Film Society of Lincoln Center Presents Special Event with Dani Leventhal Tonight

The Film Society of Center announced today a special Views From the Avant-Garde evening presenting the work of video artist Dani Leventhal tonight, December 18 to celebrate the occasion of her receiving the 2013 Kazuko Trust Scholarship Award Grant. The Grant is presented by the Kazuko Trust and The Film Society in recognition for her excellence with experimental work. The evening will include the premiere of two of her newest works (SISTER CITY, NIKHOLE), as well as a special teaser for a new work-in-progress (HARD AS OPAL).

The Kazuko Trust was established upon the death of Kazuko Oshima, a Patron of the Film Society who loved film, experimental film most of all. It was her wish to contribute to this worthy area of the film world after her passing, by awarding the Film Society with a five-year $50K grant ($10,000 a year or $5000 for two filmmakers per annum) for the purpose of creating a scholarship fund for worthy experimental filmmakers featured in NYFF's Views from the Avant-Garde. In addition, a seat in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center was named in her honor.

Said Nora Coblence, executor of the Kazuko Trust, "When the time came to decide where Kazuko's funds should go, the Film Society of Lincoln Center seemed like the ideal choice. She loved film with a passion, always supported the Film Society, and was quite avant garde in so many of her multi-artistic endeavors."

The first two recipients in 2012, Laida Lertxundl and Michael Robinson, each received $5,000 grants during its inaugural year. This year, the committee decided to award Dani Leventhal with a $10,000 grant. The 2013 committee includes Film Comment Editor Gavin Smith, VIEWS curator Mark McElhatten, Nellie Killian of Migrating Forms and BAM and Chris Stults of the Wexner Center.

Dani Leventhal's work expresses an absolute and fearless ongoing effort to connect-in more ways than one. Her videos represent a prolonged and intensive engagement with the world around her. This engagement is deceptively casual at first glance, but Leventhal has an acute eye for striking images that bring her, and by extension the viewer, into close and unflinching contact with her surroundings and the lives of others. Those images are then organized into an unpredictable succession of fleeting glimpses and impressions collected according to what she describes as "an emotional logic," and her distinctive and often startling practice of montage explicitly recapitulates the work of forming connections, linking fugitive moments of tender lyricism and stark reality, candid and sometimes harrowing anecdotes, and attentive close encounters with human and animal life in enchanting conjunctions of disparate sounds and images that form an irresistible stream of consciousness flow.

"I start with a subject that I care deeply about. I concentrate on fear, desire, anger, confusion, and love. I concentrate on the emotional relationships between humans, humans & animals, and humans & their environments," says Leventhal. "I am particularly interested in the way we develop based on our experiences in childhood, and then the process of undoing it. The work takes multiple forms and encompasses a broad range of themes, ranging from the explicitly political to the mundane and domestic."

Leventhal is an assistant professor of drawing at The Ohio State University. In 2009 she received an MFA in film/video from Bard College. Shehas screened her single-channel videos at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Gene Siskel Film Center, PS1, Cine Cycle, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Union Docs, the New York Film Festival Views from the Avant Guard and Anthology Film Archives. Leventhal has been the recipient of the Wexner Center Film/Video Residency, the Milton Avery Fine Arts Award and the Astraea Visual Arts Grant. Her drawings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Yale University.

For more on Dani Leventhal visit danileventhal.org

Screening on December 18 at Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center includes:

Platonic (2013, 20:26)
Sister City (2013, 4:39) - (Premiere)
Nikhole (2013, 4min) - (Premiere)
Hard As Opal teaser (2013, 1:22) - (Work in progress)
Draft 9 (2003, 28m)

Tickets are $8 for general public & members. Visit www.filmlinc.com for more information.

Film Society of Lincoln Center
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility and understanding of the moving image. Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year's most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, LatinBeat, New Directors/New Films, NewFest, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-vous With French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Comment Magazine, Film Society recognizes an artist's unique achievement in film with the prestigious "Chaplin Award." The Film Society's state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year round programs and the New York City film community.

The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from Royal Bank of Canada, Jaeger-LeCoultre, American Airlines, The New York Times, Stonehenge Partners, Stella Artois, illy café, the Kobal Collection, Trump International Hotel and Tower, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

For more information, visit www.filmlinc.com and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.

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