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Good Symptom: Episode 1, September 2023

GOOD SYMPTOM
Episode 1, September 2023

Featured in this Episode:

  • “My phone needs to charge so this’ll be a little far away” ~ 02:40 | Tobi Springer | 2022 | Netherlands
  • “Results May Vary” ~ 04:07 | Tiffany Jiang | 2022 | USA
  • “Für Lilith” (“ლილიტს”) ~ 09:35 | Mariam Elene Gomelauri | 2023 | Tbilisi, Georgia (Sakartvelo)
  • “According To Sun Ra, None Of Us Are Real” ~ 04:38 | Naima Lowe | 2020 | USA

Episode Extras:

  • “And so we begin,” an introductory essay by Good Symptom curators M Freeman, Rana San, and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke
    Read the Essay (PDF)

My phone needs to charge so this’ll be a little far away ~ 02:40 | Tobi Springer | 2022 | Netherlands
In “My phone needs to charge so this’ll be a little far away,” director, animator, and sound designer, Tobi Springer, pairs conversational interview snippets and personal essay with an improvised, lulling piano score and evocative hand-drawn, reflexive animation. Fleeting in ordinary time and everlasting in tender originality, My phone needs to charge so this’ll be a little far away is a trans-genre journey into being and becoming and wondering what the future holds. A world premiere in Good Symptom.

About the Artist
Tobi Springer is a British-Dutch animator and filmmaker with a penchant for old-school and traditional animation techniques. Their work tends to explore themes of queerness and grief and the feeling of otherness that accompanies these themes.

Results May Vary ~ 4 minutes 7 seconds | Tiffany Jiang | 2022 | USA
In a deft assemblage of deteriorating found footage, the nostalgia of a scratchy old record, and a kind of fragmented lyric essay rendered in text-on-screen, Brooklyn-based, second-generation Chinese American filmmaker, Tiffany Jiang, questions the reliability of family history and photo albums, considers the possible outcomes of child rearing, and wonders about having children at all. Queer and non-binary, Jiang renders a dreamy assemblage. Results May Vary is at once of the archive and the archive revitalized, wary and interrogatory, melancholy and hopeful.

About the Artist
Tiffany Jiang is an award-winning Chinese-American filmmaker who gravitates towards stories about identity struggles, cultural taboos, and personal traumas. Tiffany is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Media Studies at The New School.

Für Lilith / ლილიტს ~ 9 minutes 35 seconds | Mariam Elene Gomelauri | 2023 | Tbilisi, Georgia (Sakartvelo)
This is how I started to understand myself through hate speech, Georgian filmmaker, Mariam Elene Gomelauri tells us halfway through the disarmingly self-aware, Für Lilith / ლილიტს, a reexamination of Gomelauri’s gender-identity formation in the conservative, post-Soviet Republic of Georgia. Turning the camera first on themself in a spacious yet startlingly reflexive opening sequence, Gomelauri rewinds early childhood memories punctuated with a present-day voice of experience coupled with a compilation of home movies, personal artifacts, photo-collages and excerpts from a 2008 Georgian commercial (so-called) comedy film. In Für Lilith / ლილიტს—about growing up genderqueer under the reign of religion, sanctioned homophobia (in classmates, in movies) and the cruel absence of affirmative queerness—Gomelauri offers us something personal and daring, something infused with mythic rage, veracity and equipoise, something that will resonate for countless numbers of us worldwide. A worldwide premiere in Good Symptom.

About the Artist
Mariam Elene Gomelauri is a 3rd year audio-visual arts student from Tbilisi, Georgia. Self-image, class struggles, social perceptions, gender and identity are some of the themes Elene’s filmography often centers around. They enjoy using various types of mediums in their work, generating visual images using artificial intelligence, creating costumes, as well working with analog technology, backed by experience of working as a darkroom laboratory technician.

According To Sun Ra, None Of Us Are Real ~ 4 minutes 38 seconds | Naima Lowe | 2020 | USA
Naima Lowe disrupts conventional notions of the biopic in this genre-nonconforming piece centering the mundane queerness of legendary Sun Ra—the prototype Afrofuturist and hugely influential jazz musician. Using improvisational strategies rooted in alchemic survival practices known as Black cultural production, Lowe couples her perfectly imperfect pre-recorded reading of this Sun Ra poem she wrote with an improvised video performance she performs. Captured by a fixed-frame, locked-down camera on auto-focus, Lowe stands behind a translucent shower curtain fully dressed. Calm as a well-practiced alchemist, she runs, pours, and drinks water. Certain spoken words appear as text on-screen as Lowe appears in and out of focus while water drops flow into ramifying moons. Infused with dreamy visual style and graceful poetic swings—a judicial racial slur leaps to drinking starlight, to disrupting hate speech, to breathing while Black. A genre-fluid classic, “According to Sun Ra, None of Us are Real” is a liberating tonic honoring the ordinary queerness of a Black legend.

