Playlist
<p>As he mulls over the budget for his new film, director-gangster Clem sends his artist cronies after an old comrade rumoured to be a leaker.</p>
<p>A calling inhabits the blank pages, unfolding a secret writing of hers. The unseen written traces seep from the murmuring land, pushing through fragmented voices to become new forms—beings made material. Framed as a dialogue with my grandmother, this film explores an alternative form of personal writing by Chinese women in the context of major political events—one that is both absent and abundant. The 'blank' becomes an image, carrying a search for agency: of land transformed, of women unheard, of voids rewritten. By breaking down linguistic structures, the film opens a space for imagining, reading, and performing, allowing for emergence. —Xiao Zhang</p>
<p>A hand-scratched text film, a constitutional transcription, a misaligned translation, and a legal code of undefined territory, carved at 24 frames per second within Taiwan’s ongoing troubled history. —Hsin-Yu Chen</p>
<p>This film draws its imagery from a series of hand-processed 35mm film stills, featuring textures with specific qualities collected by the artist during her travels through various natural environments. These images are then meticulously layered through slow dissolves in post-production, seeking to activate the image’s immanent potential to generate the indeterminate sensations. "Before everything has a name" is not an imagination of the past or future, but a perceptual mode and state of existence that can be experienced in the present moment - something that may arrive at any time, yet cannot be summoned by will. In this unnamed place, language has not yet taken shape, concepts have not yet been constructed, and naming has not yet severed the interconnections among all things.—An-li dīng</p>
<p>After September 11th, an Iraqi filmmaker living in the west spends her days at home, questioning her own life choices and sense of belonging in a world that has gone astray. —Nadia Shihab</p>
<p>Blending fiction and documentary, Aisha (Surviving) follows the gaze of an Arab-American filmmaker making a film about her immigrant cousin -- a woman whose inner voice slowly disrupts the orientalizing narrative, revealing an emotional landscape marked by estrangement, cultural dissonance, and desire. —Nadia Shihab</p>
<p>A story within a story, fragments from the filmmaker's life in post civil-war Beirut lead into a fictional tale of two lovers and fatal madness. Soon, the male narrator's authority is interrupted by a female voice who recounts her own version of the story. —Nadia Shihab</p>
<p>In 1940, on the dry westside of Kauaʻi, the Kekaha Sugar Company began a six-month mail-order film subscription with World Enterprises, an Oʻahu-based distributor—screening films for workers on their Sundays off from harvesting and processing sugarcane. The films, produced on the continent, ranged from John Wayne westerns and anti-union public service announcements to DuPont Chemical industrial shorts. Varied in style, the films shared a common theme: American power taming lands and peoples of the “frontier” through extraction, an encroachment justified by declared ideals of progress. These narratives attempted to codify American absorption as inevitable—meanwhile Asian immigrant laborers were actively exploring socialist futures that incorporated Kānaka Maoli sovereignty and imagined an independent, multiracial nation. WORLD ENTERPRISES is a collage of radical possibilities sourced entirely from the original 1940 film program. —Anthony Banua-Simon </p>
<p>In her new experimental moving image work The Glass Booth, artist Jenny Brady casts a cinematic gaze on the figure of the interpreter, exploring the interpreting profession and the contemporary landscape of interpretation. Through vignettes set in both extreme and familiar environments, the film portrays the processes of listening, speaking, and forgetting within acts of formal and informal interpretation. This film is a study of the complex, intersubjective nature of interpreters’ work, placing them at the centre, rather than intermediaries that blend into the background. Brady seeks to illuminate the interpretive act – an elaborate, sensory process of listening, decoding and responding. —Aisling Clark</p>
<p>This archival documentary (without archival footage) remediates primary sources of an American right-wing political strategist's rise within the Republican establishment in the context of his origins as a "leftist documentary filmmaker." Audio describing the films he made for broadcast on PBS and continues to release on his Youtube channel, while denying their original sound or images, the film examines the usefulness of documentary infrastructures to right-wing media strategy in waging culture war, from alarmingly successful attacks on critical race theory, DEI, and Black women in positions of leadership to the US government's mass deportation campaign.—Jordan Lord</p>
