Void In Resonance

A film by Jerónimo Reyes-Retana

Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Doors: 5:00 pm / Screening: 6:00 pm

In his writing, artist and researcher Jerónimo Reyes-Retana (b. 1984Mexico) defines "colonial voids" as territorialities and communities subjected to practices of cartographic erasure that enable the expansion of modern/colonial global designs through infrastructure development and industrialization projects. Such is the case of El Campo Pesquero de Playa Bagdad, a marginalized and underserved community located at the easternmost edge of the Mexico–U.S. border, where the waters of the Río Bravo meet the Gulf of Mexico.

At this confluence lies an oyster field vital to Playa Bagdad’s local economy. However, with the construction of SpaceX’s spaceport just two miles north, on U.S. soil, the human bodies, biosphere, and vernacular architecture surrounding Playa Bagdad’s oyster field are now threatened by the sonic shock waves produced by SpaceX’s massive rockets during lift-off.

Informed by over four years of fieldwork and community engagement, Void in Resonance—originally conceived as a film installation—captures intimate moments of a SpaceX launch through the eyes of those working in the oyster field, revealing the personal and collective impacts of the land-based infrastructure required for what has been mistakenly called a new era of outer space exploration when, in reality, it marks a new era of outer space industrialization.

Following the film screening, Jerónimo Reyes-Retana will join Eric Coombs Esmail in conversation about the film. The program will end with a short Q&A session.

Eric Coombs Esmail is a critical media artist, theorist, and pedagogist interested in labor, spirituality, and the politics of human migration. Trained as a cinematographer, his practice has taken him both far afield and close to home where he has explored ideas around power, place, and experience. Eric is assistant professor of critical media practices and the director of the Center for Documentary Media at the University of Colorado Boulder, which hosts the annual Mimesis Documentary Festival.

Soft Frames

Animated Shorts @ The Sie Film Center

Thursday, September 18, 2025

Doors: 6:00 pm / Screening: 7:00 pm

Grit & Ground

Shorts Block @ The Sie Film Center

Friday, September 19, 2025

Doors: 6:00 pm / Screening: 7:00 pm

After Party at Forest Room 5

9:00 pm - late

In the violent streets of Mexico City, Joel leads a double life fixing car engines by day and getting his hands dirty by night. Now, he must repair the toughest machine of all: his own shattered existence.

From hand drawing animation to complex transmedia pieces, Esteban Azuela (Mexico, 1984) experiments with the narrative possibilities of visual art, in an atypical space between fiction, documentary and dialogue with other disciplines. His videos and animated shorts have been exhibited in venues as diverse as the Palais de Tokio, Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage and the Central de Abastos market, while his collaborations as a VJ and sound act visualist include equally diverse artists such as Richard Devine, Los Viejos, Black Devil Disco Club, Tristan Arp, Nick Zinner and Lourdes Grobet.

Director’s Statement:

Based on real events, in families close to mine, this story is contextualized in the 90s when extreme violence began to be more visible in the mass media and when North American popular culture began to permeate more through the Free Trade Agreement between the USA and Mexico, where we adopted symbols like the NFL as aspirational models.

I made this film trying to understand the origins of violence in my mexican reality and the growing glorification of criminal figures through pop culture. Narrating it from a character who constructs his strength through acceptance in a criminal group, justifying himself through his passion for cars and socioeconomic status but ultimately defeated by the ambivalence with his culture that bind him to family values. In the end, it’s the portrait of a failed heroic figure of masculinity.

It was also important for me to show these characters from the innocent perspective of a 10-year-old child, like the one I was at that time, and to realize how it almost imperceptibly permeated me with video games and figures of power and competitiveness. Bringing this elements to a more intimate term; the attachment to our memories and how to live more freely if we detach from them, seen through the duality in European and Nahuas beliefs about life after death and what we take with us when we die.

Using error as an aesthetic posture, I chose low-cost techniques to talk about the precariousness of the technology of an average user in Latin America and how films can be made with them, facing a hyperrealistic, polished and sterile aesthetic imposed by other the canons of digital filmmaking.

Threaded Gestures

Shorts Block and Live Performances @ the Digital Armory

2565 Curtis Street Denver, CO 80205

Saturday, September 20, 2025

Doors: 5:00 pm / Screening: 5:30 pm / Live Performances 7:30 pm

Closing Screening

Sunday, September 21, 2025

Brunch: 11:00 pm / Screening: 12:00 pm

Datura’s Aubade (17:00)

Jean-Jacques Martinod in collaboration with Bretta C. Walker

USA, Ecuador

2021

In the high Chihuahuan Deserts a local myth tells the story of how a local farmer once discovered the remains of a fallen meteorite. In the liminal deserts a vacuous wind enmeshes itself with magnetic lands where the earth and the alien surrender to inner overlapping rhythms, and where serpents, wolves, and nature spirits roam horizonless and free of form.

Eastern Anthems (78:00)

A filmic correspondence between Matthew Wolkow and Jean-Jacques Martinod

Canada, USA, Ecuador

2024

An unfinished film is passed along from one friend to another. The dialogue between them is a journey crossed by the swarming of the American Great Eastern Brood X of periodical cicadas that prophetically emerge every 17 years, invoking a reflection of a post-pandemic present and our shared futures. A film composed of a chorus of voices (both human and non-human), the warnings of history, the power of nature and rebirth.

Director’s Statement:

This film has had many lives. It’s in discourse with our times, with the intersections of the realities of our bioregional spheres. Simultaneously, this film is about the inherent friendship required in any type of true collaboration and building discourse as a larger human family in its multifaceted relations to the natural world. While suffering from several important setbacks during production, including the inability for one of us to be present during the emergence of Brood X, and then a mechanical failure that almost completely annihilated our faith in being able to complete the film, the project continued steadfast thanks to tenacity and sacred community. We were also all in lockdown, figuring out ways of expressing love, camaraderie, and perseverance during trying times. This film was reconjured out of ruins, in full play with the art of failure, thanks to a commitment to the event, manifested in a filmic situation that brought true friendship among all the makers to forms of collaboration all were unaware of could be possible. This is partially the reason why this film operates within the context of chorus and noise awakening harmoniously from the ashes.

This screening will be followed by a Q&A with Jean-Jacques Martinod.