Filmmaker and anthropologist Kathryn Ramey will visit CAMS for a screening of her latest documentary, “EL SIGNO VACÍO”, on Thursday, December 5th, followed by a masterclass on Experimental Filmmaking at the JHU-MICA Film Center on Friday 6th.
“EL SIGNO VACÍO” (The Empty Sign) is a feature-length anthropological journey through the United States’ occupation of Puerto Rico. Mixing over a hundred years of found footage – tourism, agricultural and propaganda films – with contemporary portraits of local artists and activists and Puerto Rican punk rock/noise music, the film reveals how carefully crafted American fictions of “democracy” and “debt” obscure a capitalist and military domination that is ongoing. Moving between old and new; Spanish and English; between paradise and environmental destruction, “EL SIGNO VACÍO” becomes a “re-educational” film challenging the viewer to re-think about modern colonization, its mechanism and responsibilities.
“EL SIGNO VACÍO” won the Agantro Award for Anthropological Excellence at the MICE 19th International Ethnographic Film Festival, Galicia, Spain. The jury, composed by Iria Vázquez Silva, Víctor Villar Caamaño, and Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros, members of the Galician Anthropology Association, highlighted the “excellent composition and editing job”, and the director “created a real style guide for field work in ethnographic description” with it.
Kathryn Ramey is a filmmaker and anthropologist whose work operates at the intersection of experimental film processes and ethnographic research. Her award winning and strongly personal films are characterized by manipulation of the celluloid including hand-processing, optical printing, and various direct animation techniques. Most recently she has been focused on creating an anti-colonial film practice with collaborators in Puerto Rico and researching environmentally friendly photochemical processes utilizing indigenous flora. She is deeply committed to sharing her knowledge of alternative analogue technologies through workshops and publications and is the author of the book Experimental Filmmaking: BREAK THE MACHINE (focal press 2016). Her work has been international screened and awarded and she is a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellow and Creative Capital awardee.
