Zachary Epcar

Life After Love
2018 / 8 min / 16mm on video

A shifting in the light of the lot, where parked cars become containers for a collective estrangement.

“If isolation is, in part, a need to divorce oneself from feelings of intensity, what we find in this film is a hybrid vehicle of motorized intimacy. Where emotional response becomes inseparable from automatic signaling. Where mood emerges with as much depth as the reflection of a skyscraper in a piece of powder coated metal. Epcar has made a world that is, despite its calmness, continually glinting, tinged by an unsettled, lingering sense of suppression.

But where there is suppression, there is also desire, and it is everywhere in Life After Love—the desire for a better life, for a relationship lost. For each secure, shining surface there is also a wavering reflection within it, a needy squiggle of the disembodied. And rather than any fantasy articulating itself into focus, we find in its place a stop-motion palette of color that skims past our vision before fading, inaccessible, out of sight.”
- Trisha Low

screenings:

Arroyo Seco Cine Club, Los Angeles, CA, 2023
Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Oberhausen, Germany, 2023
Blonde Cobra, Cologne, Germany, 2022
l’Etna, Paris, France, 2022
LaborBerlin, Berlin, Germany, 2022
Lichtspiele Kalk, Cologne, Germany, 2022
Filmhuis Cavia, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2022
WORM, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2022
Nightingale Cinema, Chicago, IL, 2022
Museum of the Moving Image, Queens, NY, 2022
Prisme, Nantes, France, 2021
Roxie Theater, San Francisco, CA, 2021
Festival 1666 (online), 2020
Kino Kinoteka, Zagreb, Croatia, 2020
Filmclub 813, Cologne, Germany, 2020
Laterale Film Festival, Cosenza, Italy, 2020
Open Out Festival, Tromsø, Norway, 2020
Syros International Film Festival, Syros, Greece, 2020
MOVIMCAT, The Moving Image Catalogue (online), 2020
Otion Front Studio, Brooklyn, NY, 2020
Les Inattendus, Lyon, France, 2020
Blonde Cobra, Cologne, Germany, 2019
Spectral Microcinema, Stevens Point, WI, 2019
ULTRAcinema, Guelatao, Mexico, 2019
Nomadica, Bologna, Italy, 2019
Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2019
Antimatter Media Art, Victoria, Canada, 2019
Festival des cinémas différents et expérimentaux de Paris, Paris, France, 2019
Black Canvas Festival de Cine Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico, 2019
25 FPS, Zagreb, Croatia, 2019
Rencontres Internationales, Berlin, Germany, 2019
Uplink Theater, Tokyo, Japan, 2019
Black Hole Cinematheque, Oakland, CA, 2019
CROSSROADS 2019, San Francisco, CA, 2019
Moviate Film Festival, Harrisburg, PA, 2019
FRACTO, Berlin, Germany, 2019
Maryland Film Festival, Baltimore, MD, 2019
IndieLisboa, Lisbon, Portugal, 2019
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Hawick, Scotland, 2019
Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Milwaukee, WI, 2019
European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück, Germany, 2019
ICDOCS, Iowa City, IA, 2019
Images Festival, Toronto, Canada, 2019
San Francisco International Film Festival, San Francisco, CA, 2019
Athens International Film + Video Festival, Athens, OH, 2019
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL, 2019
Spectral Film Festival, Stevens Point, WI, 2019
Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival, Chicago, IL, 2019
Process, Riga, Latvia, 2019
Rencontres Internationales, Paris, France, 2019
Cosmic Rays, Chapel Hill, NC, 2019
FLEXfest Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival, Tampa, FL, 2019
International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2019
November Film Festival, London, England, 2018
Transient Visions, Johnson City, NY, 2018
New York Film Festival, New York, NY, 2018
Curtocircuíto, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 2018

awards:

Best International Short Film, Black Canvas Festival de Cine Contemporáneo
Honorable Mention, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival
Honorable Mention, ICDOCS
Best of Festival Award, Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival

press:

Triangle House, “My Summer of Crisis, Trisha Low
Cinema Scope, “Pleasurable Surfaces: The Films of Zachary Epcar,” Phil Coldiron
Film Threat, “Life After Love,” Matthew Roe
L'emergere del possibile, “Life After Love,” Francesca Rusalen & Francesco Cazzin
48 Hills, “Watching at CROSSROADS 2019: Avant-garde film festival returns,” Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
Chicago Reader, “The Onion City Film Festival conveys the disorientation of living in an era of great change,” Ben Sachs
MUBI, “Welcome to the Other Resistance: The Year in Experimental Film,” Michael Sicinski
The Film Comment Podcast, “NYFF56 Projections,” Nellie Killian, Nicolas Rapold, Becca Voelcker