Amber Bemak
Dallas, TX
Amber Bemak is based in Dallas, Texas after three years spent living in Mexico City after seven years living between India and Nepal. Bemak is a filmmaker, artist, and educator whose creative practice is based in experimental and documentary film. In her work as a film director and performance artist, she engages with social and political borders in relation to the intimate, symbolic, and performative body. Her films are created as performances in themselves, often blending the lines between protagonist and director, as well as what is scripted and what is improvised on screen. Her work has been seen at venues including the Carnegie Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Tamayo Museum. Festivals include Oberhausen, BAM cinemafest, BFI London, Ann Arbor, DocLisboa, and Morelia. Bemak is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. She has taught film theory and practice in India, Nepal, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States.
Cosmic Moose and Grizzly Bears Ville
Amber Bemak is an Anti-Zionist Jewish queer lesbian filmmaker, artist, and educator whose creative practice is based in experimental and documentary film, performance art, and community media.
Artist BioDiagnosed at an early age with paranoid schizophrenia but choosing to live his life unmedicated, Peter Valentine lived independently, riding the edge between mental illness and magic. Peter was an eccentric, beloved, and respected local legend of the city of Cambridge. He was also my uncle.
The film follows Peter’s unusual journey, weaving around the extraordinary events surrounding his house, MIT, and the city of Cambridge. In the 1980’s, Peter was not the owner of his rent controlled three-story house. It was divided into apartments, and he rented one of them, living on disability payments. When MIT wanted to demolish his neighborhood to develop University Park, Peter refused to move, insisting that he could not leave because his apartment was his laboratory for research on Electromagnetic Arts, a psychic defense system he’d created, developed, and taught.
Peter’s refusal to leave his house was joined with a longstanding local movement around rent control and tenants’ rights, also invested in blocking the development of University Park. What Peter did not know when he moved into his apartment was that his building and the buildings surrounding it had been at the center of the tenants’ rights movement in Cambridge for over a decade, a focal point for conflict between the landlord and urban development practices of MIT and the housing needs of Cambridge.
After seven years of Peter’s insistence and many legal hearings, MIT physically moved his house 900 ft to Central Square. They also sold the entire house to Peter for a dollar. The rest of the neighborhood was demolished, and MIT moved forward with their development of University Park.