Rana San
a serial anthology of time-based disturbances
Rana San is an intermedia artist, curator, and night dreamer pondering language and lineage, intimacy and interdependence. Her film poetry and analog photography meld dreamwork, movement, and word play, examining the ways we relate, where we belong, and the new meanings made in spaces where artistic mediums meet. In community, Rana crafts collective experiences that celebrate the work of artists and activists working at the intersections of media, literature, and performing arts. As Artistic Director at Northwest Film Forum from 2017-23, she co-curated year-round programming, including ByDesign Festival, Cadence Video Poetry Festival, and Local Sightings Film Festival. Rana is co-curator of the 2022-2023 Base Residency which supports the research of traditional and indigenous dance and movement practices. In 2021, she co-curated Yellow Fish Festival VI, a long form inquiry into durational performance art as a means to support methods of staying alive in our present times. Her film work has been featured most recently at North Bend Film Festival, Eugene Contemporary Art, Seattle International Film Festival, SPLIFF, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Artists of Color Symposium, Georgetown Super 8 Film Festival, and Reel Love Fest.
Released in 12 monthly installments, this suite of short films troubles the boundaries between and within cinematic and literary forms. Helmed by contemplative filmmaker and autotheorist M Freeman, the series is curated by them along with Rana San and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes “The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.” Each monthly release includes one to three short films and an accompanying critical essay that observes, wonders, speculates and imagines the implications of work that defies easy categorization and resists our impulse to name. This project challenges the page as the domain of literary art and invests fully in the conviction that necessary alternatives to received ideas about authorship, publishing and genre arise from artists who live and work outside the stockade of dominant culture: queer, Black and Indigenous womxn, other womxn of Color and people with disabilities.