<p>For most of her life, filmmaker Lynne Sachs has collected business cards that strangers pulled from their wallets and placed in her hand. She sometimes remembers the precise moment they were offered to her, other times they are a mystery. Now in this digital era, being in the same space with others happens less and less. Sachs selects seven cards from hundreds and throws herself into finding out how and why certain people left an imprint on her consciousness. When she is able, she embraces clues and seeks out reunions. But when there is no trace, she gambles with imaginary histories and futures. A lifetime of tactile, face-to-face encounters reminds her of identities passed from hand to hand. —Kino Rebelde</p>
<p>A conceptual film in which Ando has assembled shots—all of equal duration—of his friends, in the order they are listed in his address book. —Light Cone</p>
<p>Computer Chess was released in 2013, after being filmed entirely on three Sony AVC 3260’s which were custom-fitted with an extra BNC outlet to make a stable, recorded image possible. Ultimately, one of the 3260’s was the main workhorse, as the 2:1 signal in the other two were less reliable. Matthias Grunsky would describe the camera as having a “...transcendental character,” which endures as a representation of the Sony AVC 3250. sitrep, which will be making its debut in 2026, uses the 3250 as its foremost camera, with the Sony FX6 as the digital intermediary. Filmed almost entirely inside of an abandoned dialysis center, the project makes work of worldbuilding through encompassing tape loops and mismatches in frequency and frame rate to produce varied flicker lines, whereas Computer Chess transforms a murky hotel into uncanny chess tournament sprawl. Beyond Bujalski’s precision in nailling the period, the 3260 itself is an apt co-conspirator in slipping the piece into an idiosyncratic otherworld. The common denominator is the ⅔ inch tube. The evident draw is in the utility of the tube camera, and it is also in how these projects use inverse methods to speak to time, whether as a phonetic marker in sitrep, or an approximation of period in Computer Chess. There is also chronological resonance with the 1969 AVC 3260 being used in 2013, and its successor, the 1974 AVC 3250 being used in 2025 —Blair Barnes</p>
<p>The search for truth behind a grandmother’s mysterious disappearance, the stories told to shield the innocence of childhood begin to unravel. A retracing of her final moments, exploring where myth and fate begin to converge. An ascent to a heaven, imaging the space between where spirits linger. As her family gathers, the sacred burial rites, a final act of guidance, a chance to move beyond the dream realm and into the spiritual realm.—Judah Iyunade</p>
<p>The Gnawa inhabit ordinary and non-ordinary worlds, their music and song creating spaces passageways between the two. This experimental non-fiction video gives a glimpse of such a passage through a brief encounter with Mustafa, a musician who lives in Rabat, Morocco.</p>
<p>A mandala for falling monuments, for falling into relation, for opening the heart to the frequency of love in revolt. Surrendur transmits the stories of Mike Forcia (Bad River Anishinaabe), the American Indian Movement activist who orchestrated the toppling of a monument to Christopher Columbus, and Ta Pe'juta Wičháȟpi Win (Hunkpati Dakota Oyate), whose political consciousness was awoken when she danced around the fallen statue with her daughter. Energies of the George Floyd Uprising, Anishinaabe Seven Fires Prophecy, and Dakota 38+2 Memorial Ride are conducted through director Karthik Pandian’s unique style of editing nonsynchronous 16mm film and sound. Oscillating between intimate conversation and kinetic montage, Surrendur traces the riverine network of migration and homecoming, chance encounter and carefully cultivated collaboration that drew Pandian into deep relation with Forcia, Win, and other luminous activists and artists from Minneapolis, the heart of revolt at the center of Turtle Island. —Karthik Pandian</p>
<p>This almost went in the trash because it’s a poor image. It’s self-conscious and struggling to not be so poor, kind of angry about it. It’s also a shadow companion to MERCURIAL MATTER made at a time I held a job upstairs ingesting filmmaker (and former AFA projectionist) Stom Sogo’s mind-bending Super-8mm films.</p>
<p>Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is born in Korea in 1951; when she is thirteen, her family moves to the United States. Her immigrant experience proves formative for her work as a visual artist and writer; she grapples with cultural and linguistic forms of rootlessness and explores the importance of language and the loss of a language for the formation of personal identity. Mouth to Mouth is an intimate video sketch in which Cha represents the alienation from her native Korean language as an inner struggle. The video opens with an image of writing: the camera slowly pans over letters spelling out the English words of the title. Then the artist’s mouth appears in an extreme close-up shot. Her lips form the eight Korean vowels without audibly pronouncing them. White noise gradually swallows up the mouth. Any suggestion of spoken language is drowned out by ambient sounds—flowing water, birdsong. The video conveys a kind of inner conflict: one the one hand, the imposed silence over the mother tongue; on the other hand, the artist’s almost physical need to express herself in this same, her primary, language. (JT)</p>
