Storefront Films: Swamplands

Storefront Films is back, in partnership with Anthology Film Archives, for a night of films centered on our yearlong exhibition and research theme: Swamplands. The films in this program focus on the increasing complexity of wetlands, while challenging perceptions of swamps as unstable environments to instead portray them as sites of inherent hybridity, care and kinship, and violence and neglect.

MANGROVE SCHOOL, 2022, Filipa César & Sónia Vaz Borges 

Mangrove School traverses the history and impact of Guinea-Bissau rebel leader Amílcar Cabral’s guerrilla schools, which fought against Portuguese colonial powers in the 1960s.

BECOMING ALLUVIUM, 2019, Thao Nguyen Phan

Becoming Alluvium observes the environmental changes downstream due to the expansion of agriculture, overfishing and the economic migration of farmers to urban areas, with a focus on the perceptions of the impact of environmental change on nature and human lives.

DIVING WOMEN OF JEJU-DO, 2007, Barbara Hammer

For hundreds of years, women on the Korean island of Jeju-do have dived to the ocean floor, without breathing apparatuses, to collect shellfish, octopus, and urchins that they sell. On the eve of this ancient tradition’s extinction, the filmmaker dives alongside the women and records the reasons behind their disappearing work and lifestyles.

HABITAT 2190, 2019, Hanna Rullmann & Faiza Ahmad Khan 

Habitat 2190 follows the construction of the nature reserve Fort Vert at the site of the so-called “Jungle”, the former migrant camp in Calais, France, addressing the ways in metaphors of nature are used to enforce borders.

LA MARCHA DEL LIQUEN, 2024, Tania Ximena

The March of the Lichen tells the story of Antarctic glacial ice, its encounter with the sea, the advance of lichen and moss, and its connection to a community on the Mexican coast that has been erased to the point of existing only in memories.