Cosmic Rays Film Festival 2026

when I close my eyes it’s all I see

Charlotte Taylor

<p>when I close my eyes it&rsquo;s all I see is an experimental film installation by Charlotte Taylor that explores the relationship between photographic chemistry, organic material, and animated imagery. Using silver gelatin chemigram prints created with citrus slices and digital animation, the work investigates perception, transformation, and the visual traces produced through interactions between natural substances and photographic processes. The piece reflects on the hidden images and sensations that emerge through alternative image-making practices.</p>

Jewel Weed

Charlotte Taylor

<p>In an imagined post-apocalyptic Appalachia, we make films in collaboration with plants to share their medicinal wisdom.</p>

Crystal Palace

Linda Izcali Scobie

<p>Two films align as a languid meditation on motion, color, pattern and joy. A collaboration between filmmaker Linda Izcali Scobie and musician John Davis for John&rsquo;s 2024 LP release &ldquo;Landlines&rdquo;.</p>

Allrecipes (Stuffed Manifesto)

David de Rozas

<p>A constellation of fragmented memories and gestures that shape the body, mind, and spirit as layered, shifting, and unresolved sites. Skirting the edge of coherence, the film becomes a space of offering and defiance, where transformation is unstable, leaky, and refuses to stay quiet.</p>

The Phalanx

Benjamin Balcom

<p>Filmed on the former site of Ceresco, a 19th-century agrarian commune in Ripon, Wisconsin, this lyrical, experimental film revisits the utopian aspirations of a community striving to live &ldquo;in association,&rdquo; guided by principles of harmony and shared ownership. Founded in 1844 and disbanded in 1851, Ceresco was one of several communes across North America inspired by the writings of French philosopher Charles Fourier. These fleeting but potent attempts to imagine alternative ways of living now serve as a lens to explore the fragility of collective ideals.</p>

Geométrika

Nicole Blundell

<p>Geom&eacute;trika is a mathematical odyssey that invites viewers on an experimental journey through the geometric wonders of the universe, reminiscent of watching floaters under your eyelids. Shot on 16mm and hand painted and developed.</p>

According to Plan

Bren Vienrich-Felling

<p>Once planted across suburban America as a symbol of ornamental beauty, the Bradford pear tree now stands as a controversial relic. According to Plan is a Southern Gothic take on the tangled legacy of this once-beloved tree species. Through a mix of interviews, animation, time lapse cinematography and archival elements filmed and recorded with 16mm sound stock film, this narrative follows the Bradford pear&rsquo;s journey from a landscape darling to an ecological pariah.</p>

Fall Wind

Alina Taalman

<p>A fall wind arrives with cold, dense air and covers the landscape below.</p>

On the Second Floor

Neil Ira Needleman

<p><span data-sheets-root="1">This work is part of a video series that was shot in an apartment building that provides subsidized apartments for residents who are mostly elderly and infirm. Each of the videos in the series explores the spaces and characteristics of a different floor of the building (&ldquo;On the Second Floor,&rdquo; &ldquo;On the Third Floor,&rdquo; &ldquo;On the Fourth Floor,&rdquo; &ldquo;On the Fifth Floor,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Fade Out in Color&rdquo;).</span></p>

Army People

Sean Zou

<p>Army people is a five‑minute audiovisual collage staging a silent standoff. Soldiers emerge in black‑and‑white, nature responds in vivid color; ambient sound only, narrative stripped away, yet senses are pulled into an unseen rupture.</p>

Friends, Shopping, & Food

Michael Lopez

<p>A solitary character sips coffee and ruminates in his haunted basement apartment. A pensive woman wanders suburban streets. A beautiful person smokes, and is unable to change their face at a Christmas party. A picnic descends into a bacchanalian nightmare. A state-of-the-art mall is explored, while another character is drawn into an ever-tightening surreal trap.</p>

