The Unreliable Narrator
February 15 to March 15, 2025
An online exhibition of artists’ moving image works.
Daniel Cockburn, Zanne D’Aglio, Roger Deutsch, Chris Kennedy, Emma Piper-Burket, Leonardo Pirondi & Zazie Ray-Trapido, Caroline Rumley, Dan S, Jennet Thomas, Lilan Yang.
From Mark Twain’s “lies, damned lies and statistics” to fake news and AI-generated falsehoods, we are surrounded by untruths. The Unreliable Narrator presents a selection of short films and videos that engage with this slippery notion—works that deliberately mislead the viewer, unwittingly promulgate misconceptions or manipulate narrative to hidden agendas.
These artists extend a literary device far beyond its use in narrative cinema to explore the motives of documentary, personal essay and experimental film. Employing self-shot, archival, appropriated and AI-manipulated footage to deconstruct and reassemble received ideals of storytelling, they question the very concepts of historical truth, narrative intent and the evidentiary nature of the photographic medium.
See below for synopses and bios.
Ahead of the Curve
Daniel Cockburn
18 min, 2024
An autobiofictional video essay that encompasses medieval music theory, COVID lockdown, dual-purpose mapmaking and apocryphal Satanism.
Daniel Cockburn is a Canadian moving-image artist based in Glasgow. His work deals with rhythm, language and thought experiments, drawing on sources spanning video games, literature, power ballads and sci-fi/fantasy/horror. His 2010 feature film You Are Here has been described as “a new kind of narrative for a new technological era” (Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope), “a major discovery” (Olivier Père, Locarno Film Festival), and “a whatsit” (Gavin Smith, Film Comment). He’s currently working on a live performance about medieval music, and a movie adaptation of Mark Vonnegut’s memoir The Eden Express.
Essay about Ahead of the Curve, by Martin Herbert, commissioned by FVU.
Gigantic Rope and other tales
Zanne D’Aglio
2 min, 2024
A satirical sampling of the truth as told by the conspiracy theorist Elmo Scruggs. Given that something called reality ceased to exist circa 1967, where can we turn to unfalsify untruths? Nowhere. We fact-find, we meet persons in the flesh, we engage all our effort, using every instrument available to get to the bottom of it. But we don’t of course stand a chance. So we make things up and revel in the absurdities.
A love child of the 1960s, Zanne D’Aglio straddles the 20th and 21st century. She calls herself a mongrel artist. Unifying no-tech, low-tech, old tech, new tech she arranges moving images, music, words and soundscapes in the digital realm.
Dead People
Roger Deutsch
17 min, 2005
“Deutsch’s illuminating picturings push close to film’s ability to reactivate the feel of that which has disappeared; but rather than lolling in the shelter of the simulative, these films subtly questions their characters’ relation to history and to their own deaths. They are portraits that remind us these characters are done, through with, no more: yet at the same time they bring them ‘to life.’ They question cinema's ability to formalize, to resuscitate and to re-represent the past." (Barbara Kruger, Artforum)
“Like a tormented half-brother of American folklife archivist Alan Lomax, Deutsch revisits the rambling stories of Frank Butler, a subject that he documented more than a quarter century ago. The time gap has offered the filmmaker a chance to confront his younger self’s ethnographic process and transcend it to form a more brutally honest portrait of both subject and artist.” (Jason Cortlund, CinemaTexas)
The North Sea
Chris Kennedy
8 min, silent, 1973–1974
"As Benjamin had predicted, nothing brings the promise of happiness encoded at the birth of a technological form to light as effectively as the fall into obsolescence of its final stages of development." – Rosalind Krauss
Chris Kennedy is an independent filmmaker, film programmer and writer based in Toronto. He is the Executive Director of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. He programmed for the Images Festival from 2003–06, Pleasure Dome from 2000–06 and for TIFF Cinematheque’s The Free Screen/Wavelengths from 2012–2019. He co-founded and co-programmed Early Monthly Segments from 2009 to 2018. His short experimental films have screened at over one hundred film festivals worldwide and have been featured in solo shows at the Canadian Film Institute, Los Angeles Film Forum, Nam June Paik Art Center, the La Plata Semana del Film Experimental and the Pacific Film Archive. He has presented the work of others in Belgium, Egypt, Germany, the US and Canada. He holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was co-founder and host of a weekly film salon. His work as an artist and programmer operates in dialogue with the history of film as art, exploring the medium’s materiality in a contemporary context.
Driving Dinosaurs
Emma Piper-Burket
9 min, 2019
An 89-year-old marketing gimmick subliminally resurfaces on a lonely road in the American west.
Emma Piper-Burket is a visual artist, filmmaker, writer and educator using fiction, non-fiction and collected media to investigate interactions between nature, society and the human spirit. Her work is process-based and research driven, incorporating social trends, ancient history, personal experience, science, politics, ephemera and the natural world. Emma was a 2024 Flaherty Film Seminar Fellow and has received support from Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Ebert Foundation, Sundance Institute, Light Cone, Visual Studies Workshop, Marble House Project and Middlebury Script Lab, among others, for her creative works. She holds an MFA in Cinema and Digital Media from FAMU in Prague, a BA in Arabic and Classical Studies from Georgetown University and is currently completing a PhD in Critical Media Practice at The University of Colorado Boulder.
