FILMMAKING
COMING SOON …
City of Angles
Imprisoned Lightning Redux
Amos Mann
Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand | 1993, Redux: 2025 | Super 8, Redux: Digital 4k | 3 minutes
… A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome …
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me …
— Extracts from The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus 1883
City of Angles is an experimental short film by Amos Mann shot from the hip one frame at a time in New York City in 1993. The film’s fast-paced and fleeting imagery creates a heightened immediacy that connects us to a time from before the authoritarian ‘clean-up’ of New York in the years that followed filming. City of Angles celebrates the ethos of New York City as a creative and synergistic safe harbour for immigrants, refugees, those escaping oppression and persecution, and those seeking safe space for creative life. Mann’s Jewish relatives began arriving from Europe three generations before the film was shot, and in 1959 his father, violinist Sydney Manowitz, arrived from East London to study at the Juilliard School.
This 2025 digital redux of the original celluloid version of City of Angles is released as a protest against present-day US authoritarianism and persecution of migrants and minority groups — this is the Imprisoned Lightning Redux.
“An anti-nostalgia film”
— Gaylene Preston (Aotearoa New Zealand documentary and feature filmmaker)
Premiering at a Show and Tell event in Toronto, Canada, City of Angles then screened at festivals in Auckland, Wellington, and Dunedin in Aotearoa New Zealand through the mid-1990s.
The film’s soundtrack is composed and performed by Mann and is heavily influenced by the flourishing post-punk and new wave music scene he encountered living in Toronto in the early 1990s. The soundtrack lyrics are drawn from the speech of New Yorkers heard during filming.
City of Angles soundtrack lyrics
A liquid lunch, eh? Lemonade, coffee, soup, milk
A liquid lunch, eh? Lemonade, coffee, soup, milk
No no no, is that a snake?
No, no, no, I’m sure I have a snake
No, no, no, I’m sure I have a snake here
Yep, yep, yep, we saw him in here
We thought it couldn’t be him
We thought it couldn’t be him
We thought it couldn’t be him
A liquid lunch, eh? Lemonade, coffee, soup, milk
A liquid lunch, eh? Lemonade, coffee, soup, milk
For a Puppet to Live
A moving image portrait
For a Puppet to Live (2024) is an experimental documentary, one of a series of moving image portraits by Amos Mann — short films of creatives at work.
Told purely through visuals and music, this story is a rare glimpse behind-the-scenes celebrating the creative process.
Spanish/Aotearoa New Zealand theatre company Naranjarte (Ana Lorite and Sergio Aguilar) are rehearsing for a new show. We are with them on stage as they develop a scene with one of their handcrafted puppets — Neto the marionette.
Filmed at St Peter’s Hall in the coastal village of Paekākāriki, Kāpiti, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Filmed and produced by Amos Mann.
Shot on GH5s, post produced on DaVinci Resolve.
Original soundtrack composed and performed by Amos Mann.
Ngā mihi nui Katrina Chandra for project support and facilitation.
Premiered in September 2024 at Wellington Puppetry Festival, Vogelmorn, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.
The Performers
Formed in 2011, Naranjarte (Ana Lorite and Sergio Aguilar) receive many accolades for their puppetry and juggling performances and education initiatives. Their performances are immersive journeys that challenge perceptions and transport audiences to realms of wonder and delight. After completing an extensive world tour, the duo chose Aotearoa New Zealand as their home. See more at naranjarte.com
Dynamics of a field
Music video
Evocative, nostalgic, and suitably spooky, this video art piece was shot at an abandoned stables in rural Aotearoa New Zealand. The intriguing visuals play with perceptions of movement and time through contemporary dance, subtle and repetitive performative actions, and experimental film techniques, bringing the site to life and into relationship with the multilayered meanings of the song’s lyrics.
‘This cosmic space here together
what connects us together
behaving weirdly together
believing only each other’
Filmed in te rohe o Otaraua hapū, o Te Ātiawa ki Kāpiti. Ngā mihi nui ki ngā graffiti artists o Waikanae, Kāpiti, Aotearoa New Zealand — please contact me to receive full credit. The site was demolished soon after filming.