James Fotopoulos

The story of young sisters in the American Midwest left alone with their increasingly unstable mother while their father is fighting in the Civil War. The film traces the girls’ naturally fraught sibling dynamic and the ways that their father’s absence ignites their imagination. When they meet a stranger in the forest they become enchanted by a world of creative work and nature, a welcome distraction from their volatile mother. Play and the dreamlike space they inhabit provides an expansive and ultimately grounding setting for the girls’ response to war.

An actress living in New York performs an audition, then goes to meditation and winds up at a party of artists viewing a film. At home, she and her girlfriend explore buried memories and later nightmares trigger sleepwalking. Finally, the actress enacts a childlike performance inspired by a Frank Wedekind play.

Video (color)

Short film from James Fotopoulos

Part 1 of 5. B&W

Part 5 of 5. B&W

The story of young sisters in the American Midwest left alone with their increasingly unstable mother while their father is fighting in the Civil War. The film traces the girls’ naturally fraught sibling dynamic and the ways that their father’s absence ignites their imagination. When they meet a stranger in the forest they become enchanted by a world of creative work and nature, a welcome distraction from their volatile mother. Play and the dreamlike space they inhabit provides an expansive and ultimately grounding setting for the girls’ response to war.

The story of young sisters in the American Midwest left alone with their increasingly unstable mother while their father is fighting in the Civil War. The film traces the girls’ naturally fraught sibling dynamic and the ways that their father’s absence ignites their imagination. When they meet a stranger in the forest they become enchanted by a world of creative work and nature, a welcome distraction from their volatile mother. Play and the dreamlike space they inhabit provides an expansive and ultimately grounding setting for the girls’ response to war.

An actress living in New York performs an audition, then goes to meditation and winds up at a party of artists viewing a film. At home, she and her girlfriend explore buried memories and later nightmares trigger sleepwalking. Finally, the actress enacts a childlike performance inspired by a Frank Wedekind play.

An actress living in New York performs an audition, then goes to meditation and winds up at a party of artists viewing a film. At home, she and her girlfriend explore buried memories and later nightmares trigger sleepwalking. Finally, the actress enacts a childlike performance inspired by a Frank Wedekind play.

Video (color)

Short film from James Fotopoulos

Part 1 of 5. B&W

Part 5 of 5. B&W

Thousands of years into the future, through the eyes of an alien life form, we see the fossilized beings of Ronald Reagan and William Casey enact their relationship as if in a crude ancient play. Through an array of text, sculptures, drawings, animations and monologues, alternate interpretations of the character’s histories and myths unfold.

Thousands of years into the future, through the eyes of an alien life form, we see the fossilized beings of Ronald Reagan and William Casey enact their relationship as if in a crude ancient play. Through an array of text, sculptures, drawings, animations and monologues, alternate interpretations of the character’s histories and myths unfold.

Christabel is an abstract interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished Gothic poem about female possession. Adhering to the poem’s structure the film is presented in four parts – Two digital video half hour segments and then two short 16mm conclusions. The contemporary relevance of the poem’s symbols and themes is underlined using performance combined with heavy image and sound layering.

The origins of the universe told through the lens of an experimental film and video sci-fi horror-show fusion: Alien women trapped in a colorfully hand-scratched film-textured hotel room, genetically mutated men slowly driven mad in a white digital prison, the high contrast landscapes of Mars, and a futuristic tribe of a giant, an elf and a witch in their decaying suicide-home.

Short film from James Fotopoulos

A man and woman embark on a sexual journey to detach mind from body. The relationship slowly grows into one of emotional domination, physical disease, abandonment and the creation of personal pornography.

"...the simplest and most beautiful of [Fotopoulos'] early video features, which simply follows the movements of a model whose body is (re)filmed so closely that she appears as abstract swirls of colour and video grain." —Maximilian Le Cain

2003, 5 min, color

A video by James Fotopoulos

Part 2 of 5. Color

Part 4 of 5. Color

Short film from James Fotopoulos

Part 3 of 5. Color

Life in a rural industrial town: a teenage boy, his family, friends and failed attempt at love are investigated through stark black-and-white photography and static long takes. Filmed in a fusion of authentic and staged documentation, with robotic performances by actors and non-actors, the piece meditates on the mundane existence of human and animal life.

