Long Distance Film Festival would like to thank Anthology Film Archives for contributing three hardcover copies of Just Like A Shadow by Jonas Mekas to our prize pool. These books will be awarded to our jury prize winners. We are very proud to be partnering with Anthology Film Archives, an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema. They are celebrating their 50th year as one of the most important cinemas in New York City, and we encourage you to check out their online programming. 

About Just Like A Shadow:

In JUST LIKE A SHADOW, sequences of three or four film frames, often sliced randomly midframe, are presented with sprocket holes and scratchy optical soundtracks. Mekas’s images are jerky with movement, either washed out or underexposed, and seemingly shot from the hip, but all have a feeling of spontaneity and the immediacy of life. This collection of film snippets is loaded with images of the famous — like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Caroline Kennedy, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their Montreal ‘bed-in’ — but these are not conventional portraits.  Having spent all his life with his Bolex camera, Mekas never ceased writing a long intimate film from which these photograms were extracted. The book reads as “one long film which is still continuing.”

We are honored to give this book by Anthology’s founder and one of the festival’s greatest influences, Jonas Mekas, to three of our winners.