Folktales are stories from the beginning of time. They weave thoughtful life lessons and reflections of the human experience into their fantastical narratives, and are often a key way for people to connect with their cultural identities. Much like the films in this program, folktales immigrate, morph, get lost in translation, and become something entirely new as future generations synthesize these stories with fresh eyes and experiences . Basha Alpern's Odabo Odoba (1981) is a collaboration with NYU students. The story follows a young child's descent into consciousness, searching for his own sense of identity in English and Yorùbá. The energetically animated film shows the viewer symbols and music of Cuba and Senegal as the child dances with masks, echoes, and ancestors. In Yorùbá, the title "Obado Odoba" can be translated to "Until We Meet Again, Odoba". Yorùbá has its roots in many parts of West Africa, and is a language deeply connected to the religion of the same name. The language embodies collective wisdom and traditions, which is emphasized through its poeticism and common proverbs called "Owe". Yoruba is also spoken in areas of the Caribbean as a result of the trans-atlantic slave trade, and cross continental influences are apparent throughout the music and dance featured in this film. Alperin has taught workshops in African and Caribbean music and dance for over 25 years in the U.S., Caribbean and Africa. Her background as a drummer informs the quick, rhythmic animation and frenetic Jazz soundtrack, taking the viewer on a celebratory journey through her heritage.

Guido Lombardi and Anna Lajolo's A (1969), offers a glimpse into a teenage girl's reminiscences of home in Italy after moving to America. The film flickers between memories of home, diary entries, and ethnographic footage of a Latin American country, tossing the viewers back and forth through a lonely girl's daydreams of items from home, community, and Western pop culture. The intercutting, seemingly peering into memories, takes the audience into a spectral time travel and that teeters the line of nostalgia, loss, and longing. The observational, ethnographic footage of Latin America isn't used explicitly as an outsider perspective; the footage conversely represents what the teenage girl misses – surroundings bursting with color, and people from a homeland. Lombardi and Lajolo were both pioneers in Rome's underground experimental and independent film scene in the 1960s and 1970s, and their series A and B were created during this movement. Scholars in the book Experimental and Independent Italian Cinema: Legacies and Transformations into the Twenty-First Century, write:

"Independence, whether economic or formalistic, is not necessarily regarded as an artistic ‘identity card’ but rather a modus operandi, a style, a philosophical and political statement made against complacency and, especially, intended to reaffirm a sense of artistic/cultural liberation" (Cristiano, 9).

In contrast to Obado Odoba as a celebration of heritage, A's narrative and structure uses a new language in search of freedom. A as a folktale explores this experimental resistance as a form of the youth's immigrant identity.

The heart of our program is Morir Para Nacer (2025). When filmmaker Ale Sanchez discovered footage of their birth 21 years after it had been recorded by their father’s old camera, it dawned on them that the recordings held a strangely prophetic quality. Scattered throughout were comments and allusions to an American ideal that had influenced their Mexican family. The first words their dad spoke to them were in English, even though neither of their parents actually spoke the language. There were remarks about Sanchez “having blue eyes” – a phrase often used for Mexicans who immigrate to the US. To reflect upon this footage, Sanchez used their father’s same camera to document their life in California. They filmed small snippets of their American life, “mostly centered around the first time I ever saw snow, something impossible for my parents to experience back in Mexico.” Ale Sanchez explores fate, generational bonds, and the violence one faces when entering new worlds. Leaning into its dreamlike, fragmented, and poetic qualities, the title Morir Para Nacer translates to 'To Die to Be Born.'

Lana Lin's Stranger Baby (1995) collages surreal sequences and interviews that report on the multiple meanings of the term "alien." The film combines documentary and fiction: Lin narrates her own relationship to her Taiwanese-American heritage while also using viewers’ speculations of the film's images. Their voices make grand assumptions of race and gender relations from montages of science fiction imagery, documentary footage and home movies, exposing the ease with which our society racially profiles. Alienation is both dangerous and appealing, and Lin uses emblematic imagery to challenge viewers to interrogate their politics of identity. Morrison Gorg, a programmer and filmmaker at the Microscope Gallery, explained that ‘flux’ is one of the main motifs she works with. “It not only symbolizes migration and transient bodies, but also acts as a conduit for cultural and linguistic memories… the glistening texture of streaming water contrasts with the soft skin of a baby playing in it. Water is the bearer of a newborn, a new meaning.” This science-fiction folktale tackles the complexity of translation and selfhood across America, Asian, and Alien cultures.

As an exciting end to our program, we present Joyce Wieland’s passionately angry satire, Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968). It wickedly critiques the corruption of the military industrial complex by telling a fable of a group of rats (actually gerbils) escaping the perpetual cycle of political and economic oppression under America to forge a new life in a utopian Canada. Wieland created this film in response to the military drafts when the US became involved in the Vietnam War in 1965, which the American public had an increasingly negative opinion about until the war’s end in 1975. During this time, Wieland moved from her home in Canada to New York, with her then husband Micahel Snow, and started creating experimental films. Rat Life and Diet in North America was one of her many politically-charged and humorous films created in New York such as Patriotism, Part II (1964), Water Sark (1965), and Reason over Passion / La raison avant la passion (1969). Edited with urgency and brimming with allegory, Joyce Wieland shows us what revolution could look like when those who are seen as dirty little working-class rats band together against the bourgeoisie fatcats.

SOURCES:

Art Canada Institute - Institut de l’Art Canadien. “Joyce Wieland.” Institut de l’Art Canadien, Art Canada Institute, www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/joyce-wieland/biography/. Accessed August, 2025.

Cristiano, Anthony, et al. Experimental and Independent Italian Cinema: Legacies and Transformations into the Twenty-First Century. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Morrison, Gorg. “Early Films by Lana Lin and One by Lin + Lam ...” Microscope Gallery, microscopegallery.com/lana-lin/. Accessed 11 Aug. 2025.

PROGRAM:

1. Odabo Odoba, Basha Alperin, 16mm, 1981, 12 minutes
2. A, Guido Lombardi, 16mm, 1969, 3 minutes
3. Morir Para Nacer, Ale Sanchez, 2025, Digital
4. Stranger Baby, Lana Lin, 16mm, 1995, 14 minutes
5. Rat Life and Diet in North America, Joyce Wieland, 16mm, 1968, 16 minutes