Standing Point Films

The Animals

Yoni — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 20:33:23 +0000

The Animals is a short live action film that explores obsession, nature, and the doppelgänger through dark comedy and magical realism.

DIRECTOR
Angeline Gragasin

WRITER
Caitlin Doughty

PRODUCER
Rachel Wolther

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Meredith Zielke

CAMERA OPERATOR
Meredith Zielke
Lance Hashida

The Animals (teaser!) from Angeline Gragasin on Vimeo.

More information about the film

Thick Relations

Yoni — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:27:00 +0000

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“Thick Relations” is film about confronting the deep losses we experience in the face of change, and our propensity to expand – or contract – in response to that. Set in Chicago and made up of a cast of (mostly) non-actors, the performers largely play themselves, and the collaboratively developed story explores both fictional and actual dynamics between the three central characters and their more extended queer families. Functioning outside of but not unrelated to the narrative, are monologues the characters deliver via Skype, to an absent and unnamed “listener” on the other end. Additionally, the narrative is interrupted by abstract sexual encounters, which are not clearly marked as past, present, or future. In “Thick Relations” we are forced to face a future we fear will be lonely and hope will be filled with love.

Direction: Jules Rosskam, Cinematography: Meredith Zielke & Yoni Goldstein

http://www.thickrelationsmovie.com

Natural Life

Yoni — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 18:19:58 +0000

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Michigan is one of forty-one states that allow a sentence of life without possibility of parole (natural life) to be imposed on youth who committed their crime prior to the age of eighteen.

Natural Life, a feature length video documentary, will challenge the inequities in the juvenile justice system in the United States by depicting the stories of four individuals incarcerated since youth. The piece, a combined effort of the Law Offices of Deborah LaBelle (LODL) and video artist / filmmaker Tirtza Even, will tell these stories from angles ranging from the legislators and victims’ family members to the incarcerated themselves. The interviews will be interwoven with staged, animated and documented moments from prison, from court and from the crime scenes. Our goal is ultimately to bring to an end the juvenile life without parole sentence in Michigan, and obtain release opportunities for those currently serving this sentence.

Direction: Tirtza Even, Cinematography: Yoni Goldstein

The Jettisoned

Yoni — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:22:29 +0000

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“These bodily fluids…are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver.” – Julia Kristeva

The Jettisoned references the tradition of the Tableau Vivant in painting and photography as it maps representations of identity and the bodily.

In three sweeping tableaux vivants, artists Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke present a rich cartography of identity at its most nebulous form. The rigid boundaries erected by conventional interpretations of collective, conditional, and bodily identities are torn down in The Jettisoned: bodily mechanisms present sickness and health as being part of the same process of sustained loss; anachronistic renditions of epic gestures deplete the national epic of its definitive qualities; crypto-judaic ritual offers veiled signs of a heritage while simultaneously dissolving it into another religious tradition. Fittingly, The Jettisoned engages these interstitial spaces with an equally nebulous aesthetic approach, a filmic rendering of the painterly tradition of the tableaux. However solitary and ambiguous the sites it explores are, The Jettisoned offers the possibility of abject recognition.

The tableaux vivants, or living paintings, that constitute The Jettisoned were shot in Chicago, Warsaw, and Mexico City. The carefully considered set design incorporates authentic elements of both the location and tradition addressed in each tableau. The Mexico tableau for instance, incorporates genuine Masonic garb and other crypto-Judaic artifacts with a Mexican working class altar to a flower covered Y-chromosomal Aaron, otherwise known as the “Jewish Gene”. The Warsaw tableau is placed in a large animal surgical theater, with Polish locals positioned as manipulated monuments and figures from national epics. In the Chicago tableau, Goldstein and Zielke’s childhood memories from Netanya, Israel and Detroit, USA combine within viscous, fluid seepages inside a former industrial soap factory.

Credits:
Directors: Meredith Zielke & Yoni Goldstein Production Manager: Elizabeth Cohen Camera Operator: Andrew Benz DIT: Robert Cauble Gaffer: Artem Avakian Best Boy: Sean Lowery Grips: Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon, Gwyneth Anderson Production Assistants: Tommy Heffron, Justyn Mainard, Jared Larson, Crispin Rosenkranz, Emily Buckler, Kathryn Grover, Emily Buckler, Chris Bradley, Amanda Eron, Rodion Galperin, Anna Kipervaser, Ronen Goldstein, Jess Turcios Make Up: Deanna Frost Special Effects Make Up: William Amaya, Jennifer Mosier Art Director: Jerzy Rose Pneumatics: Katrina Chamberlin Location provided by: Joseph Gheith Location Scout: Travis Wyche

Cast: Sebastian Alvarez, Stef Almeida, Misuzu Aoi, Nadav Assor, John Boss, Jefferson Dakota Brown, Sagar Budhe, Justin Cabrillos, Masha Chernyak, Noé Cuéllar, Erin Davette, Ehsan Ghoreshi, Elise Goldstein, Amanda Gutierrez, Jerry Heller, Nadia Hotait, Geoff Hughes, Joshua Johnson, Sharon Kluge, Kunal Kumar, Zihan Loo, Lauren Mardirosian, Hally Marlino, Jeff Matheis, Laura Meyer, Anisa Pashaj, Balta Peña, Cheryl Pope, Casilda Sanchez, Louis E. Sather, Jr., Lynn Stransky, Earl Smith, Lynn Stransky, Jaroslaw Studencki, Daniel Teafoe, Gregg Valentine, Roberto Vega-Morales, Joette Waters, Ryan Wilson, Collins Yearwood

On Set Photographers: Alexandra Dietz, Beverly Jensen, Rodion Galperin, Justyn Mainard, Academic Adviser: Frédéric Moffet

÷ Obelus

Yoni — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A male creature is born into a limbo space covered in dust. The creature finds himself with two heads and eight limbs, two human beings joined as one. It attempts to strengthen itself and negotiate its existence as a single entity. The moment of identification arrives, and it realizes that in order for both parties to survive they have to break the bond that links them together – they choose to force a division despite unknown consequences. OBELUS is a video featuring series of convertible male sportswear designed by graduating SAIC Master of Design in Fashion, Body and Garment student Adam Van Eeckhout, whose collection is inspired by psychoanalyst Lacan’s lecture “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function.”

