Screening preview: Requiem for Black Gold

This is part of a series of posts from the filmmakers previewing the different films that will be screened at Portsmouth Short Film Night.

This post is from Amy Kaczur, about her film “Requiem for Black Gold”:

A little background on me:

I picked up video and Super 8 film after many years of painting. Painting just wasn’t enough. Video gave the lens to a traveler’s raw discovery and the pleasures of inquisitive searching. I love a good adventure and a great story. My passion in art is directed toward subjects of social and political conflict, debate and change – the subjects that we are not supposed to talk about at the dinner table, but are crucial to being openly discussed. Currently, my video and art work is grounded in environmental concerns, community, land use, and a formative love of the aesthetics of experimental landscape cinema, language and social space.

I grew up outside the Cleveland area in the Rust Belt. My working class family roots had a huge impact on how I saw and appreciated landscape, both urban and rural. They worked in food, healthcare, education, auto industry, manufacturing and worked the land, feed, mills and livestock in rural Southern Ohio down to the edges of Appalachia. I moved to Boston to go to college and lived in Cambridge, Long Beach and now Los Angeles. Graduate of Tufts University and University of California, Irvine.

A little background on the video:

While in graduate school, and I had a strange attraction to the refineries in the Long Beach port area. They became a beacon. A friend and I went on a few night rides to see the glittering lights of the port and refineries. Oddly they reminded me of home and provided a comfort that can only be explained as nostalgia.

The video really began in 2001 when I first saw a sunset from Keys View in Joshua Tree National Park. The sunset was candy-colored, spectacular, brilliant. Dense smog rolled out from the Los Angeles basin through the pass between St. Jacinto and San Bernardino Mountains, past Palm Springs and all the way to the Salton Sea. The smog was a key ingredient to the beauty we witnessed. I was struck by this conflict and wanted to explore the conflict between beauty and danger, and the balance of vulnerability and industriousness. Requiem for Black Gold is a visual poem of complex nostalgia for an industrial age fueled by petroleum, a call for hope for newly discovered energy sources, and for things not always being what they appear to be. Someday, even a plastic bottle will be obsolete

Come to Portsmouth Short Film Night on Thursday, May 9 at 7:00pm in The Press Room in Portsmouth, NH to see this and the other great short films being screened!