Prismatic Ground 2024

Fertile Memory

Michel Khleifi

<p>The first full length film to be shot within the disputed Palestinian West Bank &ldquo;Green Line,&rdquo; FERTILE MEMORY is the feature debut of Michel Khleifi, acclaimed director of the Cannes Film Festival triumph, WEDDING IN GALILEE. Lyrically blending both documentary and narrative elements, Khleifi skillfully and lovingly crafts a portrait of two Palestinian women whose individual struggles both define and transcend the politics that have torn apart their homes and their lives.</p>

Sukh yantr ka ruphala khaaka (Blueprint of a Pleasure Machine)

Amit Dutta

<p>When a detective is recruited to locate a secret in the bylanes of a lost film-city, little does he know that it is after all a set-up; a conspiracy to send him on a mission with no return. &mdash;Matra Publications</p>

Amma Ki Katha

Nehal Vyas

<p>India&mdash;my nation&mdash;is being rebuilt. Her foundation is being laid on the imagined land that claims to be the birthplace of my grandmother&rsquo;s God. In the mythology that she passed down to me during many summer nights, her God was magical, kind, imaginative and democratic&mdash;just like my India was supposed to be. But today, through its many retellings and reimaginings, the tale is being used as a political tool to manifest the violent desire of a Hindutva state. This film attempts to remember&mdash;as well as dream&mdash;a forgotten nation. &mdash;Nehal Vyas</p>

Jikele Maweni Ndiyahamba (Let's Go To The Mines)

Advik Beni

<p>An essay film that parallels a replicated mining town of Johannesburg in California to the mines in South Africa. It serves as an indicator of how those who profiteered of mining in South Africa, the white population, where able to leave and start a whole new town based on where they came from, whereas those who work the mines, the black population, are still faced with excruciating conditions. This is seen via the archive footage of the Marikana mines massacre of 2012 contrasted over the beautiful voice of Miriam Makeba. &mdash;Advik Beni</p>

No Stranger At All

Priya Sen

<p>Over the last 2 years in Delhi starting late 2019, I wrote, filmed and recorded, as days and nights turned from collective rage and exuberance to withdrawal and solitude. The search was along the edges of disquiet and premonition, in fragments and intensities, through wandering and not-staying. Perhaps down pathways made from adjacent knots of desire, seeking solace, seeking life. This video / essay has been composed from those notes, recordings, slivers of prayers, non-intended sound, stranger-love, lamentations and extreme longing, in a city that absorbs, mirrors, tears apart, and simultaneously allays both remorse and euphoria.<br /> What happens to the energy of attachment when it has no designated place? To the glances, gestures, encounters, collaborations or fantasies that have no canon? **<br /> These incomplete fictions, these false closures and tenuous associations, compose a timeline of the city at an angle through the time of this work. There is a shadowy sense of a protagonist who un-dreams it all; a stranger, who turns out, is no stranger at all.<br /> Somewhere I wrote:<br /> &hellip; so much power, it is difficult to move towards love.<br /> &mdash;Priya Sen<br /> *Majrooh Sultanpuri translated by Baidar Bakht and Marie-Anne Erki<br /> ** Lauren Berlant, from &lsquo;Intimacies: A Special Issue&rsquo;</p>

Homing (2023)

Tamer Hassan

<p>Centuries prior to the colonization of the Americas, Purple Martins began to nest in gourds that people hung to store food and water and became companion species for many tribes. The birds that European settlers brought with them drove Purple Martins out of their wild habitats so that now they can only nest in birdhouses that people build to prevent their extinction. Without dialogue or narration, Homing follows the migration of Purple Martins from the Amazon to the Great Lakes, between the conservationists who study them and to the houses they are dependent on for survival. &mdash;Tamer Hassan</p>

Wolves

Aria Dean Laszlo Horvath

<p>Sheep, a dog, a camera and the filmmaker behind it; somewhere beyond, danger. &mdash;Inney Prakash</p>

Just a Soul Responding

Sky Hopinka

<p>This is a travelogue of sorts, as two friends whose lives intersect and diverge, look at the road and the vessels we use as means to traverse landscapes both contemporary and historical, and of the spirit and of the body. The title, inspired in part by Smokey Robinson&rsquo;s Just My Soul Responding, refers to the passive and active ways that movement guides and shapes the routes one follows and creates in roadways and waterways long established, yet sympathetic to paths of desire and paths of refusal. Through each channel are various attempts to reconcile who we are, who we want to be, as well as who and what was lost along the way. &mdash;Sky Hopinka</p>

Listening In, Resounding Out

Eislow Johnson Dominic Bonelli

<p>Through the ears of an acoustic engineer, the film explores how in the near silence of the anechoic chamber, listening is a straining toward understanding and connection. It engages with cinema as a body &mdash; one given presence and depth through sound &mdash; and a body as a resounding instrument, which listens to its own vibratory depths and amplifies its feedback.</p>

Ilanga Alikho (The Sun is Missing)

