New Society

Description

Miranda July’s newest theatrical inquiry investigates the ways that groups form, change and disintegrate. A work involving audience participation, New Society relies in part on an absence of information about what will happen during the evening. But it can be revealed that the experience will be both funny and moving, and we’ve been told that it “will test the limits of what is possible given two hours and a room full of strangers.” Already an award-winning short story writer, July recently published her first novel, The First Bad Man, described by the NYT Book Review as “a wry, smart companion on any day.” Festival audiences perhaps know her best as the writer-director-star of the innovative feature-length films Me and You and Everyone We Know (SFIFF 2005, winner of the New Director Prize) and The Future (SFIFF 2011), which also reference the tensions between individual identity and social norms. She also created “Somebody,” a mobile app that gets strangers to read messages aloud to one’s friends. Her internet artwork, “Learning to Love You More,” which slyly enlists web surfers to become performance artists, was created in collaboration with Harrell Fletcher and its archive is a part of SFMOMA’s collection. July defies categorization and her work confronts conventions, conscripts participants and continuously provokes us to re-think our assumptions of art and society. This is a one-time chance to directly experience July’s genre-busting work firsthand. New Society is presented through a collaboration of San Francisco Film Society and SFMOMA. —Sean Uyehara

Film Details