Catalogue > At random

“A film which meticulously reflects upon the materiality of time following specific histories. While focusing on details, the images prevent us from accessing the whole. This gesture reflects the subject where voice has been violently stripped from the people, left silenced.”—Jury’s notes awarding the FID Marseille 2020 Alice Guy Special Mention Prize. A POTENTIALITY is a short, structural film about looming totalitarianism that adds the elements of time and sound to a graphic artwork by Susan Silton and joins the front pages of the 1933 New York Times with a mythic opera composed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944. The newspaper has local reports mixed with the increasingly disturbing accounts of events abroad, which have an uncanny echo in our current news. On a structural level, A POTENTIALITY makes a close comparison of printing dots and film grain that break apart the elements of language that support meaning.

Dana Berman Duff was named a Cultural Trailblazer by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in 2020, and a retrospective of her short films is scheduled in Los Angeles for spring 2022 at REDCAT in Disney Hall. In 2019, she mounted a large multi-channel video installation titled "What Does She See When She Shuts Her Eyes" (in collaboration with the late Sabina Ott) at Aspect Ratio in Chicago and Alchemy Moving Image Festival in Scotland. Her film A POTENTIALITY was awarded an Alice Guy Special Mention at the 2020 FIDMarseille Film Festival. Her works in small format film and video have been screened in the Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Edinburgh International Film Festival, ExIS Festival (Seoul), Experiments in Cinema (Albuquerque), Rencontres Internationales (Paris/Berlin), Dortmund/Cologne International Women’s Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads, and in over forty more festivals. She lives in Los Angeles and rural Mexico.