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Wednesday Night Cinema Society: Nostalgia (with Filmmaker and Visiting Artist Jenni Olson)

Wednesday, February 3, 2016 - 7:00pm
Studio C, 150 Communications Building (UCSC)
Presented by: 
Film and Digital Media

Focusing on a theme of "Nostalgia", San Francisco-based filmmaker, Jenni Olson, one of two visiting artists this quarter, will present her most recent film, The Royal Road, about nostalgia, unrequited love, and California history.

A meditation on urban change and the role of myth in shaping identity, Olson describes her film as a “cinematic essay in defense of remembering.” In this personal essay film, the history of the Spanish colonization of California and the Mexican-American War are placed alongside of distinctively Californian brands of unrequited romance. Ranging from Hollywood films such as Vertigo, to anecdotal, personal stories of falling for unattainable women, narrated in a distinctively, dispassionate tone, Olson uses the metaphor of unrequited love to explore her own compulsion for nostalgic attachments to landscape. For Olson, this attachment is entangled with a love of classic Hollywood films, as much as with nostalgia for San Francisco as the queer mecca it used to be.   

Jenni Olson is an experimental documentary filmmaker whose urban landscape films have been shown at film festivals around the world, earning critical and popular acclaim for their unique style; Olson fuses 16mm static urban landscapes with lyrical essayistic storytelling. Her most recent feature-length essay film, The Royal Road, premiered at Sundance in 2015, and won the jury award for Best LGBTQ Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. A longtime champion of LGBT cinema, Olson is a former co-director of Frameline (the San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival), as well as being an advisor and production consultant to dozens of filmmakers. Most recently, she executive produced Chris Mason Johnson’s gay drama, Test, which was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, and won the Grand Jury Award for Best Screenplay, and Best US Narrative Feature at Outfest in 2013. Olson is also one of the world’s leading experts on LGBT film history and is well known as a queer media historian, activist, author and online pioneer. She is currently VP of e-commerce and marketing at Wolfe Video and sits on the advisory boards of the Outfest/UCLA Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation, Canyon Cinema, and the Jewish Film Institute.

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During the winter quarter, the Wednesday Night Cinema Society will present works which deal with the urban landscape, exploring themes related to urban spatialities, human geography, the commons, gentrification, and the temporalities of change. This quarter’s programming is curated by UC Santa Cruz Film and Digital Media PhD student Samuael Topiary, and draws from her ongoing academic research on landscape, environmental urbanism, the commons, and utopian imaginaries.

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Free and open to the public
Parking $3 in Core West Parking Structure