Advik Beni

<p>Ilanga Alikho is an experimental landscape film with an element of poetry. The film follows the son of the professional mourner who has now taken up the mantle of his father. He is confused. He does not want to mourn anymore, but it is all he knows how to do. He goes to the local flea market and purchases some chickens for a sacrificial ceremony in the name of his ancestors. Soon enough he is traversing the vast mountainous landscape of Kwa-Zulu Natal as he struggles to find a place where belongs. &mdash;Advik Beni</p>

Bleared eyes of blue glass

PARK Kyujae

<p>The &quot;bleared eyes of blue glass&quot; in the title of this experimental short expand on a verbal image from Virginia Woolf&#39;s novel The Waves, considered the most experimental among the 20th-century British writer&#39;s literary works, from which the young filmmaker took inspiration for his film, borrowing passages and visions to explain his own understanding of what cinema is. A film that plays with water - precisely - and light, and yet in a very dark b&amp;w lit up by rare flashes of colour, making a journey in the night in which the shadow of a man gradually acquires substance. &mdash;PARK Kyujae</p>

in the interval

æryka jourdaine hollis o'neil

<p>Both an intimate family portrait &amp; cinematic collage of Black and trans collective memory and (be)longing, meditating on themes of safety, bodily autonomy and generations of compounding loss across time and media. Taking the form of a diptych, the first act interrogates the convergence of Black confrontations with police brutality and the annually increasing disparities of homicidal violence experienced by Black trans women and femmes, while the second act non-linearly traces the respective origins and evolutions of a Black non-binary trans femme scholar-artist and her late father who died unexpectedly ten years prior to filming. Organized around family VHS footage, viral media and found footage, present-day video diary using digital as well as Bolex 16mm cameras, performance, and other artifacts of an inherited personal and public archive, the film explores the continuities and cleavages of the filmmaker and her father&#39;s corresponding lived experiences, amidst the backdrop of unrelenting anti-Black, queer- and trans-antagonistic acts of violence, both state-sanctioned and otherwise and the aftermath of a deadly global pandemic. The film stands as an open-ended inquiry into what Frantz Fanon once called &ldquo;the problem of time&rdquo; for figuring Black life, collectivity and struggle&mdash;where past, present, blood kin and queer kin kaleidoscopically collide. &mdash;&aelig;ryka jourdaine hollis o&#39;neil</p>

Behind the Sun

Bentley Brown

<p>A filmmaker explores astrophysical metaphors to make sense of a failed relationship to person and place.</p>

Both, instrument and sound

Sharlene Bamboat

<p>In this intimate portrait of queer life and intergenerational friendship, 80-year-old Tony describes his political activism since the 1970s, after moving from Calcutta, India to Toronto, Canada. Translated through sonic and filmic experiments, his stories and observations express the tensions inherent in solidarity and collectivity under neoliberalism. The film&rsquo;s score, co-written with musicians and the film&rsquo;s cast and crew, remixes and meditates on the concept of tension, and its manifestations in sex, identity, music, touch and political struggle. In the face of a growing politics and language of individualism, the film interrogates discourses and practices of solidarity and their enmeshment with friendship and love. Fragments of phone calls, conversations over shared meals, and tender moments captured on 16mm film portray the complexity of building community, and the hazards of reducing shared experiences of oppression to individual expressions of identity. &mdash;Sharlene Bamboat</p>

Barrunto (2024)

Emilia Beatriz

<p><em>barrunto</em>&nbsp;is a speculative fiction that takes place in a future of the past, in a present ruptured now. Its far-reaching network of affinities spans from Puerto Rico to Scotland, from the land to the bottom of the sea, and all the way to planet Uranus.</p>

Capital

Basma Al-Sharif

<p>A ventriloquist, a political speech, Nino Ferrer and advertisements for new districts paint a satirical portrait of an era with fascist overtones.</p>

(A Stone's Throw) على مرمى حجر

Razan AlSalah

<p>Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice from land and labour. He is displaced from his birthplace Haifa seeking refuge in Beirut, and again to Zirku Island, for work on an offshore oil platform and work camp in the Arab Gulf. &quot;A Stone&rsquo;s Throw&quot; trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labour in the region and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The film rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline.<br /> &mdash;Razan AlSalah</p>

COP26FILM

Luke Fowler

<p>COP26FILM was shot in Fowler&rsquo;s home city of Glasgow during the period that the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) took place there in from October 31 &ndash; November 12, 2021. Denied entry to the main &ldquo;blue zone&ldquo; the artist instead made daily walks around the periphery of the site recording the temporary infrastructure of the conference, security systems, police cordons and the omnipresence of Police helicopters. These combine to form a subjective image of state-power at a highly monitored and politically expedient event. Fowler offsets these displays of power with a &quot;patchwork&quot; of alternative interventions that took place; mass protests, temporary squats, and the significance the Minga Ind&iacute;gena, a collective of over 100 indigenous leaders who travelled to Glasgow to claim representation and space in the decision making process around issues of the climate crisis and potential solutions. COP26FILM features a soundtrack composed from recordings made on location and also synthesized sound by Richard McMaster and Luke Fowler. &mdash;Luke Fowler</p>

