In the past year or so, the film community of Boston lost some pillar voices: the passing of programmer David Pendleton and filmmaker Robert Todd, the closing of landmark film series MassArt Film Society, only to name a few. While we were always grateful for their brilliant existence, it is only until they are gone are we confronted with the dark meaning of living without them: a void of intelligence, imagination, and inspiration. So we bring forth the Revolutions per Minute Film Festival (RPM), out of a simple desire to bring more films to the area and bring more light to our dialogue about the art of moving image.

RPM was originally co-founded in 2013 by Wenhua Shi, experimental filmmaker and assistant professor at UMass-Boston, as a traveling exhibition of sound art and audiovisual performance. Notable highlights of its nomadic experience include RPM Exhibition Sound Art China 2013 in New York, RPM Exhibition Hong Kong 2014, and RPM Exhibition Shanghai West-Bund Biannual 2015. Finally, RPM finds a new home in Boston, and RPM Fest 2019 is the first edition focused on film and video.

RPM Fest 2019 presents 10 programs including 114 short films and 17 installations by 131 artists from 23 countries. These films push the boundary of the poetics of cinema as a melting pot of image, sound and text, with their fictional and non-fictional ambitions and aptitude. There will also be three special programs including a screening of documentary Yumen by Xu Tuotao, J.P. Sniadecki, and Huang Xiang, an experimental sound performance by Manfred Werder, and a special program featuring films by local film collective AgX.

We are lucky to be able to host RPM Fest 2019 in UMass Boston’s University Hall whose state-of-art facility - a 230-seat theater and a multi-function art gallery - allows us the freedom of exhibiting contemporary cinema in its multiplicity of forms and formats. It is also our hope that, by hosting RPM Fest 2019 at a public institution, we can make the often seemingly exclusive experimental cinema less opaque and more available to a wider audience, especially more students.