CROSSROADS 2026

Air (2026)

Alexander Barancheyev

A selection of memories, dreams, and conversations from different places and of different people captured on Super 8 Tri-X film.
Everything seems mixed and jumbled up, yet is unified through a dynamic soundscape. This is a film-diary that jumps through time and space, and finds connections between various sceneries and situations, which ordinarily would not find each other together.

Lost in the Water

Allison Chhornd

Fragments of recreated archival footage depict daily life along the Mekong River in the countryside of Cambodia. An imagined flash flood submerges everything, opening portals of memories that reemerge from the depths of the river. (Allison Chhorn)

Bay Area Sampler Quilt

Amy Reid

Sampler quilts are by nature an amalgamation of different patterned blocks, techniques and experiments created by a quilter. Seemingly though each block is disparate in their qualities, they are held together by the container and boundaries of the quilt itself—the top, the back and the batting and quilt work holding each block together. Bay Area Sampler Quilt attempts to consider how a film can be like a quilt. How can built-in camera techniques, repetitions through contact printing, dying processes and other experiments employed mimic what a quilter might do in assembling their work? How can each frame be like a quilt block, expressing a different register of creative expression? And lastly, how can a film act as a container, holding both experimental forms, memories and a documentation of social relations? (Amy Reid)

Forgetting

Antoni Orlof

Revisiting lost images and moments. A meditation on the fleeting nature of memory and remembrance. Edited from unused footage shot between 2023-25. (Antoni Orlof)

simulacra

Bruno Varela

A Super 8 reel found and violently treated with chlorine. Destination Tokyo—a wartime propaganda film starring Cary Grant—serves as the seed for an almost ready-made film. The revenge for Pearl Harbor, or the atomic bomb is here anticipated. Alternative history and propaganda in the age of paranormal paranoia. The empire has always been here. (Bruno Varela)

Only Now

Cauleen Smith

The obligatory pilgrimage to Goreé Island is almost like visitng an oracle. Everyone hears something different, and what was heard is nearly possible to articlate to another. But it must be heeded. The weaver makes tapestries of our stories. And the tapestry spans the Atlantic, as does modernity. (Cauleen Smith)

A Pure Portion of Anxiety

Chae Yu

A mermaid stands abandoned at the water's edge, and the water remembers her. Images drift between a lake, the badlands, and a ferry crossing open water, trembling through mirrors and reflections as if longing had its own frequency. Fossils surface. Bones are carefully kept. The ocean sounds like an unanswered call. The mermaid waits.

Du soleil, que ça existe

Charlotte Clermont

Du Soleil, que ça existe examines the temporalities through which the body forms, stores, and creates what we translate as reality. Focusing on longing, distance, and language, this text-based project explores the spaciousness of both language and landscape, installing spaciousness in dialogue and considering landscapes as bodies.

The Gloaming (2026)

Charlotte Pryce

The Gloaming is a metaphorical tale of pyrophytic transmutation, of metamorphosis through fire. Inspired by medieval paintings of celestial portents, The Gloaming is a work of bio-mysticism that takes the form of a fable. The slippage between substances and the ethereal nature of matter finds a parallel in the chemical accretions of the hand processed film. In a time of environmental uncertainty, the film offers a story of adaptation and survival.
From 16mm film, Super-8 film, and magic lantern slides.

Buried in the Snow

Cherlyn Hsing-hsin Liu

The world above ground and the world below.
Below the horizon, there exists a world that belongs neither to the present, future, nor past, surrounded by boulders and waterfalls, where departed life secretly continues its activities. The spirits of those atomic life forms flow in the meandering water, formless yet remembering the past.
Above the horizon, all things that continue to live continue to live. A gust of wind blows, a flurry of snow falls, waiting for winter to pass, waiting for the sun to rise. Memory, like a giant tendril, rises from the ground, its roots seeping into the soil with the melting snow.
Having been here, yet never truly here.
This is a film poem commemorating the passing of a dear friend from my youth. The poem was hand-engraved on a 400-foot-long roll of film.
Music: Michael Pisaro-Liu