About the Artist
Naima Lowe is Black queer disabled writer and artist who creates films, performances and texts using improvisational and collaborative strategies. With a BA from Brown University and MFA from Temple University, Naima has exhibited at Anthology Film Archive, Wing Luke Museum, MiX Experimental Film Festival, National Queer Art Festival and the Henry Art Gallery. Naima has been an artist in residence at Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. She’s currently a Mid America Arts Alliance Interchange Artist Fellow, recipient of the Mid America Arts Alliance Artistic Innovation Award, and recipient of the Jazz Road Creative Residency. Naima resides in Tulsa, within the Muscogee Creek Nation Reservation, where she spends her time being free and talking to animals.

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80+ countries, 700+ submissions

80+ countries, 700+ submissions

Thank you to all the MANY artists who submitted work to Good Symptom. We received more than 700 submissions from over 80 countries! Curators M Freeman, Rana San and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke have been hard at work watching every single film and making the tough choices. They will winnow down this remarkable abundance to just a handful of exceptional projects that exemplify the boundary-troubling, genre-defying impulses of work that shrugs off labels and requires a lot of hyphens to categorize. Exciting announcements will be made very soon! 

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Submit Your Work

Submit Your Work

Good Symptom is open for submissions through December 20, 2022.

Visit our submission page at Film Freeway.

We prioritize submissions from queer, Black and Indigenous people, other people of color, and people living with disabilities – people who create as poets, essayists, hybrid writers, filmmakers, media artists, and interdisciplinary artists.

Subscribe Early

We’ll notify you when Good Symptom subscriptions go on pre-sale. Early subscribers will receive bonus content & early access to installments.

We are looking for literary media arts experiments that push the language of poetry, essay, correspondence, autobiography, manifestos, thought pieces and hybrid literary works off the page and onto the screen: Work that might be lyrical, might be essayistic, might be personal, political, meditative, songlike, spacious, dense, raplike, performative, spoken word…or any combination of these and more. We’re looking for experiments that disregard genre and disturb disciplinary lines between literary and media arts.

We are inspired by what Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, that “The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.”

 

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The Good Symptom Team

The Good Symptom project team is made up of three exceptional artists and writers who share a commitment to innovative media and interdisciplinary thinking.

Together, M Freeman, Rana San and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke are seeking out time-based work that slips through the cracks of genre and form, assembling it into twelve breathtaking, mind-opening installments, and providing critical and imaginative context for artists who work outside the bounds of literary and cinematic convention. 

Subscribe Early

We’ll notify you when Good Symptom subscriptions go on pre-sale. Early subscribers will receive bonus content & early access to installments.

M Freeman works at the intersections of reckoning and resiliency, of film and writing, of contemplative, creative and social art practices. They are author of The Illuminated Space: A Personal Theory and Contemplative Practice of Media Art (The 3rd Thing, 2020), which won the 2020 Nautilus Book Award’s Gold Medal for Creativity & Innovation. Their text and media arts essays have been published in The Fourth Genre, Blackbird, Ninth Letter, TriQuarterly, and Rolling Stone. M is the creator of Cinema Divina—evocative short films made through and for contemplative practice.Their films have been featured on PBS and in galleries, spirituality centers, theaters, and in festivals worldwide, most recently in LA’s Film and Video Poetry Symposium, in London’s MircoActs Artist Film Screenings, the Nature and Culture Film Festival in Copenhagen, Experiments in Cinema in Albuquerque, Cadence Video Poetry Festival in Seattle, the Midwest Video Poetry Fest in Madison and at the International Video Poetry Festival in Athens, Greece. They’ve received The Evergreen State College Faculty Foundation Grant, The Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation Grant, and multiple Artist Trust Grants including twice being awarded the Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship. marilynfreeman.com

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 the Artistic Director at Northwest Film Forum, she co-curates 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. ranasan.art

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke is a writer exploring the liminal spaces of the literary arts. She is the author of the chapbooks Adventures in Property Management (Sibling Rivalry, 2017), Borough Body (Cold Cube Press, 2017), and Thunder Lizard (H_NGM_N, 2016). Her interest in how words are experienced has led to solo work and collaborations with artists across media to create gallery installations, music performances, broadsides, karaoke, and video poetry. She is co-founder and co-director of Cadence: Video Poetry Festival, the only video poetry festival in the Pacific Northwest. She also founded and was director of Till, a literary organization. She has worked as outreach coordinator for Conium Review and was previously managing fiction editor at Pacifica Literary Review. She has received support from Jack Straw Cultural Center as a writing fellow, from Artist Trust as an EDGE participant, and from the Cornish College Arts Incubator. She has been a writer in residence at Vermont Studio Center and Ragdale Foundation. Werner-Jatzke has taught creative writing through Seattle Central Community College and served on the board of Lit Crawl Seattle. She received her MFA from Goddard College, where she was editor-in-chief of Pitkin Review and founded Lit.mustest, a now-defunct reading series. She moonlights as a communications professional. chelseawernerjatzke.com