About BALAGAN

The Balagan Experimental Film & Video Series was conceived in the summer of 2000 when the Coolidge Corner Theatre approached us with an opportunity to host a regular program highlighting local experimental film/video makers in their brand new Screening room.

The New room is a wonderful compliment to Boston's most treasured art Deco moviehouse and a wonderful opportunity to present experimental films & videos in an intimate theatrical setting. As filmmakers ourselves, struggling to find venues to exhibit our works, we were excited for the challenge of establishing a new space for experimental works by local and international film/video artists who are rarely represented in Boston cinemas.

Our mission in creating the series is to promote films and filmmakers whose works do not fit into the traditional genres of the film "industry". These works traditionally, throughout the history of cinema, have been labeled as avant-garde, art-house, or experimental.

Although an experimental film/video often can contain or combine elements of traditional narrative or documentary filmmaking, experimental filmmakers, as difficult as they can be to define, tend not to make their films/videos for the "industry". Their works are made for very personal and intimate reasons and their visions and creations are uncompromised by the constraints of "mainstream media".

That said, experimental filmmakers create their works to be screened, exhibited and experienced by an audience. Balagan aims to create a "space" where an audience can experience the visions of the artists. Balagan aspires to nurture and develop the rich community of artists working in film & video in New England and abroad. The series provides an outlet for artists to exhibit their works and to see, meet and discuss works by other artists within the "community".

We hope to continue to collaborate with a variety of film/video artists and film organizations in bringing diverse and exciting programming to Boston and to introduce Boston's experimental film/video artists to the rest of the world.

 

What is BALAGAN

Balagan was a type of travelling theatre troop common during the 18th to early 20th centuries in Russia. Balagan as a theatre genre, combined elements of commedia dell'arte and French street performance. Cities and villages would eagerly anticipate the coming of the Balagan wagons as they traveled from one city plaza to the next bringing laughter, joy, drama and a chance for people to forget about the ordinary doldrums of day to day life.

Curated by local filmmakers Alla Kovgan and Jeff Silva, Balagan aims to rekindle the spirit and essence of the traditional Balagany experience. The Balagan Experimental Film series promises to surprise you with a different experience every time. Come and see for yourself.

 

Who We Are

Jeff Silva is a filmmaker, Installation artist, professor and curator living in Somerville, MA since 1997. Jeff studied Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College in NY in the early 90's and received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has since gone on to produce, shoot and edit several award winning films, videos and installations that have been presented around the world.   He has recently completed  Balkan Rhapsodies: 78 films about Serbia and Kosovo, which is a feature length documentary/ cine-poem exploring the cultural intricacies and history of the conflict between Serbia, Kosovo and the NATO bombings in 1999.

Jeff has developed a diverse body of work, but his projects always tend to challenge the boundaries of conventional genres.  Often employing his own footage, shot from trips around the world in 16mm, super 8, and video, Jeff also integrates found material into his films and installation works. He often prefers to screen his works outside of the traditional theatre from galleries to site-specific locales. He is currently working on several of his own film and installation projects.  He is currently developing an installation project entiled Second Sight that explores the relation between motion and stasis by using a specialized camera to slow down one-second gestures to three-minutes.

Jeff also worked professionally as a Multi-Media producer at MIT for over eight years. Among his many projects while at MIT, Jeff produced all of the over 100 reknowed Walter Lewin Physics videos found on MIT's OpenCourseWare and MIT World and recently conceived, developed and produced MIT's new video podcast magazine called ZigZag .  He is currently an adjunct professor at Emerson College and a teaching Fellow at Harvard University . He is also a member of the Filmmakers Collaborative .

Alla Kovgan is a filmmaker/curator originally from Moscow, Russia. Her films have been screened at film festivals in the North and South America, Canada, Europe and Australia including Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center (New York, MA), Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn, New York), DeCordova Museum (Lincoln, MA), The American Dance Festival: Dancing for the Camera (Durham, NC), and others. Alla co-founded and co-curates Balagan Experimental Film and Video Series in Boston (http://www.coolodge.org/balagan/) and St. Petersburg International Dance Film Festival KINODANCE, Russia (http://www.kinodance.com/russia/). She is also a member of the Kinodance Company (http://www.kinodance.org), an intermedia collective that explores dance film collaborations on stage. Among her most recent endeavors are co-curating the Dance on Camera Special Program (Art’s Close-Up) for the Boston’s public television station WGBH; co-directing her second feature film about Contemporary African Dance “Movement (R)evolution” produced by Joan Frosch, and editing the local documentary “Traces of the Trade” (http://www.tracesofthetrade.org/) by Katrina Browne about the white privilege in America.