Kata Tjuta, west of Uluru

Dianna Barrie Richard Tuohy

Looking at the present, as though the far future were dreaming of its ancient past—an 'iconogenic' vision of Australia. (Dianna Barrie & Richard Tuohy)

In the Heavenly Cutting Room

Emma Penaz Eisner

A woman on her deathbed summons her creator, chastising him and demanding a justification for her life's trajectory, in this fusion of stop-motion animation and dreamlike live-action video. (Emma Penaz Eisner)

L’IMAGE FANTÔME (The Ghost Image)

Emmanuel Piton

In the house where I grew up, something appeared once upon a time, a shape, a presence, an image that has never ceased to haunt the memory of that place. I search for traces of this apparition as if this image from the past had never left the house. (Emmanuel Piton)

Black Seas

Erin Weisgerber

Ghostly figures are conjured from a mist of crumbling film emulsion, while flickers of familiar melody emerge amidst a sea of resonance and static. Weaving together fragments of footage from Alexander Sokurov and Irakli Kvirikadze, Black Seas salvages damaged 35mm film prints, breathing new life and stories into cinematic material that was originally destined for destruction. Printed on handmade film stock and employing artisanal colour separation techniques, Black Seas was commissioned by Guillaume Lafleur for the Cinémathèque québécoise as part of the project Archives in the Hands of Filmmakers, which invited artists to create new works from a donation of Soviet prints. It was created using clips from The Swimmer and The Lonely Human Voice. (Erin Weisgerber)

Veronique (Ein Friseursalon in Paris aus dem Barbieland)

Friedl vom Gröller

A day inside the charming hair salon of Veronique Gizard, on the corner of Rue de Bagnolet and Rue Planchat in Paris's 20th arrondissement. Owner, stylist and client shyly gaze into the lens of legendary Viennese filmmaker and photographer Friedl vom Groller. The salon's distinctive character lives on in 16mm – it closed its doors in mid-2025 after 20 years, and the shopfront now houses a cafe.

Heaven and Earth Magic

Harry Smith

A sequence of surreal cutout animation imagery, largely without a discernible narrative.

North

Hogan Seidel

I found a decaying print of Nanook of the North buried in the archive at Northwest Film Forum. Vinegar-soaked. Warped. Unstable. I let it keep rotting. Then I pushed it further: through photochemical abrasion, through touch, through light. I approach the material not to represent it, but to hold it. To sit with its damage. To mark it with heat, with light, with gesture. I am not re-presenting the image. I am pressing against its surface, smearing its claim to objectivity. I see myself not as a filmmaker, but as an image handler.

Dialogue of Energies

J.M. Martínez

On a single roll of Ektachrome, a pendulum swings in opposing directions over past and present forms of currency. A mirror turns inward, reflecting and refracting back. (J.M. Martínez)

Songs Overheard in the Shadows

James Edmonds

Balanced on the edge of what is visible, everything comes from nothingness and returns to nothingness. Strands of consciousness trying to convene with each other. Forms of personal significance in a time of crisis, set free into random motion through chance operations. Recurring details point towards a centre. (James Edmonds)

Mounds Above the Earth

Jiayi Chen

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.

09/05/1982

Camilo Restrepo Jorge Caballero

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.

XTENDED RELEASE

Joshua Gen Solondz

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.

Aftertide (2025)

Kaiwen Ren

Inspired by concepts of decay and fossilization, Kaiwen Ren's tactile miniature Aftertide responds to a spate of 2025 whale strandings along the California coast by way of abstract and ghostly 35mm, itself partially decomposed.

I Was There

Kamila Kuc

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.

Phytophonics

Karel Doing

Plant matter is used to create finely detailed indexical traces on photochemical film. The traces are not only visible but also audible. By feeding botanical textures, patterns and rhythms into the optical sound system noise, cracks, pops and hiss is generated. