This is the first of 3 consecutive Thursday nights of films by Los Angeles artist Stanya Kahn.

Sliding scale tickets

Thursday July 23rd at 8pm – Stand in the Stream (2011-2017)

Stand in the Stream defies categorization—an ambient digital feature about life, death, the inextricability of the personal from the political, the primacy of the image and the interplay of scale in human struggle, from the intimacy of the home to the global streets, the handheld camera to the drone. Shot over the course of six years, Stand in the Stream captures historic shifts in popular uprisings and the nascent use of the internet to organize and document. Made during a period in which massive and unprecedented protest movements rose across the globe between 2010 and 2017—Tunisia, Egypt, Brazil, Turkey, the U.S.—the film is also follows the intimate arc of deterioration and death of the artist’s activist/worker mother, alongside personal documentation of daily life amidst swiftly changing political and digital landscapes. Live-streams screen-recorded in real-time are intercut with footage Kahn shot on multiple camera formats, as an embodied means to reframe our screen-saturated, contemporary perspectives without using found footage. With a dense and visceral sound score, Stand in the Stream moves from the home to the wild, from online chat rooms to the streets. From the birth of a child to the death of a mother, from Tahrir Square to Standing Rock and Trump’s (first) inauguration, Stand in the Stream is an urgent contemporary ode and a story for the people.

Thursday July 30th at 8pm – Dont Go Back to Sleep

Color HD video with stereo sound
Written, directed, shot, edited and sound designed by Stanya Kahn ©2014

Includes original sounds/music by Kahn and Keith Wood (Hush Arbors, Chelsea Light Moving). B Camera by Ignacio Genzon, Mike Soltz and Chiara Giovando. The cast contributed primary dialogue. 
Made with the support of Grand Arts, Kansas City

Courtesy of the artist

“People are going back and forth
across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open
Don’t go back to sleep!” 
–Rumi

“When you affect something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn, and in a slightly different way than you might have been the moment before. You have made a transition, however slight. You have stepped over a threshold.”
—Brian Massumi, (translator, “A Thousand Plateaus”), from interview: Navigating Movements

Don’t Go Back To Sleep is an experimental narrative feature film that operates as a metaphor for the violence of the state and resulting citizen trauma and resilience. As medical professionals perform haphazard triage, mostly on each other, in homes left vacant during the 2008 housing crash, we realize they may be the only people left: workers (The People) vs the danger outside: the state (police/military/clampdown). In tenuous relations between strangers collaborating under pressure, darkly comedic camaraderie arises in small human exchanges.

Thursday August 6th at 8pm –
No Go Backs  ©Stanya Kahn, 2020, It’s Cool, I’m Good Stanya Kahn ©2010

No Go Backs  ©Stanya Kahn, 2020

TRT: 33 min 

Color super 16mm, transferred to 2K Digital video with stereo sound

A visceral 33-minute short film, shot on super 16mm with an original sound-score and no words, No Go Backs follows two sets of teenagers who leave the city for the wild, only haphazardly prepared. Featuring the artist’s son (Lenny Dodge-Kahn) and his life-long best friend (Elijah Parks) and their friends (Serafina and Marisol Prietto,) No Go Backs is a quietly dystopian fiction grounded in real-world relations and the understated but persistent presence of contemporary catastrophes. In the haunted precarity of a collapsed world, the kids travel in dreamlike states of distraction, malaise, and resilience. They cut an arduous path along sites of California’s historic water wars, following the aqueduct north toward its source, through the monumental landscapes of the Eastern Sierra Nevada. Eventually encountering other kids along shared roads—and the prospect of camaraderie in facing the unknown—the film becomes a vison of tenuous survival and the astonishing power of the earth. Completed just a month before lockdown, No Go Backs appears as an uncanny premonition and an allegorical epic about an entire generation that must make a new way forward. 

It’s Cool, I’m Good Stanya Kahn ©2010

TRT: 35:22 

Color SD video transferred to HD with options for 5.1 surround or stereo

Commandeering a rotating staff of nurses with equal parts wit and belligerence, a severely injured protagonist (Kahn) moves through the city, hospice, and wilderness, seducing, harassing and charming caretakers into holding the video camera. At once selfless, narcissistic, verbose, elusive, vulnerable and manipulative, the patient is tenacious in the face of death. Memory and time have been destabilized by trauma. Mirroring economic collapse, urban tension and ecological demise as contexts for contemporary stress, the “patient” embodies damage and resilience with a relentless albeit morbid sense of humor. A compromised sense of social navigation gives way to uncompromised presence. 

Kahn shot at over twenty locations and designed a complex audio score, to cut a narrative that’s organized across many small arcs in place of one grand one, confounding linear time and troubling the line between the monstrous, heroic and mundane.

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