(lively music) (upbeat music) - Welcome back to TVFilm.

I'm your host, Jermaine Wells.

TVFilm showcases the talents of upstate New York media makers across all genres.

We're gonna start this episode with "The Golem Returns", an animation by Nathan Meltz.

This film explores the theme of the mythical Jewish golem created out of clay and sorcery in the 16th century.

In Meltz's narrative, the golem is a protector of the persecuted, defending innocents from a destructive monster in a stylized world, brought to life through collage puppets, clay, ink, and stop motion.

Enjoy.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (upbeat music) (gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (gentle music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (gentle music) (upbeat music) - My name is Nathan Meltz and my film is "The Golem Returns".

So the kind of background for it is it's this whole mechanical world of little robot animals and mechanical plants.

This malevolent beast comes about threatening the population in which a survivor raises the golem, which is their protector, to protect them against the beast.

The original golem is something that happens in Prague.

The Rabbi Yosef uses old-school Jewish sorcery and clay to make this clay robot that basically becomes protector for the Jews of Prague.

So I'm taking that as like kind of an inspiration in re-envisioning the idea of who would it protect now, who are the disenfranchised people or people who might need protection now?

We are living in a time of ethnic cleansing, border violence, genocide, and right now we need a protector.

And I am kind of taking a cue from this mythology, or at least history, and imagining what it could do now, because we need golems, we need protectors in our world.

I just consider myself an artist who sometimes animates, sometimes makes prints.

It's like you go where you need to go to tell the story you wanna tell.

All of my art is interested in exploring how technology is infiltrating every part of our lives.

This happens throughout all of my work, and specifically, through the golem, it's actually looking at how technology might be able to solve a problem, but also all of the weapons and the beast in my world is a technological construct.

So I'm both looking at technology through a lens of critique, but also fascination.

I'm using technology to make the work, I'm looking at how technology is involved in all of our systems, but then also trying to look at how technology is oftentimes creating conflict, but potentially can be used to solve a conflict as well.

- Next up, we're gonna take a look at cyanimation, a technique in which digital footage is separated into thousands of frames, output onto digital negative film, and then printed in cyanotype.

The result is reminiscent of early film, mysterious and beautiful.

This is "Shelburne: Clown Automaton" by David Sokosh.

(playful music) (playful music continues) (playful music continues) - My name's David Sokosh and my film is called "Shelburne: Clown Automaton".

"Shelburne: Clown Automaton" is an animated cyanotype piece.

It features a 19th century mechanical man who's dressed like a clown and is doing magic tricks.

That object is part of the collection at Shelburne Museum in Vermont.

The way that you can really tell that a print is a cyanotype is that it's blue.

And that is the natural color, it isn't toned blue or dyed blue in some way, it is inherently blue.

The way that it works is I'm shooting digitally and then taking that footage and separating it into thousands of still frames.

And then those images are manipulated, they're made black and white, and then grouped on what Photoshop calls contact sheets.

It's 12 frames per second, so each sheet of 12 is one second of time.

Then I output those contact sheets onto digital negative film, then start to do the cyanotype printing, which involves mixing chemistry, coating paper, and then exposing the film in contact with the print in ultraviolet light.

Those contact prints in cyanotype are processed and dried and flattened and then scanned back into a computer, then cropped and reassembled in the computer and then output as a movie file or a MP4 file.

It's very time-consuming.

I think that it takes about an hour per second of time.

I've always been interested in historic process and in material culture, essentially objects.

I really hope that when people see these cyanimation moving pictures, they get a sense of my fascination with these kinds of objects and also with historic photography and this really antique and yet modern technique of making moving cyanotype pictures.

- Our third film of the night is "Retracing Our Steps" in which filmmaker Kelly Gallagher interviews her mother-in-law who recounts stories from her past, including organizing with our community and assisting abortion seekers.

The film sheds light on what it takes to stay engaged in political struggles long term.

Let's take a look.

- [Jenifer] My name's Jenifer Petro.

In the early 1970s, 1973, when my daughter was born, my Lamaze teacher was the first, my first introduction to feminist thought.

So after Emily was born, I saw where they were having a NOW meeting and I went, and from that, we broke into consciousness-raising groups.

And so we met once a week and the group I was drawn to was women's healthcare.

I was not in the medical field then.

I'm now a registered nurse, but I was not then.

And we would meet and talk about what could we do in our community to improve women's health.