When We Encounter the World
Leonardo Pirondi & Zazie Ray-Trapido
11 min, 2023
In 1934 an experiment by an amateur-scientist couple began. Named after a genus of moths, the Automeris Project placed a group of young children in an enclosed forest, leaving them to fend for themselves. On return visits, the couple presented self-made films, accompanied by live music, depicting the outside world. For them, these images were the perfect replica of reality seen in their expeditions. Nevertheless, the films were carefully framed, edited and manipulated to induce a transformation and provoke the development of a new society. This film revisits the remains of the Automeris Project and recreates one such film made using the few remaining assembly notes.
Leonardo Pirondi is a filmmaker and artist who lives and works between Los Angeles, Porto and São Paulo. His films have been exhibited in various festivals worldwide, including the Toronto International Film Festival, the Tiger Short Competition in Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, Viennale, Mar del Plata, BFI London, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Guanajuato, Ambulante, Media City and many others. His work has been presented in art centers such as CCCB, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and REDCAT. He has had solo exhibitions at Galeria Mola (Portugal) and Spectacle Theater (New York). He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in film from the California Institute of the Arts and is a Sundance Institute Fellow. Fractais Tropicias, his debut feature-length fiction produced by Bam Bam Cinema, will be his next film.
Zazie Ray-Trapido is a filmmaker and producer based in Los Angeles. Her films expand on traditional documentary and narrative formats, engaging with analog film techniques, archives and performance. Her practice investigates relationships between memory, ideology and the environment. Her work has been screened at festivals and venues worldwide, such as the New York Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Viennale, Curtas Vila do Conde, RIDM, Kasseler Dokfest, Glasgow Short Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video, ICDOCS, Maysles Documentary Center and others. She holds a BFA from Bard College and a MFA in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts.
The Sippy Cup Incident
Caroline Rumley
10 min, 2025
Surveillance, stay-at-home-moms and a mysterious flood converge in this speculative documentary on gender dynamics, parenting, judgment and control.
Caroline Rumley is an American filmmaker from the South who collages solo-shot film, found and archival footage, text and sound to illuminate a public or personal event. Her films have screened internationally at varied venues—from Melbourne’s Biennial of Video Art to Amsterdam’s IDFA to Berlin’s Zebra Poetry Film Fest to Sundance. Caroline holds an MFA in Theatrical Design from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MA in Film, Video and Digital Imaging from Georgia State University. Her favourite place is the Gulf of Mexico.
The Truth About Hastings
Dan S
10 min, 2021
The Truth About Hastings is a hallucinatory interrogation of the mutual irrational distrust between rural and city-dwelling Americans, exploring how we have been isolated from each other by technology, commerce and intentionally hostile landscapes. It is presented in the form of a hard-hitting investigative documentary that makes allusions to popular conspiracy theories (shape shifters, flat earth, New World Order, QAnon, et al) that are perpetuated by the technology that isolates, oppresses and dehumanizes us.
Dan S is a writer/director/editor and sometimes camera operator currently residing in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A recipient of two McKnight Fellowships (2010/2016) and The Creative Capital Award for Moving Image (2015), he has been recognized for his experimental narrative and documentary work. Dan uses unconventional structures, poetic imagery and immersive sound to explore technological isolation, destructive masculinity, generational violence and the commodification of human suffering by the media industry, among other things. His work has been seen at Anthology Film Archives, The Walker Art Center, MoMA, Ann Arbor Film Festival, True/False Film Festival, Fantasia, Fantastic Fest, Athens International Film & Video, Kurzfilm Hamburg, Filmstock International, Cellular Cinema, Revelation Perth, Antimatter [media art], FLEXFest, Cosmic Rays, Grand Illusion Cinema, Trylon Microcinema and a few other places.
The Man Who Went Outside
Jennet Thomas
10 min, 2008
A distinguished looking man (performance artist Richard Layzell) is apparently trapped in an ever-changing void of colour, locked in a power play with a perversely operated camera. A mute, caged, charismatic TV presenter, he is by turns charming, menacing, educational, confused. At times he appears to have great powers. A voice-over tells us how this man is special—the first man to “go outside.” Hallucinogenic flash-frames punctuate the colour field to give us a view of his world’s alien (or horribly familiar?) logic. A retro sci-fi critique, maybe of the corporatization of the self? A sinister and playful meditation on making sense.
Jennet Thomas makes films, performances, multi-media sculptural installations, writes experimental fictions and monologues. Emerging from the anarchistic, experimental culture of London’s film/live art scene in the 1990s, she was co-founder of the Exploding Cinema Collective. She is a Reader in Time Based media and Performance at University of the Arts, London. Her works have shown widely, with solo shows and live performances at Matt’s Gallery, London; Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool; PEER, London; film festivals including IFF Rotterdam; Antimatter; European Media Arts Festival; New York Underground and museums such as Tate Britain and MOMA New York. She lives and works in London.
CineML: Paris
Lilan Yang
4 min, 2023
Taking a machine learning approach to analyzing cinema—in relation to places in real life—CineML: Paris is a computer-generated video based on Instagram posts associated with film locations in Paris for Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset. It explores how the constructed cinematic experience affects our memory and meaning of place and space, as well as how computers scrape images online as a proxy of human collective memories, then reinterpret and develop memories of their own.
Lilan Yang is an artist and experimental filmmaker from Chongqing, China. Their practice, rooted in the materiality of film and machine learning, delves into the flux of migration, the decay of memory and the intricacies of perception. Yang lives and works in Boston.
