When I came up with the title “Beyond Interpretation” for my thesis project last year, my view of its meaning was limited. Guiding my curatorial choices in the program was an interest in paranoia and conspiracy, themes which never left the final product despite incremental changes during the months it took to put it together; an interest in unconventional narrative structure, a playfulness with form, and a sense of confusion and mystery, elements I though might resonate with audiences in a post-pandemic context. But most importantly, guiding the project was a preoccupation with how a certain kind of film – small, precariously funded, narratively unconventional, outside the system – might (or often might not) find an audience outside the circle of people closely associated with it. Watching the films in the first iteration of Beyond Interpretation with these ideas and interests in mind, which I did over and over both out of pleasure and out of a fear of (for lack of a better word) misinterpreting their key ideas and making a fool of myself in front of a discerning audience, opened my eyes to Beyond Interpretation’s other meanings.

I wrote at the time, in an article for Little While Lies, that Beyond Interpretation was not just a potential description of the films’ plots or deeper meanings – all the films played clever tricks regarding narrative structure, character development, and other conventions of traditional cinema that could, and often do, frustrate the viewer. In one sense, these films were beyond our own means of interpretation. More importantly, however, the title was a call, not so much to action, but to surrender. I saw the five films in the program as invitations to the audience to free themselves from the seeming requirements of mainstream cinema to solve a problem, to answer a question, to complete a mission. The worlds explored in films like Slow Machine, Topology of Sirens, She Dies Tomorrow, Happer’s Comet, and The Plagiarists, which I programmed back in January of this year, while a step or two to the side of the one we live in, ultimately express real truths about our own. In them, answers don’t come easily, problems are rarely solved at once, and missions are less about the goal than the journey.

Beyond Interpretation, then, is an invitation to free oneself; to seek pleasures beyond the mere intellectual satisfaction of deciphering meaning, and instead become acquainted with the primal, elemental feelings that ground us in everyday existence.

But where to go from here?

Starting at the end of October, Beyond Interpretation makes a return to London, the city it originated in. I continue to program this series in London, despite no longer living there, because I still feel it is important to help the small films I’m interested in play outside their immediate circles. The regional, independent film festivals that dot the American landscape are familiar with all the films I plan on screening. The challenge these films face is how to travel beyond those circles. As a programmer, I feel a responsibility to use the platform I’ve been given at the ICA as an avenue these films can traverse to find new audiences. My ultimate goal is to facilitate the mutual access between films and audiences, unique interactions that, due to the disadvantage these films find themselves in compared to mainstream Hollywood films, might not have otherwise occurred.

As the next iteration of Beyond Interpretation gets off the ground in the coming weeks, I look forward to sharing more about the films and the contexts in which they were made. And I hope those reading this and visiting this website, who have the ability to do so, come to as many screenings as they can.