So at some point, somebody said they were gonna write a letter to Planned Parenthood International and see if we could open an office.

And we had a very, very small group.

I just worked as a receptionist, so I fielded the calls.

We had two nurses, one social worker, and then part-time physicians who came and did exams for us.

So mostly our work was health-related in terms of breast exams, gynecological exams, birth control.

We did not do abortions at our clinic, we weren't set up for that.

So Pittsburgh was the closest.

The specific time I can remember that it came up, we had a mother who brought her daughter who had been assaulted.

And the mother was frantic, and we took the pregnancy test and she was pregnant and the mother was just beside herself.

And they really didn't have money.

We managed to scrape up the money from people in the office, I remember it was $250, and we drove her in our own vehicle, a nurse, who was a good friend of mine, myself, the mom, and the daughter.

And we took her and met with the people and then gave them their privacy.

And that was not my first experience with somebody.

I had a good friend who went to almost 24 weeks before she would go get a pregnancy test.

And I was living in Buffalo, New York, and in New York, you could go up to 24 weeks if you had a psychiatrist sign and a physician sign.

So she came, stayed with me.

Somehow we made the arrangements.

I remember the nurse being particularly nasty and it was terrible and it was traumatic.

It traumatic for me being with her.

She stayed with me for a couple weeks before she went back to Johnstown.

And then I also had an experience with my sister.

She came, my mother brought her to my place in Buffalo.

We took her to a really nice hospital.

I don't recall that they were the same hospitals, but it was a completely different experience.

And she had great support from our parents, and they went back home.

That was great.

So to see what became a reality, that Roe v. Wade became law in the land, (lively music) and here we are years later.

And to think that women have to travel to a different state or have a forced pregnancy, it just, I could get very emotional, it's very heartbreaking.

Because when you're young, when I was young and it became an option, it was like this great relief, I think of all the women since then, you just never had to think about it.

If that was a choice you made that was right for you, your family, your partner, then it could happen, and now I can't.

And I just, it's unimaginable to me.

(lively music) If you don't have agency over your own body, (lively music) you really don't have a life, you don't have a full life, you don't get to live the life you intended.

If you take the choice away, you don't have a full life.

(lively music) (lively music continues) - Hi, my name is Kelly Gallagher and my film is called "Retracing Our Steps".

"Retracing Our Steps" is an experimental documentary in which my mother-in-law, Jenifer Petro, details stories involving her helping people who needed access to abortion, getting to those procedures.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, this amazing filmmaker, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, who's a friend of mine, she reached out to a bunch of different filmmakers and was like, "We gotta do something about this."

We all felt the need to want to document what was happening.

I had been thinking a lot about the people in my life who had fought for access to abortion during the time when Roe v. Wade was first introduced.

And I thought about how tragic and sad it must be for those individuals who fought so hard back in the early '70s to see what's happening now.

I knew that my mother-in-law was a big feminist activist in the '70s, so I wanted to interview her to kind of learn more about her resilience and her specific stories and lived experiences, and I was very lucky that she was, in fact, so open.

The title really emphasizes that these struggles continue.

Just when we think that maybe we've made some successes or wins, like with Roe v. Wade, we can see the rug pulled out from under us.

So we have to continually be fighting, fighting right now, again, for access to abortion.

So I wanted the visuals to really amplify that notion of retracing.

And so I utilized this animation technique in which I kind of have these very slow-moving, almost like neon lines that kind of rupture the frames.

I'm kind of thinking about these lines moving around like the tracing, the retracing of this political activist work.

There's video that's moving extremely slow because I really want us to sit in and simmer in these stories that my mother-in-law is sharing and to really feel the weight of time itself.

It's really important for me to give gratitude and thanks to all the women, all the trans activists, all the non-binary activists, all the people who have fought for access to abortion historically and who are doing that fight now, with a special shout out, of course, to my mother-in-law, Jennifer Petro, and also to my own mom, MJ Gallagher.

So many of us artists and filmmakers learn so much from the fearlessness, the courage, and the bravery of our own parents and family and all those who have fought before us, so I just wanna leave off on that.

- If you're craving to learn more about this season's filmmakers and to watch films on demand, visit wmht.org/tvfilm.

Don't forget to connect with WMHT on social media and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Come on people, let's get those numbers up.

Thanks for tuning in.

I'm Jermaine Wells and I'll see you next week for our last episode of the season.

See you soon.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] TVFilm is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.