El que baila pasa (He Who Dances Passes)

Carlos Araya Diaz

<p>A being from the beyond returns to Chile in 2019, embodied in a worker who dreams of social upheaval. Viral videos intertwine with fiction to narrate the experiences of a polarized country that wanders between drama and absurdity, illusion and failure.</p>

Six Seventy-Two Variations, Variation 3 (For Charles)

Tomonari Nishikawa

<p>This is the third variation of the on-going 16mm film projector performance piece, &quot;Six Seventy-Two Variations,&quot; for which I produce images and sound as a live performance. I use a wood carving knife to scratch off the photographic emulsion of the looped film as a live performance. Scratched patterns, which would be mostly horizontal lines, will appear as an abstract animation on the screen and produce noises, as the area of the filmstrip reserved for the optical soundtrack will be also scratched. Due to the distance between the gate of the projector and the position of the photocell to read the visual information for sound, the noise from a scratched pattern will be produced about a second later after it appears on the screen. &mdash;Tomonari Nishikawa</p>

Bolero Study

Cherrie Yu

<p>Bolero Study is a reprise of Torvill and Dean&#39;s ice dancing routine from the 1984 Olympic Sarajevo Olympics. Artist Cherrie Yu and collaborator Jade Manns rechoreographed the duet on their hands. &mdash;Cherrie Yu</p>

Us and the Night

Audrey Lam

<p>Night after night, two travellers cross paths at a university library. The library&#39;s symmetry, rhythms and recurrences form a fantastic geography for their stories and adventures. &mdash;Audrey Lam</p>

El Realismo Socialista

Raúl Ruiz Valeria Sarmiento

<p>Ra&uacute;l Ruiz had just completed shooting for Socialist Realism in 1973 when Pinochet led a successful military coup in Chile. Ruiz had to flee the country and was never able to complete the edit for this hybrid docufiction film. Cameraman Jorge M&uuml;ller Silva disappeared following the coup, and he remains missing to this day.</p> <p>Film material was rediscovered in 2016 at Duke University in Durham, in the US, and some more in 2020 at the Cinematek Royal Film Archive of Belgium. Filmmaker-editor Valeria Sarmiento, Ruiz&rsquo;s widow, managed to save this historic and fundamental piece of cinematic heritage by editing, reconstructing,&nbsp;restoring and completing the film, backed by production company Poetastros.</p> <p>Socialist Realism is a political satire about Unidad Popular, the left-wing alliance led by socialist president Allende. In a series of short stories, two worlds within this alliance intersect: the world of the workers and the world of the well-educated left-wing supporters. The latter believe intellectuals should come down from their ivory towers, and that all Chileans should write poetry&mdash;although no one turns up to the poetry group. These two separate worlds ultimately clash violently in this sardonic report of a turbulent political climate.</p>

Deep 1

Philip Hoffman

<p>Filmed over 2 years (2020-2022), at home and away,&nbsp;<em>Deep 1</em>&nbsp;is a diaristic meditation, flower/plant processed and decayed with hyacinth and lichen extract. Winged and four legged animals, both wild and domestic, traverse the frame marked by a hand-made practice. Filmed in Mount Forest, Ontario and Dawson City, Yukon.</p>

Black Rectangle

Rhayne Vermette

<p>&ldquo;Time has not been kind to Kasimir Malevich&rsquo;s painting, Black Square. In 1915 when the work was first displayed the surface of the square was pristine and pure; now the black paint has cracked revealing the white ground like mortar in crazy paving.&rdquo; This film documents a tedious process of dismantling and reassembling 16 mm found footage. The film collage imitates functions of a curtain, while the recorded optical track describes the flm&rsquo;s subsequent destruction during its first projection. &mdash;Rhayne Vermette</p>

Domus (2017)

Rhayne Vermette

<p>&quot;The block of marble is the most beautiful of all statues&quot; - Carlo Mollino This is the story of the godlike architect, Carlo Mollino, animated within the desk space of failed architect, Rhayne Vermette. Made, with love on 16mm, 35 and Super 8, this classic tale of Pygmalion investigates intersections between cinema and architecture. For E. Ackerman, A. Jarnow, and T. Ito. &mdash;Rhayne Vermette</p>

A Shifting Pattern

Isaac Sherman

<p>Across the first minute of Isaac Sherman&rsquo;s A Shifting Pattern, brief filmic phrases&mdash;close views of flowers and buds, each between 1 and 5 frames&mdash;appear at irregular intervals, generally in the range of every two seconds, as the soundtrack hums with outdoor ambience. A single, quick synth tone signals a turn: the montage accelerates, drawing the Markopoulos-style opening into outright flicker (Sherman continues to make precise use of black frames, creating a dense composition of afterimages, layered and fugal), as saxophone and flute join the synthesizer and field recordings in a similarly accumulative arc that moves from sparse 3-note phrases into a full arrangement which sounds like the record Laurie Spiegel never released on Mego. The botanical world is among the more common subjects for the flicker film, but when matched with the witty sense of fleeting pleasure imbued by the soundtrack, Sherman&rsquo;s sumptuous and extravagant floral still lives&mdash;with their deft handling of light and shadow, of contrasts in color and scale&mdash;feel appropriately fresh. &mdash;Phil Coldiron</p>

