This year, the “Viewfinder” films explore how images preserve and mediate, as well as transform and (re)discover shared and singular experiences. These films uncover the layers of archival footage through creative, immersive exploration, either through a close, slow viewing of a 1938 home recording of a Jewish community in Nasielsk, a small Polish town at the edge of the war (Three Minutes – A Lengthening), or by intensely studying the faces and fates of WWII POWs to approximate individual fate through collective suffering (Turn Your Body to the Sun). The possibility of repurposing original footage lies at the core of Sierra Pettengill’s Riotsville, U.S.A., which mines footage of a makeshift, fictitious town built to train US police during the growing civil unrest of the 1960s. The past’s ambiguous legacy in the present is foregrounded by Lithuanian filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė, who takes the most unusual guide to the defunct Ignalina nuclear power plant in Burial, a meditative, eerie documentary with a surreal touch. The legacy of another Lithuanian cinematic pioneer, Jonas Mekas, is explored in the homage film Fragments of Paradise, built from his visual diaries capturing fleeting and personal experiences. Each second of Mekas’ footage highlights the lived moment of the present, palpably showing that in any act of filming or viewing, “the real work you are doing is on yourself.”^*

^*Jonas Mekas on documenting your life,
https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/jonas-mekas-on-documenting-your-life/