Playlist
<p>A visit to the National Archives brings up a family history of internment and dispossession, traced through photographs and records.</p>
<p>A haunting exploration of familial bonds, intergenerational memory, and the enduring impact of shared narratives. Filmmaker Kamila Kuc steps into the emotional stream of inherited family history as the lines between documentary, testimony, and fiction blur. She performs acts of bearing witness not just for herself but also on behalf of her grandmother. Together, they testify to their experiences and the reverberations these stories have over time. I Was There is a palimpsest - a layered tapestry where past and present intertwine in the intimate process of activating memory and vulnerability as forms of resistance. It honors the testimonial object inherited from ancestors and the living connection that binds generations in the shared pursuit of justice and healing.</p>
<p>A jovial and dreamy rumination on love. On time passing. On what we collect, what we hold on to, and how we maintain connection to home, place, to ourselves.</p>
<p>A 16mm film portrait of the filmmaker’s mother, shot in-camera.</p>
<p>The origin story of my mother’s struggle with manic-depression (aka bipolar disorder): the rural prairie in the 1950s, an old boys’ club of “deciders,” a puzzling disease about which little was known.</p>
<p>Lizzy is the result of the days spent in the aftermath of the death of a neighbour, who passed in the house where she had lived out her whole life on the Hillsborough River in Tampa, Florida and who left behind an electric organ addressed to the filmmaker, without a note. To receive it was like a wild riddle.How might one story continue in the hands of another? What powers organize the telling?</p>
<p>Separation, fever dreaming, and a deflated celebration.</p>
<p>A suburb in Southern California comes together to create a community and heal from loss.</p>
<p>A little night music for the eyes. Geometric shapes dance… the rain falls, a storm approaches.</p>
<p>Often working with images from British state archives to reflect on imperial legacies, filmmaker Miranda Pennell, in her third appearance at the festival, takes us to Gaza in December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media raises questions about what it means to be a spectator. What we see and read, beyond the shapes and colors that document reality.</p>
<p>In the film, ‘The Cavalry’, the director travels to Israel, where she was raised, during September 2023 to film the public protests against the Israeli government. During that time she is given access to a secretive section of the police unit, the cavalry, where she documents the desensitization of the imported Friesian horses. The film consists of documentation contrasting horses in a rural setting, the West Bank, an Israeli police unit and manipulated archival footage, depicting a transformation from sensitive singular entities to amalgamations.</p>
<p>Inside an egg, the white and the yellow coexist… but when there is a fracture or rupture between them, each follows its own nature.</p>
<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 — one given presence and depth through sound — and a body as a resounding instrument, which listens to its own vibratory depths and amplifies its feedback.</p>
<p>A film about people who are trying hard to listen, and people who are hardly listening.</p>
<p>A boy, too young to understand his family’s escape from Cold War-era Shanghai, nevertheless grasps something of the journey in the cartoon images that float alongside him.</p>
<p>How can we cancel this displacement?" Impossible questions are posed to refugees, queries that form the springboard for an associative collage with an ironic slant. With a surprising combination of archive material and video game footage, filmmaker Malaz Usta portrays the absurd reality and consequences of displacement. As viewers, we get a taste of the confusion, insecurity and loneliness that are part of this experience.</p>
<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’s own Western expansion. In <em>Dau:añcut (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>
<p>Multiple speeds and moments of migration rendered—from women riding “only women” subway cars, to pilgrims gathering at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, to a slow glide along the ancient Aztec waterways of Xochimilco.</p>
<p>Plays with the fragmented but continuous nature of the experiential, examining the lively tension in landscapes and human relationships with nature. (Cosmic Rays Film Festival)</p>