Measuring 500 Feet

Abigail He

<p>Dimensions: 500 ft. x 5/8 in. x 1/128 in. (15240 x 1.6 x .02 cm) overall: 547 ft. x 5/8 in. x 1/128 in. (16672.6 x 1.6 x .02 cm) &mdash;Abigail He</p>

Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke

Nishikawa Tomonari

<p>Intriguing portrait of summer fireworks, in which delayed and separated sounds create a unique rhythm.</p>

Tricks Are For Kiddo

Rhayne Vermette

<p>In 2010, Winnipeg director, Guy Maddin exclaims &ldquo;it&rsquo;s impossible to collage a film!&rdquo; &mdash;Rhayne Vermette</p>

Glitter For Girls

Federica Foglia

<p>Glitter for Girls is a handmade tattoo film that utilizes a camera-less direct-on-film animation approach to collage multiple layers of water tattoos (commonly used by children.) &mdash;Federica Foglia</p>

Entrance Wounds

Calum Walter

<p>A meditation on the image and the bullet. Entrance Wounds considers the modern challenge of trying to unsee an image. The film sifts through moments of the everyday, imagining a world where afterimages of disaster drift in near-transparency over the present. &mdash;Calum Walter</p>

He Thought He Died

Isiah Medina

<p>A painter stages a heist to steal his paintings back from the vault of a museum. A filmmaker happens to be at the museum on the same day. &mdash;Isiah Medina</p>

Camera Test (King Cadbury)

Charlie Shackleton

<p>A documentary readymade about family lore and chocolate biscuits.</p>

Midwood Movie

Melissa Friedling

<p>Midwood Movie is a feature experimental documentary about both a Brooklyn neighborhood and about motion pictures and their development. Shot over 12 years entirely on and around the former site of the American Vitagraph Company which began producing silent films there in 1906, the film digs through layers of cultural history, presenting an array of individual accounts of the site&rsquo;s varied uses along with subjective appraisals of its importance. While excavating manifold media forms and formats, the film encounters artifacts and artists entangled in histories of harm and intolerance. In so doing, Midwood Movie contextualizes media and its monuments as a charged cultural milieu.</p>

Social Circles

Eri Saito

<p>This piece explores the unique dynamics and communication that arise from the inability to fully connect and understand each other. In our daily lives, we form various social circles through interactions with friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and family. With the prevalence of social media and online platforms, people can create even more diverse social circles and connect with individuals from all over the world. Through this artwork, the faint boundaries that emerge from individual communications and relationships are contemplated, with the hope of sparking thoughts about our future existence and how we interact with others.</p>

Wu Suo Zhu (Abiding Nowhere)

Tsai Ming-liang

<p>The walker with the shaved head and dressed in a red robe is barefoot. He walks slowly but determinedly through the forest, over stones and grassland. He also makes his way through the shadows of trees and houses. He sets foot in the train station, the church and the museum. The sun rises and sets again. The walker passes through Washington, D.C. Another stranger is also on the move in the city. We are unsure whether or not he is following the walker.<br /> Tsai Ming-liang began his Walker series in 2011; this is now the tenth film. In the role of the monk, his long-time collaborator and lead actor Lee Kang-Sheng travels all over the world. The figure is inspired by Xuanzang, a Tang Dynasty Buddhist monk who journeyed thousands of miles on foot between China and India.</p>

As close as your voice can call

Grief Trauma Communication Experimental Film Documentary

<p>A film about language, about the way trauma inflects grief, and about learning to speak with the dead.</p>

The Treasury of Human Inheritance

Alexis Kyle Mitchell

<p><em>The Treasury of Human Inheritance</em>&nbsp;is a poetic film about the experience of living with and alongside genetic disease and disability. Tracing loops, echoes and repetitions across the physical and spiritual realms,&nbsp;<em>The Treasury</em>&nbsp;combines documentation of family home movie footage, somatic and religious rituals for death and life after death, abandoned urban architecture teeming with natural growth, celluloid film hand-processed in genetic material, and an analogue synthesizer soundtrack that mimics specific inheritance patterns of genetic disease. In essence, this is a film about a family, but, more than that, it is a film made from the everyday patterns we embody in order to live through and with one another.</p>

Revolution Until Victory a.k.a. We Are the Palestinian People (Newrseel #65)

San Francisco Newsreel

<p>Made by a breakaway faction of the US Newsreel collective Pacific Newsreel, We Are the Palestinian People: Revolution Until Victory edits exclusively archival footage into a detailed, historical reconstruction of the conflict. Great attention is paid to the political genesis of Zionism, the role of colonial Britain in assigning [sic] Palestine to Zionists and the strategic role Israel has played ever since in the control and monopoly of the world&#39;s most sought-after commodity, oil. While other titles in the season stressed the internationalist dimension of the Palestinian revolution by linking it to other anti-colonial struggles, the same concept is rendered here specularly - for if anti-imperialism is a trans-global phenomenon, so is repression. Incorporated into the montage is footage of Moshe Dayan visiting Vietnam to learn about counter-insurgency technique.</p>

