Sister City
2014 · 5m · USA
Directed by Dani Leventhal ReStack
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
An experimental video work exploring paradoxical states of being — inhabiting contradictory feelings simultaneously, 'being a superhero or being for sale' — through images of division and isolation rendered in natural and architectural environments.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
ReStack's work sits at the intersection of video art and diary film in a way that's genuinely hard to categorize — that difficulty is the point. Sister City uses its environments as internal landscapes without ever announcing that it's doing so.
ReStack's syntax — superhero-or-for-sale, Turrell-to-jellyfish — is doing real philosophical work, not confessional. This is one of the rare experimental video-diary films that earns its abstraction.
Dani Leventhal ReStack pushes the video diary into openly philosophical register — the paradoxes she names (superhero/for-sale) are structural, and the spatial framing makes them feel inhabited. Lovely and rigorous.