<p>Honeycreeper is a short film that is part of the larger series of Speculative Speciation: Artificial Anagenesis and Creative Cladogenesis by Jacklyn Brickman and Dr. Sharon Gill, 2023-24.<br /> Since the 1600s, more than 160 species of birds have gone extinct. Not only are those extinctions profound losses in and of themselves, but they also represent devastating losses of what could have been. Over time, would these species have changed, evolving into new species not yet seen? Would these species have diversified into many more different and wonderful forms increasing biodiversity? Speculative Speciation: Artificial Anagenesis and Creative Cladogenesis ponders on what could have been, by employing AI to generate new species descended from the extinct ones, highlighting what has been lost in the past, what continues to be lost in the present and may be lost for future generations.</p>
<p><em>A field guide: Flora evolving with environmental changes, and pollinators utilizing biomimicry. Natural objects are gathered, and sculptures of and from the landscape cast reflections of nature being infinite, self-knowing, and alive. Extinct species and stages of evolution are suggested, accompanied by field recordings capturing the underground soundscape of soil. Bird calls and wingbeats offer greetings and warnings. -A rock, a tree, a human—each dissolving into matter and transmuting into new forms.</em></p>
<p>Elegant and rigorous, while surprisingly playful, Chis Kennedy’s Go Between observes the Brisbane River, passing boats, and cars on the William Jolly Bridge through an intoxicating play of masking and superimpositions.</p>
<p>Searching the artist soul of a filmmaker. Reflections on images past films created, then the camera goes into water... a new perspective on urban areas superimposed over the cosmic. (Cosmic Rays Film Festival)</p>
<p>Streaks of iridescence and dull clatter disintegrate the brutalist architecture of Albany’s Empire State Plaza in Laura Kraning’s ESP as modernist structures glitch, smear, and flicker through the intervention of a faulty inkjet printer, rendering the capital city into a pulsing monochrome tesseract, a sinister grid of light and noise.</p>
<p>Remembering my last visit with Mary in her garden at Rosräth. (Cosmic Rays Film Festival)</p>
<p>In Zachary Epcar’s Sinking Feeling, human bodies and voices are counterposed with the shimmering abstractions, ambient fizzle, and rigid linearity of corporate architecture. A disquieting glimpse into a post-post-modernity of dread and torpor, Sinking Feeling peels back the surfaces of these Ballardian non-places to release pent-up fluids, a stifled longing, a hidden radiance.</p>
<p>A 16mm non-narrative film. A stomach and a slice of cherry pie.</p>
<p>A synaptic celluloid requiem, propelling the High Priestess Aviator Earhart through far-sighted passages of flora, fauna, air, fire and water.</p>
<p>A hand-drawn animation composed of fragments rotoscoped from various films; began with replacing Frankenstein’s monster with a person the filmmaker knows.</p>
<p>The film presents daily dedications to R.G. Springsteen, a minor artisan of the classical Hollywood Western genre. Each segment was initially a private correspondence, sent in fragments to a friend over a few weeks—an ode to R.G. and B.C., celebrating cinema, everyday life, and the cinephilic fantasy of their indistinguishability.</p>
<p>Experimental animation exploring glitches in motion-capture tracking; the sound is a recording of the filmmaker’s feet dragging across the floor.</p>
<p>A portrait of the filmmaker’s mother, framed through her crystals, supplements, jewelry, healing instruments, and household adornments.</p>
<p>Made with thread, chain, beads, tacks, hex nuts, bolts, steel eye pins, hooks, clasps, tracing paper, prints, IKEA paper measure, bobby pins, 35mm photographic film strip, 16mm film strips, nail polish, screenprint, mesh fabric and lace.</p> <p>Painted, screenprinted, cut, stickered, and rayographed with thread, fabric, and metal tools, the filmstrip becomes itself a plastic doll to dress and undress in material. Inspired by Dadaist Man Ray’s classic short film “Le Retour à la raison”, that similarly featured silhouettes of screws and bolts, and by Annabel Nicolson’s performance “Reel Time” (1971), in which the artist ran film through a sewing machine as it was simultaneously being projected. Kazdal’s film updates the tactile film genre with today’s techniques, pairing it with an exhilarating soundscape that rings of absorbent discovery.</p> <p>- Ester Freider Sound by Bo Deurloo Cards and Poster by Lili Fourmestraux</p>
<p>Considers oceanic thinking to connect histories of exploitation and resistance between Pacific and Caribbean islands; combines digital and archival footage, cyanotypes, poetry.</p>
<p>A play on the light, lost in the woods, longing.</p>
<p>In Macau, an opening ceremony celebrates the establishment of the “Coloane Development and Construction Association.”</p>