Introduction to the End of an Argument

Jayce Salloum Elia Suleiman

<p>This highly kinetic tableaux of uprooted sights and sounds works most earnestly to expose the racial biases concealed in familiar images. Relying on valuable snippets from feature films such as &quot;Exodus&quot;, &quot;Lawrence of Arabia&quot;, &quot;Black Sunday&quot;, &quot;Little Drummer Girl&quot;, and network news shows, the filmmakers have constructed an oddly wry narrative, mimicking the history of Mid East politics.</p>

Let the Red Moon Burn

Ralitsa Doncheva

<p>&ldquo;Let The Red Moon Burn&rdquo; is a meditation on the ancient ritual of fire dancing in Bulgaria. The film creates a blur between the past and the present to evoke the ghosts in the landscape. The spirits of ancestors unearthed by the pulsation of music. All the sounds and images were recorded during the Zheravna Costume Festival, where thousands of people gather every summer to perform the traditional dance under the full moon.</p>

at the bamboo green

Xiaolu Wang

<p>A one take recording of a family&#39;s visit to the bamboo green at the foot of the Helan Mountains.</p>

In the Wake of Loss

Aminata Ndow

<p>A documentary portrait of twenty-year-old Amie Lowe, whose father disappeared during Yahya Jammeh&rsquo;s violent dictatorship in The Gambia when she was only 3 years old. The personal portrait that emerged illuminates the intimate and small in the interminable wake of unresolved loss. &mdash;Aminata Ndow</p>

Avant Seriana (Before Seriana)

Samy Benammar

<p>Mom, you brought me back to our homeland. All I know about these harsh landscapes I learned from books written by the hand that burned these mountains. I try to undo the colonial myths engraved into my memory, but the hills escape my gaze. Do you think I, too, have become the white djinn spoken of by the legends surrounding our martyrs?&#39;Avant Seriana&#39; is an essay film shot in Super 8 in the Aur&egrave;s region of Algeria. Observing the landscapes of my native land, I realize that they are divided into several images and times. Two different countries are formed: the Algeria of the mountains and an imaginary one born of the tales I&#39;ve read in colonial archives. My gaze no longer belongs to the places where I was hoping to return to my roots.</p>

121280 Ritual

Antoinetta Angelidi

<p>In 1980, Antoinetta Angelidi filmed the birth of her son Petros, as her daughter Rea looked on, cuddling up to her massive belly. It would then take some twenty-eight years for this quarter of an hour of footage to find its final shape and see the light.</p> <p><em>&ndash; Olaf M&ouml;ller</em></p>

Idees Fixes / Dies Irae

Antoinetta Angelidi

<p>As a creator of alternative and poetic cinema, Antouanetta Angelidi combines her knowledge of film history with universal artistic language while maintaining her unique personal form. In an experimental exploration of gender, the film employs not only cinematic language but also music, language, sound, architecture, poetry, and body language, incorporating a magnificent meta-narrative of concrete and abstract ideologies about intellectual and political extremism. Based on an exploration of contrasts between the dipole of reality and art/masculinity and femininity, this film examines the variations on the same subject through a striking, paradoxical, black-and-white audiovisual collage.</p>

In the Fishtank

Linnea Nugent

<p>A triptych contemplation of nature&#39;s mystery through earthly scenes.</p>

Extinction Story Origin Story

Terrie Samundra

<p>On their way home from school one day, two young girls find themselves in a haunted desert.</p>

Hinkelten

Svetlana Romanova

<p>Constructed out of personal poems and notes, xиӈкэлтэн poses questions about image production&#39;s intersection with creation of narratives, that are embedded now in our perception of contemporaneity and manifest themselves in our performances of ideas and feelings like love. Positioned in the Yakutian Arctic, this visual essay invites the viewer to ask vital questions in relation to peripheral discourse that seems to be inseparable in relation to the etymology of the word itself - Arctic, and how does the western ontologies in relation to intimacy are fitting in immediate Yakutian realities.</p>

Unspeakable Heap

Kara Hansen

<p>An accumulation of histories is explored via the filmmaker&rsquo;s uncle, a retired Grego-Roman Olympian wrestler who lives in a sinking house built atop a decommissioned landfill.</p>

Manzareh, Moalagh (Landscape Suspended)

Naghmeh Abbasi

<p>Under the pretext of a police interrogation, this film shows the politically charged history of Shaho mountain of the Zagros Mountains range in Iran.</p>

Thief Or Reality

Antoinetta Angelidi

<p>Three different characters experiment their own version of reality while a Thief connects their stories and visions throughout space and time.</p>