Placeholder

Jesse McLean

<p>Amid a pandemic and the breakup of a marriage, loneliness sparks new forms of escapism. A film star becomes a companion and pop culture a way of coping, as the lines between reality and fantasy dissolve.</p>

Interwoven Intervals

Laura Kraning

<p>A material hybrid of film and textile, as the intermediary device of a laser printer transcribes weaving patterns onto strips of 16mm clear leader, connecting the material process of handmade films with hand-crafted textile production. Pattern drafts are the graphical score for weaving &ndash; grids of light and dark representing the over and under of weft threads between the warps. The printer strains to align the image, as powdered toner smudges and fibers peel away like stray threads. The graphic repetition of grids, lines, and squares assert a structural form that is fragile and vulnerable to erasure. In the archeological record, textiles are often lost to time. Here, a new form emerges &ndash; grids of ink and plastic, flickering projected light and dark.</p>

Grounds, Premises

Bram Ruiter

<p>Grounds, Premises takes the opening scene of Ed Wood&rsquo;s Plan 9 From Outer Space to consider intention and failure. What emerges is a treatise on the creative process with the emphasis on process rather than result. This film was made while teaching a film production course at a castle in the South of the Netherlands, and is dedicated to our fleeting time together.</p>

SKRFF

Corrie Francis Parks Daniel Nuderscher

<p>A 40-year-old graffiti wall becomes an archaeological site and a sgraffito sculpture as skrffologists reveal hundreds of layers of colorful paint representing decades of artistic, political and cultural expression.</p>

Acetone Reality

Sara Magenheimer Michael Bell-Smith

<p>Images cascade and collide in Acetone Reality, as animation, found images, and the artists&rsquo; own video recordings crash against a dialogue between computer-generated voices exploring the wonders of acetone and the nature of meaning. Across Sara Magenheimer (Art and Theft, NYFF55) and Michael Bell-Smith&rsquo;s (Rabbit Season, Duck Season, NYFF53) teetering montage, blocky pixels, smeared colors, and cryptic iconography constitute an &ldquo;insane, yet validated reality.&rdquo;</p>

XTENDED RELEASE

Joshua Gen Solondz

<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>

Evacuations

Lilli Carré

<p>Xeroxed images of hollowed-out public spaces become the canvas for Lilli Carr&eacute;&rsquo;s signature loose, figurative animation style to take hold. Frenetic movements and frantic gestures reveal a deeper feeling of alienation and evacuation in our era of social, political and ecological crises. They vanish as quickly as they appear, without a trace.</p>

Hiding Places

Magdalena Bermudez

<p>Women pretend to be rocks. Military operations masquerade as art education. One woman deserts to pursue a more radical act of unselfing.</p>

explant / implant

Josh Weissbach

<p>a lifetime of surgeries continues with an upgrade in battery life and a downgrade in scar tissue when the filmmaker has his original pacemaker replaced after sixteen years.</p>

pressing

Stephanie Barber

<p>a woman washes her hair in the kitchen sink while telling her friend about a memory of sitting in a bathtub and watching her aunt get ready to go out.</p>

The Story of The Cricket Queen

Natalie Peracchio

<p>The &ldquo;Story of The Cricket Queen&rdquo; interprets digital media tropes, trends, and aesthetics using analog film techniques. Through a hybrid of performance, hand drawn animation, Super 8 and archival footage, the film attempts to recreate a collage of internet cultures and capture the specific uncanny, hypnotic, and isolating feeling of consuming media in the digital age.&nbsp;</p>

Api (April, 1949)

Harper Stone

<p>Api (April, 1949) is a one-take recorded translation of a man&rsquo;s proposal letter and firm vision of life through love. Penned after my paternal grandfather&rsquo;s time in a forced labor camp during WWII, Api (April, 1949) is a reconstruction of his bid for agency during a time of oppression and destruction.&nbsp;</p>

