Experimental or artist films often imply the painstaking work of a solitary maker. Less commonly acknowledged are the films made as collaborations. Polar Coordinates celebrates the dynamic, brilliant, and playful fusion of energies when two artists working together is more than the sum of their individual parts. The films gathered here are the products of a variety of collaborations, many of them overlapping: beyond filmmaking duos, they are families, romantic partners, scientists, and activists. Some are individually made but entangle themselves in the dynamics of relations. All are acts of communication, where the dialogical process of making is also an integral and intriguing part of the film. Instead of reductive compromises, these dialogues highlight their own incongruities and frictions. What is perhaps most exciting about these works is that their outcomes are never guaranteed, least of all to their makers.

The first program, A Frame that Holds Us, arises from the intimate spaces of the home, which, in these artists’ conceptions, can mean a physical space, a relation among people, or the recesses of the mind. These are inside-out home movies, playing on the conventions of their traditional forms, depicting unconventional domestic scenes, moments of strife as well as joy. The intimate spaces alternate with “views from the windows,” both literally but also as a framing of one’s world from a remove, an experience made globally familiar by the recent years of confinement and seclusion.

Genevieve Yue and Piibe Kolka