Stanya Kahn — Director (2)

Movie

No Go Backs (2020)
Douban
A 33-minute short, shot on super 16mm with an original soundscore and no dialogue, No Go Backs follows two teenagers (and real-life fr iends) who leave the city for the wild, only haphazardly prepared. From the heart of the city, they cut an arduous path along sites of California’s historic water wars, traveling north into the monumental landscapes of the Eastern Sierra. In the haunted precarity of a collapsed world, the kids travel in dreamlike states of distraction, malaise, and resilience. As they eventually encounter other kids along shared roads and the prospect of camaraderie in facing the unknown, the film becomes a compressed, allegorical epic about an entire generation that must make a new way forward.

Movie

Stand in the Stream (2017)
Douban
Stand in the Stream is an experimental documentary shot on multiple camera formats over the course of six years and edited with the speed of our ubiquitous shifting screens to a pulsing original sound score. A visceral multiplex of footage from a vast, indexical collection forms narratives of birth, life, death and change: the deterioration of the filmmaker's worker/activist mother, her own role as a mother, and the shifting demands, tactics and digital visibility of resistance movements across the globe. Reflecting the ways in which we live amidst a sea of images, the film creates a seamless flow between on-line spaces, watching life through devices and being in the world 'IRL'. From Tahrir Square to Ferguson to Standing Rock and airport shut-downs against Trump's Muslim ban, time unfolds here across changing political landscapes, the short lifespan of web platforms, and the deterioration and death of a loved one dovetailed with the growth and development of another.