, they require you to invest yourself a little more than usual. Only getting something out of them if you’re willing to put something in.

Curated by Nikki Cormaci

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Sou’wester Arts Week 2022 Extended Run – The Cabin Carport Projections

Sou’wester Arts Week 2022 artists Nicky Kriara & Cory Gray, Bobbie Robinson & Jordan Badger, Andie Sterling, and Rachel Blumberg created the four films featured in our spring Red Bus program. The filmmakers inhabited our four cabins during Arts Week 2022 and projected these films in the cabin carports during the closing weekend’s exhibitions, performances and installations. The four films screened alongside each other, layered over two beautiful sets of live music from drummers Bobbie Robinson and Rachel Blumberg (accompanied by Cory Gray), alongside the interactive environmental art installation of ceramist Nicky Kriara, and transforming the cabin into a tidal, “living projection” by the hand of animator Andie Sterling. What remains as traces of Arts Week, in all its light and sound leaking of one project to the next, are these films, featured here, concentrated and focused, on a loop starting May 10.

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One, OK, and We’ll find you when the sun goes black by Anouk De Clerq

Belgian filmmaker Anouk De Clercq is our featured Artist-In-Residence in the lead up to Sou’wester Arts Week 2022. Anouk’s residency will culminate in daily screenings of One (2020), OK (2021) and We’ll find you when the sun goes black (2021); on rotation beginning Thursday, March 24th in the Sou’wester’s red bus micro cinema. Free and open to the public 5-9 p.m. daily.

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Woman and non-binary directed films Curated by Nora Colie of POW Film Fest.

1.     “Aguaviva” – By Alexa Lim Haas 6:48
2.     “Turk Shop” – By Bahar Pars 6:40
3.     “Applied Pressure” – By Kelly Sears 6:22
4.     “Inocencia Enjaulada” – By 2:35
5.     “Ziggy & the Starfish” – By Anne Duk Hee Jordan 16:28
6.    “Noni & Elisabeth” – By Nana blondell 15:05
7.    “All Men Must Die” – By Kate Beacom 9:02
8.    “After Fall” – By Kelly Sears 3:19
9.    “Liquor Store Babies” – By So Yun Um 5:04 

POW FILM FEST AND THE POWGIRLS MEDIA EDUCATION PROGRAM ARE IN SOLIDARITY WITH BLACK LIVES MATTER. WE CONDEMN ALL ACTS OF RACISM AND VIOLENCE AGAINST BLACK COMMUNITIES. WE SPEAK UP IN SOLIDARITY WITH OUR FELLOW BLACK STAFF, VOLUNTEERS, FILMMAKERS, PANELISTS AND STUDENTS, AND THE ENTIRE BLACK COMMUNITY BECAUSE BLACK LIVES MATTER.

POW FILM FEST WAS ESTABLISHED AS AN ORGANIZATION THAT LIFTS UP AND AMPLIFIES THE VOICE OF UNDERREPRESENTED WOMEN AND NON-BINARY DIRECTORS, CREATING A PLATFORM TO SHARE THEIR WORK WITH THE GREATER PORTLAND COMMUNITY AND BEYOND. RECOGNIZING THAT MODERN-DAY FEMINISM IS BORN FROM A WHITE LENS AND THAT SUFFRAGETTES OF THE 1920S DISMISSED THE VOICES OF BLACK WOMEN, WE KNOW WE HAVE MUCH WORK TO DO. WE SHOWCASE FILMS THAT REFLECT ALL WOMEN DIRECTORS, AND WE HAVE WORKED ON BUILDING AN ORGANIZATION THAT UPLIFTS AND GIVES VOICES TO BLACK WOMEN AND NON-BLACK WOMEN OF COLOR, TRANSGENDER WOMEN AND NON-BINARY FOLKS, QUEER WOMEN, DISABLED WOMEN, AND THE MANY WOMEN THAT SIT AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF THESE IDENTITIES. WE ACKNOWLEDGE THAT INTERSECTIONALITY IN FEMINISM IS VITAL.

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House curated films selected by Sora Blu

1. Vignette – “Ness Hollow” – By Sora Blu 2:25
2. Vignette – “Dead Betty” – By Sora Blu 1:50
3. Vignette – “Jessica Owens” – By Sora Blu 1:36
4. Music Video -“Simple Pleasantries” – By Rosetan 2:38
5. Music Video – “When you go” – By Darren Hanlon 4:12
6. Vignette – “Honey” – By Sora Blu 2:11
7. Micro Doc – “Bog Town” – By Sora Blu 2:08
8. Micro Doc – “All Wild” – By Sora Blu 2:37
9. Vignette – “A Window In” – By Sora Blu 2:03
10. Music Video – “Today is My Day” – By Jet Black Pearl 4:31
11. Music Video – “Ivory Coast” – By Pure Bathing Culture 3:28
12. “Seekers” Short Film by Mikey Kampmann and Travis Woolsey 10:00

Sou’Wester Arts is a non-profit 501c3 organization that helps fund our art, music, and wellness programming. Our mission is to be of service to the artist community at large by providing a space for folks to create, connect, restore, and renew in order to experience transformation within themselves and their work. Subscribe to Sou’westerTV

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