Spectral Transmissions 

 

                                         

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Spectral Transmissions is a production of Wishbone Films.  

Produced and directed by Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher

Conceived by Donal Mosher

Sound  Edit and Design by Michael  Palmieri 

Original Music and Scoring by Michael Palmieri with help from Kelly Pratt, Colter Jacobsen, and Donal Mosher

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Special Thanks to Liz Cook-Mowe, Ben Popp, Amy Dotson, December Carson, and the NW FilmCenter.

Info for programs, events and classes at the NW FilmCenter can be found at nwfilm.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher are a collaborative filmmaking/multimedia team. Their first feature as directors OCTOBER COUNTRY won the Grand Jury Prize at Silverdocs, received two Cinema Eye Honors, and was nominated for a 2009 Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary. The film is a haunting portrait of American poverty, described by A.O. Scott as a “Joyce Carol Oates novel rendered as a documentary.” Their most recent feature film  "THE GOSPEL OF EUREKA" premiered at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival, was released theatrically by Kino Lorber, and broadcast on POVin 2020.  Palmieri and Mosher  have worked in live cinema, performing at the First Look Festival at the Museum Of The Moving Image and collaborating with Daniel Lanois, Pop-Up Magazine, and others. They score their own films and perform their soundtracks  as live accompaniments. Palmieri’s music video director credits includes work for Sharon Van Etten, Beck, The Strokes, and The Foo Fighters. Mosher's writing can be found at Failed States Journal, Talk House, and other publications. 

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Derek McCormack is a novelist, essayist, and playwright who lives in Toronto. His previous books include The Show that Smells and The Well-Dressed Wound (Semiotext(e)). His latest book “Castle Faggot” is available in November.  Edmund White says of  “ Castle Faggot” the mystery of objects, the lyricism of neglected lives, the menace and nostalgia of the past—these are all ingredients in this weird and beautiful parallel universe.”

 

Jeanie Finlay is one of Britain’s most distinctive documentary makers, telling intimate stories to international audiences. Whether inviting audience behind the scenes of Teesside’s last record shop in her home town (SOUND IT OUT), uncovering a rollercoaster Nashive fable (BIFA winning Orion The Man Who WOuld Be King), to share the extraordinary journey of a British transgender man, pregnant with his child (BIFA nominated Seahorse) or onto the set of the world’s biggest television show (Emmy nominated Game Of Thrones: The Last Watch), all of Jeanie's films are all made with the same steel and heart, sharing an empathetic approach to bringing overlooked and untold stories to the screen. www.jeaniefinlay.com 

 

Steven Sheil is a writer and filmmaker based in Nottingham, UK. His work has previously appeared in Black Static, Horla, The Ghastling and as part of the Black Library anthology Invocations. His first feature Mum & Dad was released by Revolver in 2008. His second feature Dead Mine, will be released by eOne later in the year. He also one of the co-directors of Nottingham’s Mayhem Film Festival.

 

Bradford Nordeen is a writer, curator and the founder of Dirty Looks Inc. He has written for Frieze, Art in America, Afterimage, and Butt Magazine, and was a 2018 recipient of the Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. He was Platinum Programmer for Outfest Los Angeles (2013-2016), and guest curator for inaugural season of public programs at The Broad Museum. He has curated exhibitions and screenings at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Film Society at Lincoln Center, Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, SFMoMA, and The Hammer Museum. His publications include Because Horror (with Johnny Ray Huston), Check Your Vernacular, Dirty Looks at MoMA, Fever Pitch, and the Dirty Looks Volume series (editor).