<p>Night Swing is a short experimental 16mm film by TT Takemoto, created as part of a curated filmmaking exercise where the only constraint was working on 16mm film. The work was presented alongside other newly created films and archival works in a program associated with SFMOMA’s Print Generations cohort screening (February 22, 2026). The film is understood as part of a broader exploration of material film practice, performance, and experimental image-making rather than a conventional narrative structure.</p>
<p>A series of video oscillator to 16mm film tests shot one frame at a time in the middle of the night. —Mike Stoltz</p>
<p>The ceiling resides in silence. Light, sound, and electricity live within it. It is a silent, service-oriented structure, a highway of energy flow between objects within the space. It is both overshadowed agency and a passage, supporting the hidden mechanisms of daily life. The film is shot using the Data Copilot film-device. King’s Cross (N1C 4XX) standard domestic electricity estimates (2015-2023) [from Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, UK Goverment] are collected to randomly send signals to the device, allowing the Bolex camera to autonomously alter its shooting speed and timeline direction, deconstructing the traditional concept of camera frame rates and linear one-way filming. Within the relationship of the filming machine’s autonomous conversation with the ceiling structure, send self becomes the meaning of it produce-calling for recognition and contact between subjects, transcending the subjective experience of a single subject. It hopes to release the electricity moving inside the ceiling from its quiet, passive, and service-bound role. —Hu Didi</p>
<p>The world emerges from the chaos of the tamago (egg) and emerges into the cycles of the sun to moonlight to sunlight. —Kioto Aoki</p>
<p>Mounds Above the Earth contemplates ecological cycles, perception, and environmental transformation, anchored in the rare emergence of two periodical cicada broods surfacing simultaneously for the first time in more than two centuries. The film follows the flicker of red—through the cicadas’ developing eyes, a blood moon, and an ancient fable.</p>
<p>Images out of their intended context create new context, and also provide us the perception to be able to see which were there but not seen in its own context. This work is a process of research on the world which is familiar, but at the same time full of mysteries. This film is based on the abandoned images with variable reasons. I hoped the images would be free from the logic of selection. At the same time, I was curious about the world which is full of mysteries, always richer than the personal perception. —Lee Jangwook</p>
<p>A short in-camera sequence of play between the filmmaker and a matte box. The inversion of the body is a familiar and natural state in gymnastics, where handstands (逆立ち / sakadachi in Japanese) are an essential part of the physical lexicon. Camera obscuras share a similar state: the image is upside down. In both handstands and camera obscuras, the inverted body is the correct orientation. —Kioto Aoki</p>
<p>Apertured voyages, orbs of light, and memories of migration summon a clairvoyant into the big city, confounding a sense of place through blurred and distant recollection. —Alan Medina</p>
<p>A lost forest spirit named Archura explores New York and tries to find a home while confronting an urban landscape that is rapidly taken over by luxury developments. —Yusuf Demirors</p>
<p>This fast-paced examination of Black women's struggles to assert their own positive self-images features two female characters who seem to represent archetypical extremes. The film is a visual feast, set up as a series of scenes and dialogues between poles of dark and light complexions. The women act out ways in which Black women challenge archaic values associated with hair texture, skin tone and the like. Grounded in a fresh, witty script, the film tackles serious issues with assistance from the Wee Papa Girl Rappers. —Third World Newsreel</p>
<p>Inspired by the renowned poet Terayama. A young boy is in love with the sunset. One day, he decides to steal a piece of the sky. He pulls out a pair of scissors and reaches them toward the heavens. Thus begins his journey through time, space, and memory. The seasons change; the years pass. Enveloped within a mysterious box of captured sunset, the boy grows older—becoming an adolescent, a young man, an adult, and finally an old man—yet, strangely enough, his memories also begin to take on a life of their own. "What is memory? What is reverie? What is real, and what is imaginary? I no longer know..." —Light Cone</p>