UNDR

Kamal Aljafari

<p>Helicopter footage examines the desert, surveying ancient natural formations and human interventions. Dynamite changes the face of the land. Farmers work their fields. Children play hide-and-seek. Employing archival footage,&nbsp;<strong>UNDR</strong>&nbsp;constructs an eerie narrative of calculated incursion. We cannot help but recall that Palestine remains a land subjected to aerial surveillance that seeks to appropriate the landscape.</p>

Familiar Phantoms

Søren Lind Larissa Sansour

<p>Familiar Phantoms is an experimental documentary short film about memory, history and trauma. Familiar Phantoms is inspired by anecdotes from Sansour&rsquo;s own family history and her old childhood in Bethlehem, making it her most personal film to date. Combining live action scenes, Super 8 footage and private photos, the editing mimics the workings of memory, constantly revisiting the same imagery alongside new fragments in search of meaning. The live action scenes are shot in a derelict mansion, serving as the seat of memory. In the rooms, vignettes are played out, adding a theatrical dimension, enlarging and exaggerating the narrative components, just as memory perpetually reworks, reinforces, adds and subtracts.</p>

A Visit With Robert

Luke Fowler

<p>In Spring 2013 I was artist in residence at Dartmouth College in New England. This was a vital time for me developing films and projects with artists Toshiya Tsunoda, Christian Wolff and Larry Polanski. I recently discovered a roll I shot during this time - whilst on a visit to the Cape with Robert. The occasion stuck in my memory because of a particularly infection I had caught which made me reticent to travel or do anything. I recall Robert encouraging me to come anyway and to use my Bolex as a way of counter-acting the virus and my general state of malaise.</p>

Eros

Rachel Daisy Ellis

<p>Brazil&#39;s love motels are a sexual haven where fantasy becomes reality. When the filmmaker&#39;s own date never shows up, she gets a fresh idea for a film instead. The result is a kaleidoscopic insight into a parallel world of human desire.</p>

The Hours — A Square Film

Antoinetta Angelidi

<p>Memory as construction and as internal pulse. Spendo, on the edge of suicide, re-lives her life, re-constructs it and, finally, liberates herself. Sadness flows and fills the space. The hours co-exist and intertwine. The world: a flesh-eating mechanism. A descend begins, a rhythmic immersion into the depths of memory, where the evil appears in the form of good. Until memory no longer repeats itself. The hours are noiselessly formed anew.</p>

"Trolley Times"

Gurvinder Singh

<p>In September 2020, the Indian government passed three acts, known colloquially as farm laws, that sought to reform the way farmers sold their produce to the market. This triggered a series of non-violent protests across the country, with farmers chiefly from Punjab and Haryana marching towards New Delhi demanding a repeal of the laws. Prevented from entering the capital, they set up camps along highways, forming a veritable community that sustained the protests for over a year.</p> <p>IFFR regular Gurvinder Singh returns to the festival with his first documentary feature&nbsp;<strong>&quot;</strong><strong>Trolley Times&quot;</strong>, an unvarnished grassroots record of the protests that borrows its title from the newspaper printed and distributed at the camping site. The farmers recount their grievances directly to the camera, their words conveying a truth absent from state-aligned mainstream media, their timeworn, dignified faces familiar from Singh&rsquo;s fictional work.</p> <p>The film, however, accompanies the farmers even after the protests, observing family reunions, the resumption of agricultural work and peacetime domestic life with an unusual candour. Relentless and uncompromising,&nbsp;<strong>&quot;</strong><strong>Trolley Times&quot;</strong>&nbsp;demonstrates its courage not only in cataloguing the protestors&rsquo; ardent testimonies, but also in breaking free from established notions of what political documentaries should look like.</p> <p><em>&ndash;&nbsp;Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>

Abefele

Amir George

<p>Abefele is a meditation on artistic and spiritual duality interpreted through the sport of fencing.</p>

On the Battlefield

Little Egypt Collective Theresa Delsoin Lisa Marie Malloy J.P. Sniadecki Ray Whitaker

<p>The first release by Little Egypt Collective stages a sound recordist reconnecting with the flat fields where once stood Pyramid Courts &ndash; the housing projects that formed the heart of the Black community of the Little Egypt region of southern Illinois.</p>

Map to the Sirens

Demetrius Antonio Lewis

<p>An exploration of the landscapes and history of the American South through the eyes of rideshare drivers</p>

ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong

Daphne Xu

<p>The ping pong table at Seward Park in New York City and the in-between space of a Cold War. An immigration lawyer advises on how to tell the truth.</p>

Khabur (Xabûr)

Nafis Fathollahzadeh

<p>In this piece, which acknowledges the colonial, extractive register of archaeology, the experience of an artifact as it is transported from Syria to a museum in Berlin is imagined.</p>

Moonblack

Aldo Tambellini

<p>&quot;Moonblack,&quot; directed by Aldo Tambellini in 1969, is part of his &quot;Black Film Series.&quot; The film explores abstract imagery through Tambellini&#39;s distinctive manipulation of the film stock using techniques like painting directly on celluloid. The visuals convey themes of darkness, transformation, and the cosmos, blending avant-garde imagery with political undertones.</p>