 

Sierra Pettengill is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker. Her film, The Reagan Show, an all-archival documentary which she co-directed and produced, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and the Locarno Film Festival. Her short film Graven Image, produced for Field of Vision, premiered at the True/False Film Festival before airing on POV, and is in the permanent collection at the Equal Justice Institute’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. She produced the Oscar-nominated documentary Cutie and the Boxer, which also won an Emmy. Her archivist credits include Jim Jarmusch's Gimme Danger and Mike Mills' 20th Century Women, among many others. She writes on film for frieze magazine and Film Comment and she was a 2017/2018 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow. Her new short, The Rifleman (2020, 18 min), is an excavation of the links between gun culture, the National Rifle Association, and the U.S. Border Patrol across five decades.

 

Dodie Bellamy is an essayist, poet, and novelist, and a fundamental and active member of San Francisco’s literary avant garde. She is the coeditor (with spouse, poet Kevin Killian) of Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative, 1977-1997. Her memoir and essay collections include When the Sick Rule the World (2015), Academonia (2006), and Pink Steam (2004). Bellamy’s poetry collections include Cunt-Ups (2001),  which received the Firecracker Award for Innovative Poetry, and Cunt Norton (2013), Barf Manifesto (2008)was named “Best Book Under 30 Pages” by Time Out New York in 2009. Bellamy has written for exhibits at several museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. In 2006, Bellamy curated Kathy Forest, an exhibition of Kathy Acker’s clothing which was shown in San Francisco and New York City. She was the subject of the California College of the Arts Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s On Our Mind series in 2018 and 2019. From 1995 to 2000, Bellamy served as the executive director of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center.

 

Simon Evans™ is the artistic collaboration between Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan. The artists create dense text-based collages saturated with short, poetic phrases, drawings, and images often created from the detritus of everyday life both inside and outside of the studio. They describe a world poised between two poles of earnestness and irony.  With a wry brand of melancholy, Simon Evans™ presents us with a laundry list of drawings that take the form of diagrams, charts, maps, advertisements, diary entries, inventories, and cosmologies that plunge the viewer into alternate states of pathos and hope.  Recent work by Simon Evan is on display at the James Cohan Gallery: https://website-jamescohan.artlogic.net/viewing-room/17/

 

Kelly Pratt is an arranger and multi-instrumentalist best known for his horn work with David Byrne and with the bands Beirut, Arcade fire , LCD Soundsystem, Coldplay and more. He is currently arranger and conductor for Father John Misty. His solo work can be found under the names Bright Moments and Sir Kelly Pratt. 

 

Toby Bull is a writer and filmmaker living in London. In 2017, he directed “Amore”, about a group of women living near Heathrow who host a fortnightly ResistDance to oppose the airport’s expansion. His second short, “Welcome to Harmondsworth” (2019), follows a tour group as they explore another of the Heathrow villages, home to the largest immigration detention centre in Europe. It premiered in competition at Big Sky and screened at Full Frame, IceDocs, and others. His new short, “Some Kind of Intimacy” (2021), follows his attempts to communicate with the sheep living where his parents are buried. He freelances as a camera person, editor, and researcher, has written for 3:AM, 4x3, Dummy and others, and spends lots of time daydreaming about ghosts. 

 

Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star, published by Hub City Press (2020). His debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury 2012), an Oregon Book Award finalist and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. His essays and fiction have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Joyland, Guernica, Catapult, and Electric Literature. Carter is the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, and earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and MacDowell. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University. 

 

Stephanie Skaff writes stories and songs, and has made performance projects based on subjects like NYC’s immigrant street vendor community, small town historians, and an aging custom machinist whose work is increasingly obsolete. She earned an MFA in fiction writing from Hunter College, and works as development director for the grassroots documentary film center, DCTV in NYC.

 

Peter Condra is a guitarist and songwriter, formerly of Portland based bands Notel and Magic Mouth.

 

T.S. Leonard is a writer and performer based in Portland, Ore. Leonard is the author of the poetry chapbooks Reverse Cowboy and The Year in Loss and Faggotry, the audio project Even Still They Shook, and the queer obscenities of the band Soft Butch. A proud after-school art teacher, they still believe in the future.

