Experimental film movements in the United States have always been about the search for voice and true expression. The filmmakers at the forefront of these movements have and continue to explore questions like: what constitutes "Americanness"? Who gets represented within power structures? What is the place of the American project of democracy in a globalizing world? Many contemporary experimental films have emerged out of a documentary paradigm, retaining elements of nonfiction storytelling while incorporating ever-expanding methods to document and reimagine the outside world and the self. In the 21st century, as technology continues to evolve, it informs and expands the possibilities of cinema and, in turn, the representations of selfhood. This is the rich terrain The American Experiment will explore.

Documentary and experimental film have been intermingling since Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North in 1922, which is before the word "documentary" was coined by the Scottish documentary filmmaker, John Grierson in 1935. If documentary is more concerned with reality than fantasy and experimental film is more concerned with feeling than fact, mash-ups of these forms embody radical aesthetics. Today's experimental non-fiction film reckons with the filmmaker's personal experience, offering a non-traditional lens to a non-traditional American experience.

Khalik Allah's Field Niggas is a stylized documentary chronicling summer nights spent at the intersection of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in Harlem. Allah weaves together stylized portraiture and non-synch audio conversations with the neighborhood's most oppressed and exhausted inhabitants, giving us a deeper sense of their dreams, regrets, opinions, arguments and observations. The film, which takes its title from Malcolm X's lecture "Message to the Grassroots" - and was filmed in July 2014 with the death of Eric Garner occurring mid-production - serves as a passionate call to rise above our social constructs and view each other simply as humans.

"With vast empathy and spontaneous imagination, the director Khalik Allah revitalizes the genre of the observational documentary and transforms several simple technical tricks into a vision of the world."

- Richard Brody, The New Yorker

An inspired and intimate portrait of a place and its people, the Oscar nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening looks at the lives of Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two young African American men from rural Hale County, Alabama, over the course of five years. Collins attends college in search of opportunity while Bryant becomes a father to an energetic son in an open-ended, poetic form that privileges the patiently observed interstices of their lives. The audience is invited to experience the mundane and monumental, birth and death, the quotidian and the sublime. These moments combine to communicate the region's deep culture and provide glimpses of the complex ways the African American community's collective image is integrated into America's visual imagination.

In his directorial debut, award-winning photographer and director RaMell Ross offers a refreshingly direct approach to documentary that fills in the gaps between individual black male icons. Hale County This Morning, This Evening allows the viewer an emotive impression of the Historic South, trumpeting the beauty of life and consequences of the social construction of race, while simultaneously offering a testament to dreaming despite the odds.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlOeSyl-zZk 

Ticketing Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-american-experiment-hale-county-this-morning-this-evening-tickets-55087524268 

"Pure cinematic poetry... poses a quietly radical challenge to assumptions about race, class and the aesthetics of filmmaking."

- A.O. Scott, The New York Times

"It's not every day that you witness a new cinematic language being born... Hale County traverses years, encompasses tragedy and beauty, all in just 76 minutes."

- Bilge Ebiri, The Village Voice

Shakedown is the story of Los Angeles' black lesbian strip club scene and its genesis. Owned and operated by women, underground and illegal in nature, the club Shakedown is the darker, faster, younger iteration of this dance culture. The film is a window into this world. Shakedown emerged from a post-riots, post-OJ, post-integration but still very racially divided Los Angeles. In this divided city Shakedown is an independent, all black and all female cash economy.

Shakedown chronicles the explicit performances and personal relationships of the party's dancers and organizers including Ronnie-Ron, Shakedown Productions' creator and emcee; Mahogany, the legendary "mother" of the community; Egypt, their star performer; and Jazmine, the "Queen" of Shakedown.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/268334358 

Ticketing Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-american-experiment-shakedown-tickets-55088045828 

"Shakedown" is the debut feature length documentary from Hood by Air Cofounder Leilah Weinraub...a filmmaker who's just getting started."

- Rooney Elmi, Dazed Digital

One of the myths surrounding the creation of Vietnam involves a fight between two dragons whose intertwined bodies fell into the South China Sea and formed Vietnam's curving S-shaped coastline. Influential feminist theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha's lyrical film essay commemorating the 40th anniversary of the end of the war draws inspiration from ancient legend and from water as a force evoked in every aspect of Vietnamese culture. Minh-ha's classic Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) used no original footage shot in the country; in Forgetting Vietnam images of contemporary life unfold as a dialogue between land and water-the elements that form the term "country." Fragments of text and song evoke the echoes and traces of a trauma of international proportions. The encounter between the ancient as related to the solid earth, and the new as related to the liquid changes in a time of rapid globalization, creates a third space of historical and cultural re-memory-what local inhabitants, immigrants and veterans remember of yesterday's stories to comment on today's events.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8j4JymxGgM  

Ticketing Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-american-experiment-forgetting-vietnam-tickets-55088285545 

"Forgetting Vietnam has the capacity to carry viewers away, to sweep them up in the river-flows of Vietnam's history and present. In these currents, the distinctions between poetry, philosophy, and pop music, grand historical events and everyday actions are blurred."

-Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa & Patricia Alvarez, The Brooklyn Rail

The Big Crossover @ URL examines the place of experimental film within the ecosystems of art making, stardom, currency, and the Art Economy, as well as the mainstream content economy and ideas pipeline. This section is a meditation on the new, elusive social capital experimental filmmakers sometimes garner and sometimes reject in the Internet era. Utilizing both physical and screen space we explore the role of internet-mediated representations of marginalized people in digital hierarchies of exposure, profit and expectation. Through this lens we seek to ask: how do, and how can, marginalized people claim ownership and representation of their identities online?

This series is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.