<p>A gay poem, clearly inspired by Cocteau, concerning the ambiguous relationships between a man and his two adopted sons. A reverie on sublimation, repetition, and death. The imagery and the characters' movements are attenuated, yet the mood is sensual. The soundtrack is in Japanese, but the text—rendered visually—is in French. —Tony Rayns</p>
<p>The images multiply and stretch into the distance through an electrical effect; they are comparable to the breaths of life. —Light Cone</p>
<p>Time. In “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, Gabriel García Márquez describes a train so long that it takes a year to pass through a station. This film consists of the image of a train passing through a bush at the back of Ando’s garden. It was shot from the same fixed angle over the course of six months, spanning the seasons. —Tony Rayns</p>
<p>Space. Inspired by photographs of Winston Link (Night Trick), this film is composed of images of trains passing by a house. Trains are seen from inside the house in a variety of viewing angles. The film lists all possible perspectives on the passing train and becomes a metaphor of cinema.—Light Cone</p>
<p>Des stars japonaises hurlent: la guerre! —Light Cone (Japanese stars shout: War! —Light Cone)</p>
<p>Inspired by the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad and laced with the cinematic DNA of Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky, Isabelle Kalander’s feature debut from Tajikistan is a startlingly beautiful and downright magical mountain village fable.</p>
<p>"It's a distraction for many, a profession for a few, when for me sport is my whole life. And if fighting is the reason you're living. If every muscle clamors : train me, exercise, put on a sprint. Find a competitor or at least fight against a pole. It's hard to get started but it's otherwise difficult to stop. Even with your back against the mat. Never mind. You have to stand up and go further. You will now have to fight against yourself." Transforming Olympic wrestling and pole vaulting Soviet films from the 1980s into expressive, painterly imagery, the film appears as a film practitioner's decathlon. —Charles-André Coderre</p>
<p>Does movement reveal memory? Faceless hands breathe in and out of the image, as if with a mind of their own, thinking, dreaming, remembering. Their performance eventually morphs into ritual; lyrical, suggestive fragments of gestures, ultimately becoming a mosaic enquiry of thought, action, intention and meaning. —Vanij Choksi</p>
<p>A performer descends the stairs. Direct film mattes frame glimpses of the motion. Phase-looping duplicates the glimpses into a cascade of humanity. A game played with colour separations, motion following hand scratched and painted mattes and a perpetual descending figure. —Dianna Barrie and Richard Tuohy</p>
<p>Finding accord amongst the photosensitive inhabitants of Frankfurt's Palmengarten as they absorb, transform and transfer the late summer light. Edited in camera. —Blanca García and James Devine</p>
<p>Inspired by Rosalie 'Rose' Bamberger (1921-1990), the mixed-race Filipina American paintbrush maker and co-founder of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in 1955. When DOB shifted their focus to becoming the first US lesbian political rights organization, Rose and her partner Rosemary faded from the historical record. What they truly sought was a 'secret society for lesbians' -- a space to dance, drink, and dine without fear of police raids. —TT Takemoto</p>
<p>An outsider from the future gets hold of a lost archive, sending us on a journey following associative clues in the movement of infinite yearnings. —Xiaolu Wang</p>
<p>This film emerged from footage originally captured for a feature documentary on enforced disappearances among Sri Lanka’s Tamil population—specifically, an interview with a mother whose son vanished in the war’s final stages. In revisiting this footage, I also revisit the challenges of representing this particular testimony, which eluded me, one that could not be fully conveyed within the framework of the original film. This iteration reshapes the original context, exploring the divide between me and her, the intersection of ethnographic and colonial perspectives, and questioning cinema’s ability to bear witness. Through silence, rupture, and absence, the film attends not only to what can be shown, but to what remains unreachable, withheld, or lost. The text read in the film was sourced from Robert Gardner’s memoir, The Impulse to Preserve. —Rajee Samarasinghe</p>
