Filmed on location in rural Utah and Salt Lake City by moving image artist Allen Killian-Moore, Desolation Slow reflects on homelessness, geography, and abandonment, while pondering connections between human and structural decay. Cinema critic J. Leithold-Patt reviewed Desolation Slow for Cine-File: “Using a variety of cameras and film stocks including Super 8mm, 35mm, and digital, filmmaker Allen Killian-Moore presents us with impressions–-some static, some moving in ghostly suspension–-of a Utah simultaneously majestic in its mountainous grandeur and squalid in the decrepitude that dots urban areas. Desolation Slow uses signifiers of a distressed planet to build a mournful tapestry–-filled out by a score from Chicago avant-garde musician Bill Tucker–-that is crucially grounded in the adversity and hard-fought dignity of Joe Ortega. Speaking of his past wrestling with alcoholism and ignominious life on the streets, Ortega provides the film’s human face for homelessness. Killian-Moore creates contrasts between despoiled metropolitan spaces and relatively untouched rural ones, to find unexpected continuities that set into relief myriad macro-level effects of human neglect.”
Moon Palace – $10 at the door – Doors open at 8pm
Artist Q & A following screening