1 Channel Video installation / fashion art video, 2010

Credits
Featuring designs by Adam Van Eeckhout
DIRECTOR Zihan Loo
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY Yoni Goldstein
LINE PRODUCER Joseph Carr
PERFORMER ONE Tian Shuai
PERFORMER TWO Tony Flannigan
CAMERA OPERATION Lawrence Daufenbach
GAFFER Robert Cauble
BEST BOY Jared Larson
DOLLY GRIP Justyn Mainard
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Gwyneth Anderson
STYLING & MAKEUP Nika Vaughan | Adam Van Eeckhout
ART ASSISTANT Mako Fuwa
STILL PHOTOGRAPHY Cheng-Yung Kuo | Meredith Zielke
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Mary Van Eeckhout | Gene Van Eeckhout | Vera Hetland | I^3 Hypermedia

La Curación (The Healing)

Yoni — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

La Curación examines multi-situated narratives about health and healing in the urban, coastal, and rural communities of Ecuador. Set within the lush volcanic landscapes of the Northern Andes, this experimental documentary reveals deeply layered understandings of the body as a porous and permeable subject. An epileptic revolutionary, a pair of fire-breathing shamans, and a poet physician discuss embodiment through the prism of poetry and folk history.

NEW: stream / download the feature length film in HD

To purchase La Curación, please contact us above or directly at docs (at) standingpoint (dot) org

Feature Length Experimental Ethnography, 2008
Spanish and Quichua, with English or French Subtitles

The Quito Film Collective connects students and scholars with global health researchers, medical students, and documentary makers from the Americas. Production was completed at the University of Michigan and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Credits
Direction/ Field Production/ Editing – Yoni Goldstein, Meredith Zielke
Production: The Quito Film Collective – Yoni Goldstein, Meredith Zielke, Sergio Huarcaya, Anica Madeo, Kyle Fish, Dana Kuhn, Gonzalo Escobar, Susan Fawcett
Executive Production: Patrick Schaller
Original Score: Breathe Owl Breathe and Drafted by Minotaurs

50 Faggots

Yoni — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 20:32:59 +0000

The groundbreaking, new, online documentary series educating, exploring and celebrating how individual effeminate men survive and thrive in today’s American communities.

50 Faggots educates audiences with the unprecedented access to the lives and experiences of effeminate male activists, artists, professionals and educators – perspectives rarely discussed within most cultures. The series addresses the dearth of self-acceptance among effeminate men, young and old, with humorous anecdotes, important wisdom, and inspiring models of resilience. By offering individual alternatives to dominant constructions of American masculinity and heteronormative gay lifestyles, this film illuminates the on-going issues relevant to queer communities.

The first season, located in the urban neighborhoods of Chicago, Washington D.C., and New York City, dedicates two years to documenting the stories of ten effeminate gay men. These men discuss their professional and personal lives, often in contradiction to communities that demand a rigid and binary definition of gender, particularly valuing patriarchy and an “appropriate” presentation of “straight-acting” masculinity. Regardless of each man’s assertion of their own authentic self, specific dominant ideologies construct the societal assumptions of these men’s presumed personalities, sexualities and behaviors.

This documentary series celebrates the differences among urban and rural environments, along racial, religious, and intergenerational lines. While the series allows each man to discuss the ways their personal effeminate expressions are negotiated in career, relationships, and communities, this documentary project creates national dialogue around the diversity of ways to truly “be” a man.

Credits:
Director: Randall Jensen Ward
Editor: Meredith Zielke

On A Runway

Yoni — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:10:18 +0000

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Credits
A Video Performance by Chryssa Tsampazi
Video by Yoni Goldstein
Camera by Yoni Goldstein and Tommy Heffron

n=

Yoni — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:26:32 +0000

This project is inspired by one of the most visually spectacular events in the life of a cell: its division. The ‘stage’ which the viewer sees from above is a theater-in-the-round, similar to a microscope stage where the specimens are mounted for examination. The lens of the camera, like the objective lenses of the scientific instrument, observes a ceremony that evokes a network of symbolisms and metaphors. The choreography is reduced to a minimal cartography that sequentially illustrates the movement of each performer through and within the delineated space. Reproduced on transparencies, the drawings provide the additional context required to organize the looping, non-linear footage. As a set, these components are part of an equation where the n variable is the unknown.

Credits
A Performance and Installation by Liliya Lifanova and Sebastian Alvarez
Video by Yoni Goldstein
Camerawork by Yoni Goldstein, Meredith Zielke, and Lori Felker

Untitled (Gurnee)

Yoni — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:55:57 +0000

“Untitled” is a film that centers on Russ Schneider, documenting his participation in the 2009 Warren Township High School Homecoming parade, in Gurnee, IL, as well as a private performance on the Warren High School football field. Schneider, who is both the Warren Township high school wrestling coach and town coroner, plays a hyperbolic version of himself, cast as a modern day Saturn, he performs cannibal acts on a phony corpse as well as birthing and burying a pseudo ancestral comic sculpture.

1 Channel Video installation / short film, 2010

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Credits
Concept and Art by Ben Fain
Moving image by Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke
Additional Camerawork by Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon
Music by Ronen Goldstein