<p>A Bundle of Silences is an experimental documentary that circles around the 1983 Águila Blanca heist, when the Puerto Rican pro-independence revolutionary group Los Macheteros expropriated $7 million from a Wells Fargo depot in Hartford, Connecticut. At its center are two figures who remain out of reach: Víctor Gerena, the Puerto Rican employee who carried out the robbery and vanished beyond the FBI’s grasp, and his mother, Gloria Gerena, a community organizer, social worker and advocate for bilingual education who passed away in 2022. —Sofía Gallisá Muriente</p>
<p>Through the circular dynamics of departure and arrival, arrival and departure, the ethnographic moving image observes the Black body in a circular state of transition, foregrounding its historical and metaphysical relation to the transatlantic through spirit, rhythm, and loop. Water functions simultaneously as memory, conduit, and an epistemological site of liminality. The crossing emerges as a structuring metaphor for the formation of modernity and, simultaneously, the moment of trance—arriving and departing—echoed through syncretic religion and ritual transformed within the New World. —Darryl Daley</p>
<p>Inspired by The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 1964: The fact that there is an enhancement of contours has long been known; in fact it is a remarkable thing that has been commented on by psychologists many times. In order to draw an object, we have only to draw its outline. How used we are to looking at pictures that have only the outline! What is the outline? The outline is only the edge difference between light and dark or one color and another. It is not something definite. It is not, believe it or not, that every object has a line around it! There is no such line. It is only in our own psychological makeup that there is a line; we are beginning to understand the reasons why the “line” is enough of a clue to get the whole thing. Presumably our own eye works in some similar manner—much more complicated, but similar.</p>
<p>A documentary crew take a pub crawl through 1990s Derry (N. Ireland), observing the young revellers who give themselves to the night while the eyes of the security forces watch on. Using archive, ‘That sanity be kept’ explores being young, being watched and getting drunk during a ceasefire. —Michael Barwise</p>
<p>During a casting session, an actress auditions to play a shrimp. As her performance unravels, so does her certainty. Watching from behind the glass, the shrimp begin to question not only her, but also what it means to be represented — and whether something truly real can ever be performed. —Ka Ki Wong</p>
<p>How shall I cater best to your desire for me to be visible? Set up as a confessional-cum-guided meditation, My Structuralist Film uses performance artist Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performance (“Time Clock Piece”) as a framework to illustrate the filmmaker's (presumable) insides. How thoroughly should a trans body want or need to be visible? On what terms is the filmmaker obligated to narrativize, perform, or even fabricate visibility for the sake of an audience? Considering the limits and limitations of disclosure, this project positions the act of looking not as an offering or an exchange, but as an unyielding neoliberal, capitalist thirst to consume the trans body, to literally see from the inside. —Angelo Madsen</p>
<p>Need help? Crashouts, manifestation influencers and injury lawyers collide in this breakneck ride through the Midwest. 50 years after attorney ads were first legalized in the U.S., their ubiquitous self-portraits (allegedly) invoke a churn-and-burn economy of volume, velocity, fears and veneers. —Eislow Johnson</p>
<p>Like two snakes chasing each other’s tails, time wriggles forward and backwards in Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s surrealist satire. In 2001, a pair of young investigators wander a mansion that is haunted by both its eastern relics and their western collector. Meanwhile, in the present day, they are watched by The Therapists, two Lululemon-clad researchers following metaphysical wellness rituals. A mysterious lo-fi kaleidoscope, with cameos by Condoleezza Rice, Shah Jahan, and Brendan Fraser. —Lev Kalman, Whitney Horn</p>
<p>In April 2023, biologists published a study proving that plants emit sounds when subjected to various types of stress. These ultrasonic sounds remind me of the silence of our time, burying suffering. Bursts of flowers flicker along a filmstrip, just before or right after the flames. —Samy Benammar</p>
<p>A group of travelers attempts to complete the endless ascent. Endless Ascent is an expanded cinema piece combining the electroacoustic music of Merlin Campbell and the 16mm projections of Félix Caraballo. The experiment is based on the reuse of several found footage films from institutional archives. —Félix Caraballo</p>
<p>Remnants of hand processing enhances the dancing flames visible between relevés. —Kioto Aoki</p>
<p>On June 15, 1960, Michiko Kanba, a student member of Zengakuren, died during a demonstration against the Anpo Treaty at the National Diet, following a clash with riot police. She was 22 years old. —Vincent Guilbert</p>
