Tuesday, October 18, 6:00pm
Hoyt Auditorium (Room 104)
University of Rochester

On Film is pleased to present a screening of Sarah Friedland’s Movement Exercises trilogy, as well as a post-screening discussion with the filmmaker. This event was done in collaboration with Art & Art History and the Program in Movement and Dance.

On Film is honored that Sarah Friedland is able to join us for this event. Sarah is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Her work has been screened, installed, and performed across film, art, and dance venues including New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, MoMA, Ann Arbor Film Festival, BAMcinématek, Performa19 Biennial, La MaMa Galleria, Sharjah Art Foundation, and the American Dance Festival, among many others. She is currently a Pina Bausch Fellow for Choreography, a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Film/Video, and a Su-Casa Teaching Artist, teaching filmmaking at a Brooklyn senior center.

It is a pleasure to screen the three hybrid documentaries that comprise Sarah’s Movement Exercises–Home Exercises (2017), Drills (2020), and the most recently completed Trust Exercises (2022). Together, these works explore embodied and collective action as shaped by a variety of forms, from the home exercise workout tape to school lockdown drills to corporate trust and meditation exercises. Further, the films reveal a deep attunement to performers in spaces both public and private, focusing on how spaces shape bodies and bodies shape spaces. The relationships (at times harmonious and at other times tense) between body, space, and exercise is heavily foregrounded throughout all three films, highlighting embodied action as it is both regulated by the framework of the exercise and at the same time able to exceed the bounds of that framework.