The past, present and future. Final Obscura is a visionary film that unfolds on a space where the lines between past, present, and future dissolve into a single, phantasmic experience—an Exquisite Corpse of perception, desire, and transcendent imagination. The film submerses the viewer in a captivating, liminal dimension where the waking and dreaming worlds merge, inviting us to reflect on the nature of time, and the anamorphic emerging worlds of the anamnesis expression in seeing the sound

The past, present and future. Final Obscura is a visionary film that unfolds on a space where the lines between past, present, and future dissolve into a single, phantasmic experience—an Exquisite Corpse of perception, desire, and transcendent imagination. The film submerses the viewer in a captivating, liminal dimension where the waking and dreaming worlds merge, inviting us to reflect on the nature of time, and the anamorphic emerging worlds of the anamnesis expression in seeing the sound

16mm film (b&w)

16mm film (b&w/color)

A film by James Fotopoulos

Collaboration with Grandpa’s Ghost.

16mm film (color)

Two of the female characters from Jerusalem (2003) appear in a new location: a black and white minimalist apartment. With the aid of drawings to illustrate their psychological probing, the ladies perform basic physical repetitions and frozen poses while being captured on video and re-lensed through low-fi cyan solariziations. Layered stereo monologues speak of their continuing personal explorations into the science-fiction dream-symbol terrain of their private histories.

Jerusalem is the first of four videos (followed by Sublimation [2003], Conjunction [2003] and The Pearl [2004]) exploring inter-dimensional travel. In this inaugural episode a group of young actors inhabit an empty apartment, their behavior taped and edited in-camera. An analog solarization technique captures their rituals of improvised dance, frozen poses and trimming of hair. Each cast member recounts painful personal life episodes that unfold like cheap sci-fi stories of otherworldly abductions, familial vanishings, strange dreams and reptilian passions.

Jerusalem is the first of four videos (followed by Sublimation [2003], Conjunction [2003] and The Pearl [2004]) exploring inter-dimensional travel. In this inaugural episode a group of young actors inhabit an empty apartment, their behavior taped and edited in-camera. An analog solarization technique captures their rituals of improvised dance, frozen poses and trimming of hair. Each cast member recounts painful personal life episodes that unfold like cheap sci-fi stories of otherworldly abductions, familial vanishings, strange dreams and reptilian passions.

Jerusalem is the first of four videos (followed by Sublimation [2003], Conjunction [2003] and The Pearl [2004]) exploring inter-dimensional travel. In this inaugural episode a group of young actors inhabit an empty apartment, their behavior taped and edited in-camera. An analog solarization technique captures their rituals of improvised dance, frozen poses and trimming of hair. Each cast member recounts painful personal life episodes that unfold like cheap sci-fi stories of otherworldly abductions, familial vanishings, strange dreams and reptilian passions.

Short film from James Fotopoulos, 16mm film (b&w).

A video by James Fotopoulos

Filmed in saturated colors on out-of-date film stocks with an aggressive soundtrack, the story of The Nest is told – The marriage of two young professionals unravels after an unnamed accident physically and emotional traumatizes the wife. Government agents, shadowy investigators and transgender beings appear, trying to solve the nervous-breakdown-mystery of secret alien forces that chose the couple as their target. In-camera tricks, drawings, derelict optical printing, miniatures, puppets and prosthetic makeup effects convey the dual collapse of the protagonists’ lives and the film structure as one unified entity.

Short film from James Fotopoulos

James Fotopoulos’ first feature film is a two and half hour endurance test about a lonely man’s decent into horror, mutilation and psychological collapse. The lines of reality and fantasy blur when the man’s hand-tinted primordial dreams of humanoid sex and violence manifest in his everyday reality as cancer, abuse and mannequin love.

Video portrait by James Fotopoulos.

Short film from James Fotopoulos