<p>Young love and intertwined lives in Taipei in a romantic and charming debut film with a colossal creative energy that dissolves the boundary between fiction and reality - just like when you are in love.</p>
<p>On the outskirts of an isolated mining town, Lázaro discovers a dead body. He thinks he has a respiratory illness and doesn’t want to go back to the mine. Rumours, suspicion and desire surround him.</p>
<p>Darkness settles over Little Egypt. Brielle, Karri, and Nunu wander among the limestone outcrops and sandstone spires. In a cave that hid freedom seekers along the Underground Railroad, their uncle shares a story of a creature that stirs at night.</p>
<p>An affectionate portrait of the forgotten town of Tapoleng, where church once served as a sanctuary for its residents during the old apartheid order. Here, a new religion emerges – one tethered to a new spiritual practice, community and self-determination. Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi’s prismatic directorial feature debut unfolds in her hometown of Tapoleng, a small village in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Let Them Be Seen examines a region renowned for its dense concentration of churches – a legacy of long-standing missionary indoctrination. It’s also an area forgotten by the new order in the post-apartheid era. Through an intriguing blend of documentary, absurdism and satire, the film follows the inhabitants of Tapoleng as they redefine their spiritual ties and forge new beliefs rooted in ancestral traditions. Mkulisi’s gaze is at once sharp and affectionate, intimately exploring the residents’ daily lives within spaza shops, informal gatherings and their homes.</p>
<p>Arthur Rimbaud’s ghost wanders through history, meeting revolutionary figures such as Emma Goldman, David Wojnarowicz and Marsha P. Johnson. A layered collage of encounters questioning identity, revolution and the role of the artistic avant-garde.</p>
<p>Onyeka Igwe’s new film work is a post-colonial analysis that unfolds the complex history of a university in Nigeria, built under imperial rule.</p>
<p>Afterlives delves into the historical traces of extremist propaganda and the efforts of those resisting its violent impact. The film explores how to confront the violence encoded in this media, reaching beyond its toxic effects to engage with power structures spanning from the colonial past to the digital age. Moving between virtual and physical environments, it introduces us to an artist, an activist and a researcher. Each of these individuals use the legacy of violent extremism to create new images and narratives that offer new possibilities for the future.</p>
<p>"Leather Graves" is an experimental 16mm film that explores the permeable boundaries between queer exile and queer utopia. Cruising amongst gravestones engraved with references to queer culture and sexuality, queers defy death by devouring candy-coated blossoms.</p>
<p>Through distant observation of people walking on desire lines, a filmmaker notices a pattern in peoples tendency to cut corners, and reflects on what this might mean for the future of our planet.</p> <p>‘Desire Lines’ are the official name given to the unofficial paths created as a consequence of erosion by human or animal footfall. These paths usually represent the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination.</p> <p>What do desire lines say about human nature and our attitude towards the changing climate? Are we doomed to always take the path of least resistance? Or can we still be saved by collectively forging a new path together?</p>
<p>A 16mm film installation responding to legacies of Scottish colonialism and slavery in Guyana through archival research, matrilineal lines and sewing.</p>
<p>Between bare concrete walls, unfinished structures and stalled escalators, an otherworldly, gleaming metallic figure emerges. What was once imagined as a thriving city centre now stands unfinished and abandoned. Modernity has rushed past itself, indifferent to the original landscape and its local inhabitants. Shot on expired 16mm black-and-white Lucky film stock, which is today almost exclusively used for aerial surveillance.</p>
<p>After her mother’s death, Nao retreats to a Zen temple to wrestle with grief. Blending family archives, hand-drawn animation and performance art, this seductively meditative documentary explores suffering, and the gentle art of transcending it.</p>
