Walter Hernandez (Echo Park Film Center): LA Rising - fm, 2012, video, 13minutes, 36seconds

Revisiting the Los Angeles Uprisings in 1992, LA Rising - fm sources archival audio footage from the radio station 102.3, which live broadcasted calls from witnesses of uprisings in real time in South LA. A mix of accounts both critical of the uprisings and in support, the film pairs these testimonies with film footage documenting anti-deportation marches in Downtown LA and visages of a bucolic Southern California landscape; this gesture suggests that a sense of deep political instability is fundamental to our present moment and the history of Los Angeles.

SCREEN: Community Cinema from Karachi to Los Angeles brings together two community cinema initiatives whose work reflects the cultural infrastructure of the cities they operate in. Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema, a project of the Tentative Collective, works with residents of Karachi, Pakistan, to produce films made entirely of mobile phone footage, enabling its collaborators to share their daily lives using a cheap and improvisational technology. The Echo Park Film Center is a microcinema in Los Angeles’s Echo Park neighborhood that teaches and empowers members of the community to view and create films. This screening includes work by both organizations that reflects cinema as a tool for expressing the narratives of immigrant communities whose notion of place, security, and citizenship is in constant flux.

Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema is represented by Yaminay Nasir Chaudhri and the Echo Park Film Center by Gemma Jimenez Gonzalez. Participating artists include The Kolachi Brothers, The Undocumented Minors Project, Simri Hernandez , Stephanie Escalante Leiva, Gemma Jimenez Gonzalez, Walter Hernandez, ACT-LA, and Walter Hernandez. SCREEN: Community Cinema from Karachi to Los Angeles is organized by Nevin Kallepalli.