From Academy Award®-nominated director Robert Stone, a New York Times Critics Pick documentary. In this meditative, intergalactic biopic, we follow Gentry Lee, Chief Engineer for Planetary Exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and sci-fi writer, on his journey through space and on Earth. From the Viking and Voyager missions to co-authoring the future with Arthur C. Clarke, Lee’s life has been spent with his head in the stars and his feet on the ground. The octogenarian Starman reflects on decades of space exploration alongside friends like Carl Sagan.

Following the screening, Director Robert Stone will sit down for a live Q&A moderated by Dr. William Gibbons, School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.   

Reception to follow with a selection of bites and refreshments. Seats are limited. RSVP required. 

As part of the lively experimental music and performance downtown scene of the 80’s, Ericka Beckman has made acclaimed works across Super-8mm, 16mm, and expanded cinema formats since the 1980’s. Engaging live-action choreographed sequences, as well as handcrafted layered animation, and face paced soundtrack, Beckman transforms the cultural norms communicated through common-place material such as fairytales and games.

Beckman is highly revered by contemporaneous peers and collaborators. She has influenced the generations that follow her in numerous ways, especially in  relationship to what she describes as “the performance of the image”.

This screening and discussion will draw on Beckman’s longstanding exploration of how physical action, and our memory of it, constructs cultural images and influences both our behavior and perception of reality.

From Academy Award® winning writer/director Chloé Zhao, Hamnet tells the powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet.

When infertility threatens mankind with extinction and the last child born has perished, a disillusioned bureaucrat (Clive Owen) becomes the unlikely champion in the fight for the survival of Earth's population; He must face down his own demons and protect the planet's last remaining hope from danger.

Writer-filmmaker Thuto Durkac-Somo, choreographer-scholar Jonathan González, and cultural practice architect Mario Gooden are in residence to develop a performance and video work exploring the spatial practices of Black liberation on bodily, architectural, and cosmological scales. During their time at EMPAC, the artists will shoot new video material and bring their collaboration into three-dimensional form. Their developing project is shared publicly in April 2026.

Set within a crumbling cinema, Li Yi-Fan’s What is Your Favorite Primitive explores the awkward, playful spirit at the heart of virtual production: its aspirations of transcending time and space by replicating reality on-screen. As characters become tools of the software, and software itself takes on the role of a character, the film imagines the technology of animation as a stage that scripts its own dramas and epic conflicts.

Told through a semi-autobiographical lens and created using a video game engine, What is Your Favorite Primitive offers both parody and serious reflection—a meditation on the pleasures and perils of building a personal persona within screenspace.

Three public tours with curator Katherine Adams offer insights into how EMPAC’s unique building is used to stage Suneil Sanzgiri’s new commission An Impossible Address.

A reception will be offered on Saturday November 1, beginning at 2:30PM.

EMPAC is pleased to present the American premiere of artist and filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri’s new film An Impossible Address. Sanzgiri’s new work traces the fraught legacy of Sita Valles—a revolutionary of Goan origin who fought in the liberation struggle in Angola, where she was later disappeared by the state. Grappling visually, sonically, and narratively with the difficulty of querying Sita’s elusive history from the standpoint of a silent present, Sanzgiri’s film confronts the contradictions of solidarity and afterlives of collective trauma beyond the grave. How do we bear witness to revolution interrupted? An Impossible Address is styled as a letter that cannot be delivered–seizing on sounds and images that erupt from historical memory.

An Impossible Address builds on Sanzgiri’s extensive engagement with Afro-Asianism, the 1955 Bandung Conference, and cross-continental networks of resistance that bridged India and Angola in struggles for freedom from Portuguese rule. The exhibition of the project engages visually with the idea of the political stage. Alongside the central film, it breaks down the architecture of official performance into informal poetics, through selected image prints and textiles that nod to the nine distinct acts of Sanzgiri’s film. Working against archives’ gaps and lapses, An Impossible Address explores the potency of collective inheritance.

Program

• An Impossible Address (2025)
• Suneil Sanzgiri
• Runtime: 40min

Writer and film curator Yasmina Price offers a screening program of short films by various contemporary artists, parallel to the exhibition of artist Suneil Sanzgiri’s new commission An Impossible Address. Price, whose reflections on post-colonial solidarity appear in Sanzgiri’s film, was a close interlocutor of the artist during the work’s production. Drawing on her robust engagement with politically-engaged African cinema, Price will also offer an introduction at the top of the program.

Paired with short films by contemporary artists, a selection from Franco-Guadeloupean filmmaker Sarah Maldoror’s Carnival Trilogy will open this screening of films.

Program

• À Bissau le carnaval (Carnival in Bissau)
• Sarah Maldoror, 1980, 18 min
• Cuba
• Filipa César, 2013, 11 min
• Measures of Distance
• Mona Hatoum, 1988, 16min
• Landslides
• Caroline Déodat, 2020, 12min
• Le roi n’est pas mon cousin (The King is not my Cousin)
• Annabelle Aventurin, 2022, 30 min
• Total run time: 87 minutes

This Be the Media! workshop, invites artists and audiences into the world of artist Suneil Sanzgiri’s new film An Impossible Address alongside the work of Albany arts organization YouthFX. The program opens with a workshop session on film practice. With a focus on the challenges facing emerging filmmakers, Suchak and Sanzgiri reflect on the practical work of filmmaking and consider its impact on the histories and communities it engages.

The program comprises the workshop session, a dinner for workshop participants, and is followed by a screening of works from Sanzgiri’s series Golden Jubilee.