Nomadic Butterflies and Intellectual Properties From the Long Walk of Steven and Poppy, Including Streets, Songs and Flying Cigarettes

MFA Photo third-year Jinming Zhong’s 13-hour flm investigates and demystifes the ‘cinematic form’. It presents real-time events from May 12th 7:30pm to May 13th 8:30am, 2017 in New York City, focuses on two characters, Chinese art student Steven and Chinese American Poppy who’s a performer based in LA, as they meet at JFK by chance and spend 13 hours together exploring the city of New York. Taking place over the course of one night, the limited time leads them revealing more about themselves, talking about their experience and perspective of love and life. Using a smartphone and natural lighting, Zhong is interested in the real-time intimacy and using a phone camera as the instantaneous medium. She constructs a spontaneous and organic live-action flm, flled with improvisations. As ‘Time’ in the flm is not a requirement but a potential landscape, “Nomadic Butterfies” proposes a much more open cinema where each image, inhabited by the characters, comes across as the fxed representation of a potential story, or a story in the making.

The screening will take place on Saturday, August 12, ALL DAY (8AM-10PM), UL105, University Center Lower Level, 63 Fifth Avenue.