 

Liz Walsh is an artist from San Francisco CA. She works with a variety of mediums ranging from sound, video, painting and interactivity. Walsh received a BFA in Painting from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1994 and an MFA in Painting from the California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco in 2003. She is currently working on large scale paintings of crash sites and future foliage and curating and hosting Supermoon broadcasts with Eric Landmark, these broadcasts, when reviewed by the LA Weekly were referred to as “ public-access-on-mescaline aesthetic that is somehow perfect for these absurd, fractured times.”

 

Eric Landmark has played synthesizers and guitar in bands including Numbers and Xerobot, is a maker of short films, and recently co-curated Supermoon, a livestream show of artists and musicians.

 

Christine Shields is an artist and musician from Northern California. She grew up in various locations, most of them rural, from the Central Coast to the Sierra foothills. A solitary life in nature, along with the influence of a vast range of Californians, including hippies, cowboys, bohemians and punks shaped her early life. At the age of 17 she moved to San Francisco, attended the Art Institute, and played in her first band as a drummer. Her creative life, built around necessity and imagination has taken many forms including painting, comics, music and illustration. She currently resides in Sacramento, California.

 

Paul Rowley is a visual artist and filmmaker. He first began making films in 1995. Since then he has completed over 40 shorts, features, documentaries, video installations, and experimental films. He works as a director, editor, cinematographer, writer and producer. His most recent film, The Red Tree, is a doc/hybrid that tells the little known history of Italian gay men being arrested and exiled to a remote island during Mussolini’s Fascist regime. THIS ONE’S FOR THE LADIES which Paul shot and produced for Determined Pictures premiered in Competition at SXSW 2018 where it picked up a Special Jury award and worldwide distribution from NEON. 

 

Maya Daisy Hawke is an editor and interactive artist. Her live project, Little Ethiopia—a cutting love story by two editors—was performed at the Sundance Film Festival, First Look at MoMi in NY, and in London at ICA Frames of Representation (2017-18). Her solo live project, Unfated Yet (2020) featuring Werner Herzog and Joe Bini, was presented online by First Look at Museum of the Moving Image and Sundance Documentary Film Program. She is the creator of the interactive fiction/non-fiction social media video novels, Currency of Despair (2014) and Box of Birds (2016), both on Facebook.

 

Colter Jacobsen is a visual adits and musician. He is a recipient of SFMoMA’s SECA Art Award (2010). His work has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions, including hour fault, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco (2019); Essays, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York (2018); This Is How We Walk on The Moon: Colter Jacobsen, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2014); Searchin’ vs. Buildin’, LAXART, Los Angeles (2010); and The Exhibition Formerly Known as Passengers, CCA Wattis Institute, California College of Arts, Oakland. Group exhibitions include Mythos, Psyche, Eros: Jess and California (2019), and A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions (2016–17), both at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA); People’s Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2014); Artists & Editions, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art (2013); and the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011). 

 

Sharon Van Etten is an American singer-songwriter and actress. She has released five studio albums, the latest of which is Remind Me Tomorrow (2019). Pitchfork described her songs as having "echoes of folk tradition."  NPR Music asserts: "Her songs are heartfelt without being overly earnest; her poetry is plainspoken but not overt, and her elegant voice is wrapped in enough rasp and sorrow to keep from sounding too pure or confident."

 

John Blanco is an activist, dancer, educator, gardener, imagination officer, mentor, space artist, survivor of childhood domestic and sexual violence, volunteer, and yogi who gives great hugs. However defined, their creative practices are described as critically whimsical, courageous, and authentic. They received their BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005 and served as a teaching artist working inside San Francisco’s Youth Correctional Center. In 2019 they completed an MFA in Studio Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 

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Kia and Essence are Portland OR activists for Black Lives Matter, Indigenous rights and land preservation, and county organizers. They are sisters by both blood and spirit.

 

Strange Hotels are an LA based band composed of musicians/street activists Ben Braden and Nick Stadler.