Black TV

Aldo Tambellini

<p>&quot;Black TV&quot; is Aldo Tambellini&rsquo;s most famous work: a dual projection sensorial hell, waves of terror over the repetitive death proclamation of Robert F. Kennedy&rsquo;s assassination. Despite the contemporary political context, Black TV is a mirror into the depths of the void that is universally familiar. This program ends with Black TV to commemorate the 50 years since Tambellini won an honorable mention at the 1969 Ann Arbor Film Festival. Winner of the 1969 Oberhausen Film Festival.</p>

Black Trip #2

Aldo Tambellini

<p>One of Tambellini&rsquo;s first forays into representational imagery in cinema. Black Trip #2 is a nail bomb of a movie. A fitting companion to Black Plus X and Black TV.</p>

Black Trip #1

Aldo Tambellini

<p>&quot;Black Trip #1&quot; expands upon the painted language of Black Is, now positing the film experience as similar to the sensorial destination of a hallucinatory zone. We see here the beginnings of Tambellini&rsquo;s theories on multi-disciplinary media environments.</p>

Black Plus X

Aldo Tambellini

<p>&quot;Black Plus X&quot; speaks from a place of deep-felt sincerity, inner reflection, and exploration. It reflects what it is to be a loving accomplice in the struggle for civil rights and universal human decency. It captures real events without a clear referent in static space, creating one of the most beguiling cinematographic experiments of in-camera multiple exposure.</p>

Black Out

Aldo Tambellini

<p>In &quot;Black Out&quot;, Tambellini&rsquo;s symbolic exploration directly on film reaches its chaotic heights as the painted circle and his iconic spiral intermingle with lattices, light leaks, and concentric circle patterns. &quot;Black Out&quot; is notable for its soundtrack, calling upon the violence of the political now inside of a cosmic hereafter.</p>

Black Is

Aldo Tambellini

<p>Tambellini at first used 35mm slides as a means of projecting handprinted abstract images onto larger spaces, using a carousel projector to control timing. However, due to the limitations of this technique, he sought an alternative method for exploring time. The result, Black Is, uses a cameraless technique on 16mm film. The hand-painted surface of the analog film allowed Tambellini to expand his painterly practice of representing the unfolding cosmic geometries of the circle and the spiral through the extremes of black and white, using ink. The quick mechanization of the projector and the resistance to/breaking of the frame create a percolating rhythm and an esoteric landscape, an expanse that both simulates the speed of memorialized, collective trauma and the extremes of cosmic (and glorious) chaos.</p>

Aida Returns (Le Retour De Aida)

Carol Mansour

<p>This is a sometimes painful, sometimes humorous, often absurd story of multiple journeys: the journey of loss as the director&rsquo;s mother Aida struggled with Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease finding solace in her repeated &ldquo;returning&rdquo; to the Yafa of her youth; the journey of losing a parent; and the ultimate return journey to Yafa where Aida would finally find rest.<br /> After her mother&rsquo;s passing, director Carol Mansour, met friends in Beirut willing to carry Aida back with them to Palestine. The film accompanies Carol as she engineers a way to return her mother aided by an unlikely set of friends and strangers coming together to facilitate what should have been a simple journey. This journey is at the same time very private and yet universal. It is a tribute to the lost past of the director&rsquo;s family, an attempt to restore part of both an individual and a collective memory, and a poetic nod and affirmation to all those exiled Palestinians forbidden from returning to their hometowns, even after death.</p>

Few Can See (2023)

Frank Sweeney

<p>Archive and reenactment tell the story of resistance via television broadcast in 1980s Northern Ireland.</p>

A Radical Duet

Onyeka Igwe

<p>Taking place in post World War II London, the film recreates the radical anti-colonial sphere in the city at that time. Two important figures come together, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and Sylvia Wynter, to imagine a revolutionary play. Mixing narrative reenactment with documentation of the making of the film, A Radical Duet is a radical reworking of archival material and histories.</p>

Εμμονες ώρες στον τόπο της πραγματικότητας (Obsessive Hours at the Topos of Reality)

Rea Wallden

<p>During the long days and nights of Covid-19, filmmaker and theoretician Rea Wallden invited her mother, feminist avant-garde beacon Antoinetta Angelidi, to be part of a film about her art and thoughts. Of course, it was not a normal interview affair &ndash; for that would go against the aesthetic principles Angelidi had long-established for herself. Angelidi has been a filmmaker for more than half a century: she thinks in cinematographic installations and performances and so, Wallden offered her the necessary spaces for that.&nbsp;</p> <p>Very often when talking, Angelidi seems to float in an ocean of darkness.&nbsp;<strong>Obsessive Hours at the Topos of Reality</strong>&nbsp;feels like an invocation or incantation of a past and the ideas that grew from it. The future is unknown but it still needs the nourishments that these first thoughts provide.&nbsp;</p> <p>What becomes present is the portrait of a most unusual artist who was a path-breaker on at least two fronts at the same time. At home in Greece Antoinetta Angelidi is a key figure of the nation&#39;s founding group of moving image artists and in the world, she was one of many female directors trying to define a feminist film language. And she achieved it all!</p> <p><em>&ndash; Olaf M&ouml;ller</em></p>

