IFC presents Rooftop Films Short Film Showcase

THE DRIFT
(Kelly Sears | 8:13 | Animation)

Wednesday, August 13, 2008 | 11:09 AM

An absurd fable crafted from images found in thrift store bookshelves about our country's unflinching frontierism and the desire to push too far, too fast.

What happens when the final frontier has been crossed one too many times? Space, the moon, the emptiness-we've already been there. But when astronauts of a new, exalted space mission hear "the drift," a hypnotic song that sounds like emptiness, it draws them further from the ground of Earth and augments a desire to explore and live in wonder.

With Kelly Sears' looped DVD projection, still photographic images of the "American Dream" gathered from magazines, junk piles, and thrift stores become animated in a would-be documentary. They drift across the screen and give an account of a manifest-destiny space mission gone awry. Perfect images give way to rejected or forgotten hopes, and the infatuation with a song of emptiness gives birth to the 'drifter' and thoughts about our place in the universe and what it means to be human.

The Drift showed as part of our Surreal Sounds and Shorts Program at Rooftop on June 27, 2008, featuring unexpected juxtapositions and surreal short films that explore the mind's wanderings and artistic expression.

Kelly Sears is an animator and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. Her work has been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Hammer Museum, Sundance, Anthology Film Archives and in galleries and film festivals internationally. Sears' collage animations parse together collected media artifacts to reveal secret histories, forgotten tales, and possible moments embedded in the images around us. She has upcoming shows in Los Angeles and La Verne, California, through October.