Where to Find Us

Street parking is available outside Light Work on Waverly Ave and Comstock Ave and is free after 6 p.m.

Accessibility

Light Work is wheelchair accessible. Films will be captioned and CART services will be provided for the Q&A portion of the event.

To make accommodation requests or ask questions about facilities, please contact info@urbanvideoproject.com or 315-443-2450.

Program Notes

Fly, Fly Sadness
dir. Miryam Charles
Duration: 5:23
2015
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A nuclear explosion mysteriously transforms the voices of all the inhabitants of an island. A journalist travels to the island to learn more and finds herself transformed.

Labadee
dir. Joiri Minaya
Duration: 7:06
2017

Labadee documents a Royal Caribbean cruise trip in Labadee, Haiti, and the dynamics that unfold in this privately-managed space, which is fenced off and leased to Royal Caribbean cruises until 2050. The subtitles in the video begin with text from the diary of Christopher Columbus when they first saw land, moving into a contemporary recount of the trip we’re seeing.

It meditates on the exploitation, self-exploitation, performance and access control created by the system of tourism in the Caribbean, and, in linking it to Columbus’ Invasion through the first sentences in the subtitles, it traces the lineage of these contemporary spaces to colonization.

Towards the Colonies
dir. Miryam Charles
Duration: 5:11
2016

When a young girl is found off the Venezuelan coast, a medical examiner will try to determine the cause of death before the body is repatriated.

A Fortress
dir. Miryam Charles
Duration: 5:38
2018

‍After the death of their adoptive daughter, a couple goes to Haiti looking for her relatives. There, they meet with a DNA specialist who might have the power of resurrection.

The Promise of Progress
dir. Joiri Minaya
Duration: 7:15
2023

The Promise of Progress looks into the continuities of extraction in the Southwest region in the Dominican Republic—from mineral extraction to touristic extraction—through family members who live or grew up there, and the narratives of hope and progress projected onto these enterprises by people in the region. The video documents the birthplace of the artist’s mother and the land her grandmother grew up in alongside highways only now being developed and properly conditioned due to the current touristic mega-project at the Cabo Rojo Port, which is transforming a port used decades ago by Alcoa to export bauxite extracted from the region into the first cruise port of the region.

Three Atlas
dir. Miryam Charles
Duration: 6:30
2018

A woman working abroad as a maid is suspected of murdering her employer. Questioned by the police, she will reveal the existence of a supernatural power. Is she a vampire? Who is draining whom in the asymmetrical relationship between employer and employee?

All the Days of May
dir. Miryam Charles
Duration: 7:00
2023

Following the shooting of a documentary on the death of her daughter, a woman who works with refugees reflects on her own life and especially on the passing of time.

Sponsors

UVP’s programs are made possible with a Tier Three Project Support grant from the County of Onondaga, with the support of County Executive Ryan McMahon and the Onondaga County Legislature, administered by CNY Arts.

Partners

Presented in partnership with the Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts Department of Film and Media Arts , the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean (PLACA) in the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs, and the Syracuse University Art Museum.