La Laguna del Soldado (The Soldier's Lagoon)

Pablo Álvarez-Mesa

<p>Reflecting on the construction of oral history and its relation to the land, The Soldier&rsquo;s Lagoon dives into the misty P&aacute;ramo region and offers an elusive living archive that navigates the dense fog separating Sim&oacute;n Bol&iacute;var&rsquo;s past and Colombia&rsquo;s present.</p>

SYZYGY

Akbar Padamsee

<p>Syzygy an eleven-minute silent, black and white film, shot on 35mm made in collaboration with the animator Ram Mohan has been located and digitized. It is an abstract work, inspired by Paul Klee&rsquo;s pedagogical diagrams, for which Padamsee developed his own mathematical pattern, and produced 1000 drawings on transparent cell animation sheets. Each drawing composed of numbers, alphabets, abstract geometric shapes, dots, dashes, was based on a differing configuration generated by his own devised code. Syzygy is a remarkably complex work that Adajania associates with the 1960&rsquo;s experiments of John Cage. When she queried Padamsee about this connection, he acknowledged that he was reading Cage&rsquo;s writings at the time, and was acquainted with the work of Iannis Xenakis.</p>

Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomenon #59

Joost Rekveld

<p>An abstract science fiction film in which, humans, aliens and electronic devices vacillate between the human fever dream of planetary control and lively mechanical chaos.</p>

Contractions (2024)

Lynne Sachs

<p>In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States ended a woman&rsquo;s right to a safe and legal abortion. &#39;Contractions&#39; takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women&rsquo;s health clinic. We listen to an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive justice activist. We watch 14 women who witness and perform with their backs to the camera. In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they speak with the full force of their collective presence.</p>

Malqueridas

Tana Gilbert

<p>With photos and videos taken by prisoners, this raw yet poetic debut film paints a rich picture of hitherto hidden life in a Chilean women&rsquo;s prison. The focus is on mothers serving long sentences. They can keep their babies with them until they are two years old. Then the women lose control over who takes care of their children and whether they will be allowed to have contact with them at all.</p> <p>The experiences of more than 20 mothers have been condensed into a collective memory, recounted through the voices of two women. They talk about powerlessness and longing. The prisoners themselves also give and receive affection and motherly love.</p> <p>The film opens with the cold rattle of a prison door and the warm sounds of a mother singing her child to sleep. A photo of a woman tenderly kissing her baby slowly emerges from the blackness. As well as being extremely intimate and unique, the videos taken secretly with mobile phones are fragmented and imperfect. Yet they are indispensable building blocks in telling this story.</p>

Τόπος (Topos)

Antoinetta Angelidi

<p>In contrast to the titles of Angelidi&rsquo;s other films,&nbsp;<strong>Topos</strong>&nbsp;is simply one word, it suggests in the most general way possible, &lsquo;spaces&rsquo;. Which is, in fact, what we see throughout the film &ndash; spaces. Theatrical spaces usually dedicated to the re-staging of a famous scene or sight from a painting known to experts of the Western canon. Some of these are intricately stage-bound, others feel stylised but are set in a real environment &ndash; Angelidi does not insist on a formal approach.</p> <p>To further muddle the artistic waters a bit, we see here and there projections in the background. Or groups consciously arranged into a&nbsp;<em>tableau vivant</em>&nbsp;in the middle of an already abstract artistic display as if to satirise the concept of artifice itself. So what do all these levels of alienation do to the way we see women&#39;s bodies, how do they warp the idea of beauty &ndash; in which way does pain become a key to female existence? There&#39;s little in cinema quite like&nbsp;<strong>Topos</strong>&nbsp;and surely nothing else that looks at Western art in a similar critical style.</p>

Ma’loul Celebrates Its Destruction

Michel Khleifi

<p>Since the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948, countless Palestinian villages have been erased from the map. MA&#39;LOUL CELEBRATES ITS DESTRUCTION uses poignant images of bombardments, destroyed buildings and disfigured people to illustrate this. All that remains are ruins, bearing silent witness in the landscape. Ma&#39;Loul, just west of Nazareth, is one such ruined village.</p>

Dau:añcut (Moving Along Image)

Adam Piron

<p>The likeness of a relative of the filmmaker surfaces as a tattoo on the arm of a Ukrainian soldier. A U.S. Army post in Oklahoma, built to fight Kiowa and Apache, is rededicated to aid in the fight against Putin&rsquo;s own Western expansion. In&nbsp;<em>Dau:a&ntilde;cut (Moving Along Image)</em>, Adam Piron explores the contradictions of colonialism and anti-settler solidarity across time and geography and in the muddled spaces of TikTok, where representations of Indigenous peoples are caught up in the ongoing and increasingly rapid circulation of images.</p>

Even God

Liz Roberts

<p>All personal archival VHS engaging with a core question of artists in times of chaos: who owns a memory and what is its value? A record of the queer Midwest. Drugs, sex, love, friendship, and a failed Los Angeles movie deal.</p>