State of Rest and Motion

Color, 18 minutes
Camera, Editing, Sound Design: Edin Vélez

Premiere at the Museum of Modern art’s Doc Fortnight, February 2017
Winner: Best Experimental Documentary-Gold, Doc LA, California, 2017
Screening: Havana International Film Festival, Cuba, 2017
Madrid Art Film Festival, Spain, 2017
Switzerland International Film Festival, 2017

State of Rest and Motion is a 15-minute tour de force, a poetic homage to the New York City subway as a rare place of shared humanity, chaos, and stillness. The complex use of new technologies, visual layering, and digital manipulation only serve to enhance the emotional weight of loneliness and companionship that all large cities simultaneously generate and relieve. Drawing on four years of footage shot within the confines of the transit system, the film works as a piece of tender observational cinema and a love letter to the diversity and strangeness of human experience.

"Fascinated with the human face, Velez allows his subjects to reveal themselves, unguarded and without direction, seemingly unaware of his camera. It is Velez's talent that he can capture people in his emotive portraits." -- Barbara Pollack (writer for ARTnews, New York Times, and Art in America)