Prototype presents: Sydney winter film season 2021

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This winter, Prototype is premiering three insurrectionary, internationally celebrated feature films that can't be seen elsewhere. We're bringing a unique approach of hybrid programming to cinemas, combining adventurous overseas films with new video art from our 2021 program.

Thursday, May 20
, 6pm

• Prototype short: Walk-Off Country (Newcastle Waters, NT), Rachel O'Reilly (2021)

• Feature: The Inheritance, Ephraim Asili (USA, 2020), Australian premiere

Both artistically and politically radical, Ephraim Asili's convention-breaking debut spins a new history of the MOVE Black Liberation group in Philadelphia. Crosscutting betwen archival footage from the 1980s and the filmmaker's own shimmering Super 16mm, the work moves between documentary and scripted drama to connect the USA's rich legacy of activism with new re-examinations of racism and justice. Featured in the Official Selection of the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival.

'When Black Power meets the French New Wave in (where else) Philadelphia. Fascinating. Illuminating.' - Boston Globe

Thursday, May 27, 6pm

• Prototype short: Remain by Gabrielle Brady (2021)

• 
Feature: Empty Metal, Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer (USA, 2018), Australian premiere

Drawing on the counter culture films of the 1970s, Empty Metal is a new political thriller of lies, paranoia and deception in present day USA. The film traces two distinct groups of anti-government radicals - punk musicians and white militia bros - embroiled in their own mistaken missions against injustice. Another feature debut by audacious new voices in the art and film worlds, Empty Metal traverses real testimony of police shootings, faux documentary and CG sequences to grapple with the violence that plagues the West. Fearless and confrontational, with the feel of a video art installation.

'Pointed in its politics and inspiringly imaginative, Empty Metal queries whether the end of the world might already have taken place.' - Frieze magazine

Thursday, June 3, 6pm

• Prototype short: Rare Earth, Robert McDougall (2021)

• Feature: Circumstantial Pleasures, Lewis Klahr (Australian premiere)


Cinematic collagist Lewis Klahr returns with a collection of six shorts, that, threaded together into a feature, capture the collective unease of the years 2012-2019. Using laborious, low-tech, stop-motion techniques, Klahr pushes animation to its most abstract, wondrous point. This new work brings his signature pop style to everyday cultural detritus from late consumer capitalism - parking tickets, styrofoam takeaway packets, news clips. A master noncommercial artist-filmmaker, Klahr's work must be seen on the big screen, to transport the viewer to his strange, extraordinary world wrought from our own trash.

'An archivist par excellence and excavator of the collective unconscious, Klahr creates striking, deeply personal assemblages.' - New York Times

Supported by City of Sydney's Night Time Diversification Program.