The Magic Hedge explores a bird sanctuary located on a former Cold War Nike missile site on the Northside of Chicago. Left to wander and observe, the viewer becomes aware of the park's open secret: men looking for fleeting sexual contacts within the trees and shrubberies. The video highlights the many contradictions of a site historically devoted to military surveillance and now designed to preserve and control the "wildlife".

This is a Sign is a contemporary daydream, with the kinds of conceptual twists and turns that daydreams often have. Natural forces in motion, a slow dance with robotic arms, a historical procession of masks, a feeling of unchecked growth, all punctuated with clouds. As with all Illustrated Music productions, "the music is the story".

Behind the yellow gates is a realm that sparkles like diamonds under a desert sun. It is a realm ablaze with outrageous flowers, fragrant and poisonous… A realm populated by bare skin scared by flashing swords and marked with stone idols… It is that subterranean consciousness; a land of Mind-in-Time that sends unholy incense up toward Heaven. 

“Drawing on the ancient Nahuatl concept of the animating soul or life force, Tonalli engages the ritualistic powers of the cinema, summoning fire, flowers, and many moons into a frenetic and mesmerizing in-camera collage. Here, amid thickly swirling images and textured abstractions, the gods of creation and fertility manifest, dissolving into iridescent colors and dense, corporeal rhythms.” NYFF59

Tortillas are an ancestral and sacred food, our transmuted corn. The circular nourishment that represents the luminous and colorful side of the moon on which our life is nourished. This is the cosmic dance of the colorful Tortilla with the hyperkinetic fire that sustain our bodies and souls. Part of the Lunar Films series.

In a remote area of northern Spain, the wind has a name: Tramuntana. Tramuntana takes what it wants—clothes, trees, boats, and the people of the landscape who live with the endless threat of being carried away by its force. This film is a lyrical portrait of this furious wind, woven from the stories passed down by local villagers.

Sound mix and design by Julian Flavin, Color by Ye Xi, Graphic Design by Studio Lieneman, With the support of "la Caixa" Foundation

At sunset a large orchestra, a choir and a group of young people position themselves against the backdrop of a mountain landscape. The musicians play the first section of Mahler's 8th Symphony, moving in precise choreography. Then, almost unnoticed, groups of them start disappearing in the dying light. Soon the landscape and the sound similarly dissolve into twilight.

“Trypps #7 (Badlands) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman's LSD trip in the Badlands National Park, before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell's unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence.”

-- Michael Green, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Originating from personal affection toward Seoul, Twelve Scenes portrays the spectacles in daily life by juxtaposing urban space in a twelve month sequence. As the individual particles in a kaleidoscope create splendid illusions by being reflected on a mirror, Twelve Scenes shows our individual life, seemingly separated by time and space, actually composes the scenery in the kaleidoscope of Seoul. Twelve Scenes represents a 'moment for self-reflection' or 'small, but precious enlightenment on life'.

A cinematic place where the mountains crash into each other in a field of magma and fire. A landscape of events.

A silent 16mm film shot in Nebraska during the total solar eclipse in 2017. The work was shot on film to capture this light-based phenomenon on a light reactive medium, as opposed to on digital video. Meditating on the metaphysical, in the work we observe the slow alignment of the moon eclipsing the sun, super-imposed onto the open landscape where it was shot. Wind, insects and plants all become active receptors for this phenomenological shift from mid-day to mid-night, as the sun transforms from a primary source of life into a fugitive void.

A vision of our brother Deer.

Through the floating garden, into the mountain of signs and chants, arise the path of the winged stone. A stone that used to be a fossil.

A silent film portraying winter across three continents.

A young man recovering from emotional wounds, defiantly re-enters the outside world that welcomes his return with all its abundant miracles.

Audio-visual recordings of zoo-animals are woven into a fine web of actions and reactions, that finally spiral into a collective animalistic concert. Relating the different animals to each other through montage, fictional relations amongst them is created; a society of animals. The film thus comments on human communities, who created zoos as mirror images. There is an otherness there, and at the same time a disturbing proximity, which we’d like to dismiss.

Written, directed and edited by: Ann Oren 
Sound: Robert Hefter