Screening
Join us at the FMC Screening Room (475 Park Avenue South, 6th Floor) on FRIDAY, APRIL 3rd, for the premiere of M Woods' feature film DAILIES FROM DUMPLAND.
The sharp pain at the back of the throat, an infection tied to a thick black wire, throbbing to be picked at, pulled out, and lanced. A Trump mask stuck to a husband's head and a wife stuck to a phone. Strangers occupying similar transient spaces until dissolution is a permanent state. As the order crumbles, it does so on all fronts, and so a "tremendous" blaring shit screen never stops broadcasting the bad bad fake real fake news; the truth is, as I've sat alone with my once lover, I've felt like I've needed to be inside my lover's thoughts. The truth is, as I've sat and watched this world fall apart, I think it best we add more fire and watch it burn.
Director's Statement:
This is an attempt at coming to terms with the dissolution of the only relationship I've had, to my high school sweetheart and the mother of my daughter, while watching the dissolution of Western society. As the world is falling apart, the one person who I've had with me my entire adult life, and my best friend, is also lost to me. The movie is, more than anything, an attempt at communication, an attempt from my fixed perspective to try and understand the things she felt that I could never know; trying to cull together some semblance of order out of 13 years that are now compressed into memories that haunt me. It is also a melancholy love song to the dream I had of a family that is now over, of the things we suffered, of the racial hierarchies that we butted up against, of the micro aggressions of race that are both familial and societal; and it is an apology to my daughter, who I can never love enough, that leaves me with an undulating pain when I think too hard about it.
Credits:
- A film by M. Woods
- Produced, Directed, Edited, Written, Shot, and Manipulated by M. Woods
- Music by M. Woods
- Sound by M. Woods and Natalie B
- Mixing by Natalie B
Starring:
- Lo Paige as Lauren
- Annmarie as Annmarie
- M. Woods as Michael turning into Trump
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With support from the Foundation for Contemporary Art and Lightcone, Disassociative Productions presents THE DEATH SPIRAL TOUR 2025 featuring M Woods’ three critically-acclaimed feature films, Dailies From Dumpland, Body Prop, and Commodity Trading https://www.screenslate.com/articles/commodity-trading-dies-irae-guillotine . This independently-produced tour is dedicated to the spirit of David Lynch and other radical auteurs who created their own methods of distribution.
M. Woods (They/Them/He/Him) has been screening work internationally since 2007 while a student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where they studied under filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Marco Williams. Originally mentored by Design Convergence Lab co-founder Mindy Faber, M is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and activist based in Chicago and the principal creative at DISASSOCIATIVE PRODUCTIONS www.thedigitalsickness.com
M was the recipient of the Erna Plachte Award at the University of Oxford (MFA 2021), and they have exhibited their work extensively for the past 15 years, including at IFFR, the Flaherty Seminar, The Royal Society of British Artists, The Oberhausen International Film Festival, the Bodleian Library, Prismatic Ground, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where they also served as special curator. They have received support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Light Cone Paris, The Filmmaker’s Coop, and Collectif Jeune Cinema.
The DEATH SPIRAL TOUR 2025 is part of Woods’ continued resistance against the Trump administration, featuring radical films and post-screening discussions intended to activate an organized avant-garde against the regime.
Book Releases:
M. Woods will also be presenting two new self-published works of analog photography and poetry at every tour stop, capping off the tour with an official book launch at the vital hub for independent publishing, Counterpath Press, in Denver, Colorado.
[TEMPORARY] CUSTODY
In this heartbreaking collection of photography and poetry, M. Woods and their daughter, Annmarie, playfully explore the medium of polaroid photography. Their camera exposes the bittersweet ephemerality of “endless youth” and the persistence of trauma, capturing elusive and fleeting moments together. This temporal despair is punctuated by the buoyancy of childhood and the resonant pain of divorce.
By Annmarie & M. Woods
64 page full-color.
https://www.thedigitalsickness.com/the-digital-sickness-store/custody
THE ABRIDGED OXONIAE PHOTOGRAPHAE
In this abridged collection of experimental medium-format photography and poetry, The University of Oxford is rendered as an enigma, a never-ending puzzle of rusticated concrete and cobblestone, repeatedly re-resurrected as itself, in attempts to transcend its own physical presence and ascend to Holy Pleroma as a mythological ideal of a never-ending past whiteness. All of Academia and all pursuits of the unknown lead to despair, the rabbit holes of our curiosity, and the never-ending spiral of our own lack. The Oxoniae Photographae is an Imperial scab under which the intrinsic properties of violence hide within formal aesthetic boundaries, disguised as exoskeletal beauty while functioning as atrocity.
By M. Woods
64 page full-color.
https://www.thedigitalsickness.com/the-digital-sickness-store/the-abridged-oxoniae-photographae
Visit www.thedigitalsickness.com for more information.