The Next World

Grau Del Grau

<p>A mother writes to her estranged child, but with each draft the details become fuzzy, threads are lost and the meaning erodes. A trip inside the memories of a mind in decline, grasping to finish the most critical thoughts and convey the most important sentiments imaginable.</p>

In Place Of A Hollow Tree

Eislow Johnson

<p>Migrating from the Amazon basin across northern Illinois, a flock of chimney swifts flutter without perching, using a natural form of radar to navigate. The pulse of infrasound from deep ocean waves vibrates the ground and emanates up, guiding the birds amid disrupted air.</p> <p>Open space heard becomes turbulent, resonant space. Various forms of tuning elicit a strained acoustic ecology between altitudes.</p>

The Call (2025)

Kelly Sears

<p>The Call is an eco-revenge film featuring unlikely instigators who were observed and filmed over three years at airports across the United States.</p>

Living Containers

Kara Ditte Hansen

<p>Aided by machine learning, a bioengineer creates a mutant enzyme inspired by larvae capable of digesting plastic. Insects, sapiens, models and machines are consumed by extraction, ingestion, excretion, and an unconscious drive to return to a state of matter before life.</p>

I think I said "yes"

Pere Ginard

<p>I think I said (I...bug...scare...bird...eye...tear...thing...heartbeat...centaur...dream...my love...) yes.</p>

Unas bolitas de mercurio (Little Balls of Mercury)

Andrea Marquez

<p>Through the recounting of a dream&mdash;an image from the past that insists on reappearing&mdash;the film dissects and displays the very materials it&rsquo;s made of: still photography, moving image, narration, as if these cinematic elements were minerals and gems in a museum showcase. In doing so, it transforms them into an evocative exploration of what is preserved and what is lost. An archive of broken and silent images? A mausoleum of time?</p>

A Telephone for God

Nicky Tavares

<p>Apitherapy, or the use of honey bee products as medicine, can be traced back to ancient Egypt, Greece, and China. The use of honey dates back 4,000 years, it is documented in cave paintings, ancient Egyptian pottery and in numerous religious texts including the Vedas and the Bible. The Greek physician Hippocrates, known as the &ldquo;father of medicine,&rdquo; used bee venom to treat joint pain and arthritis. Several years ago I began experiencing chronic health issues that led me down a winding road of healing modalities from allopathic to holistic to straight up fringe. When these healing modalities failed, I began experimenting with live bee venom therapy (BVT) which, to my surprise, was instrumental in restoring my health.</p>

Foot to Ground

Christopher Thompson

<p>Minimalist frontiers proliferate from acquisition. Larping utopia, shedding skins, forging new luxury amidst shards of past lives. Embracing shadows, sculpting stagnant futures in the flicker of ancient flames.</p>

How Now, House?

Tess Martin

<p>&lsquo;How Now, House?&rsquo; investigates our yearning to leave traces behind through the prism of one house in Rotterdam. Using archives, personal memories and the philosophy of time, the film questions whether a space can ever really belong to one person, or time period, at all.</p>

Good Neighbors Care

Kate E. Hinshaw

<p>For decades chemical company DuPont and its subsidiary Chemours poisoned North Carolina&rsquo;s drinking water through illegally dumping forever chemicals into the Cape Fear River. On altered 16mm film, corporate promises of community care and pure water dissolve as rivers and bodies merge in a meditation on what it means to exist in an imperfect environment.</p>

09/05/1982

Camilo Restrepo Jorge Caballero

<p>A damaged film shot in 1982 in a Latin American country documents the violence that took place on 9 May that year. Beneath its apparent banality, the film raises suspicions of manipulation of the truth.</p>

Another Earth

Ben Russell

<p>From mouth to cave to fire to screen to war to skin, this is a dizzying 16mm portrait of an increasingly chaotic present, one whose political contours are affected by everything and nothing all at once. In the words of Zadie Smith: &ldquo;Time is not what it is / But how it is felt&rdquo;</p>