<p>Trapped in museum archives, Ancestors bend time and space to find their way home. History, spirituality, and the law collide as tribal repatriation specialists fight to return and rebury Indigenous human remains, offering a revealing look at the still-pervasive worldviews that justified collecting them in the first place. Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] documents the emotional and vital work of MACPRA (Michigan Anishinaabek Cultural Preservation and Repatriation Alliance). This alliance, made up of repatriation specialists representing all Michigan tribes, fights to bring their Ancestors and funerary objects home from settler colonial institutions like museums, libraries, and archives. Adam and Zack Khalil’s monumental and formally daring film follows the pressing struggle to rebury Indigenous human remains that have been held in sterile storage, laying bare the history of Indigenous collections and the battle to recognize and enforce the laws intended to facilitate their repatriation to the communities they were originally stolen from. Using an essayistic approach alongside vérité portraits, the film celebrates the courageous individuals who carry out this hard and emotionally draining labor of return. — AP</p>
<p>Reverie and observation forge relations among a fire lookout in California and a landscape painter in London — with a concern for how media technology impacts representations of forest fires and the experience of witnessing with one’s own eyes.</p>
<p>ANOMALIES DANS LE PAYSAGE is a film in four tableaux – four audivisual landscapes that unfold in all their strangeness. Spices, leaves and local seaweed reveal and imbue with their hues this film shot and developed on the very banks of the Magtogoek/St. Lawrence river.</p>
<p>Set over the course of a weekend tournament for chess software programmers thirty-some years ago, <em>Computer Chess</em> transports viewers to a nostalgic moment when the contest between technology and the human spirit seemed a little more up for grabs. We get to know the eccentric geniuses possessed of the vision to teach a metal box to defeat man, literally, at his own game, laying the groundwork for artificial intelligence as we know it and will come to know it in the future.</p>
<p>A French academic is seduced into a world of untold histories in her scholarly quest to uncover the mystery of a history-capturing camera-like machine created by clandestine Benedictine monks. An academic-noir, armchair mystery in the lineage of Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco.</p>
<p>Rhayne Vermette’s (Ste. Anne, NYFF59) newest feature spins an eerie tale about humanity’s uneasy relationship with the natural world, featuring a mysterious narrative, tactile visuals, and dense soundscapes.</p>
<p>A director blames the failed shoot on personal feelings toward the actor. The actor auditions for a role in a shamanic tale about a goblin that’s entered a woman’s body. The story is told twice, solely from one person’s point of view, but differently.</p>
<p>In between cities, I think of home. But I wonder if there’s even such a thing. One day, two ladybugs stopped on my index finger. I let them stay for a while.</p>
<p>Granite tors scattered over 20 square kilometers around Tooborac in central Victoria dance in energetic celebration of their own endurance.</p>
<p>This video installation explores Changgyeonggung, a strange place where a zoo, amusement park, and palaces coexist. After uncovering its tragic history, the place – once associated with childhood memories – is stripped of its emotional appeal.</p>
<p>35mm of collaged film material reading like a diary without linear thought or narrative. A hodgepodge of photographic images spliced and taped with ecstatic handmade explosions of colour and texture. A fragmentary experience that revels in the material and provides an opaque and impenetrable portrait of the maker.</p>
<p>A dreamlike, fantastical drift around a fractured identity, with dazzling visual inventions. Like a diary that visually conveys a state of being between two worlds.</p>
<p>This film documents the significant role of Voodoo in Haitian culture from the perspectives of Voodoo priests, government officials, historians and politicians. Attacked by Western clerics and declared a "superstition" by law in 1935, Voodoo has always been a source of empowerment for the average Haitian. And scholars argue that despite the exploitation, romanticization and vilification of voodoo, it remains an authentic and stabilizing cultural base of everyday Haitian society.</p>
<p>A mesmerizing visual journey across Spain, Lithuania, and Austria transforms natural scenery through vibrant Technicolor techniques, creating a stunning interplay of vivid hues and shadows.</p>
<p>Light cracks and chemical abrasions on a celluloid wandering. Each immutable essence disintegrates with every frame, slowly waning into no-selfhood. The old man and the old woman wilt in the candlelight.</p>
<p>Stitch the Ruin weaves microscopic views of used textiles, focusing on stitching and tags. It explores time, labor, and the socialist structure of feeling shaped by workers, alongside a list of shut factories—some named after heroines of the Antifascist Women’s Front.</p>
<p>African American composer Julius Eastman’s music and voice take turns. Sparked by colonial and life history. Raw, radical, crystal clear. A multipart, flashy, transnational-collective performance by six artists. An homage.</p>