Artist and writer, Morgan Quaintance's work crosses experimental cinema, essayistic film, documentary autobiography, and articulate sound work. Interested in the subjects of the human condition, ethnography, counterculture, and Afro-Caribbean, British, and East Asian histories, Quaintance's work navigates themes that mark the construction of the now: racial identity, politics and activism, memory and history, the impact of technology and the media on the contemporary world, psychology and human existence. His critically incisive texts are regularly featured in publications such as Art Monthly and The Wire, and his cinematographic works have been screened at various festivals and institutions of world renown. At Curtas Vila do Conde, Morgan Quaintance has been part of the Experimental Competition three times, winning it in 2020 and 2021 with South and Surviving You, Always respectively.

The 32nd Curtas Vila do Conde will present a complete program dedicated to Morgan Quaintance, combining a partial retrospective of his work and a Carte Blanche. At the same time, the festival is inaugurating its first exhibition in Portugal at Solar - Cinematic Art Gallery. Efforts of Nature IV will present an unprecedented, site-specific exhibition proposal that incites articulated reflections on the passage of time, mortality, the dissolution of the body and the disintegration of the polar ice caps. The artist uses moving images, satellite images, sound works, photographs and other documents to relate individual mental states and planetary changes in environmental conditions.

The famous filmmaker will be present at the festival, where he will lead a guided tour of the exhibition and a masterclass on the weight of the body's physical failure at the moment of artistic creation, based on his own experience of chronic pain.

Morgan Quaintance 

Film programme

All Divided Selves, Luke Fowler, 93’

Norwegian Wood, Tran Anh Hung, 133’ 

Palace, Morgan Quaintance, 3’

Repetitions, Morgan Quaintance, 24’

Puerto Rican Obituary (excerpt), Pedro Pietri , 4’

Ecce Homo, Jerry Tartaglia, 7’ 

Telephone Booth Number 905 ½, Pedro Pietri, 1’ 

Efforts of Nature, Morgan Quaintance, 20’

Partners, Morgan Quaintance, 4’

RIP, Morgan Quaintance, 3’

Surviving You, Always, Morgan Quaintance, 18’

Sixth Form Acid, Morgan Quaintance, 2’

PULN, Philippe Brioude, 3’30’’

Numerology, Morgan Quaintance, 2’32’’

South, Morgan Quaintance, 28’

New Covenant, Morgan Quaintance, 3’

Or Anything at All Except the Dark Pavement, Théodora Barat, 5’

Early Years, Morgan Quaintance, 15’

Sonja Ferlov Mancoba – A Danish Sculptor in Paris, Torban Glarbo, 35’

Missing Time, Morgan Quaintance, 15’

Dissonant, Manon de Boer, 11’

Efforts of Nature IV, Morgan Quaintance 

13.07.2024 – 31.08.2024

MON – SAT, 2PM – 6.30PM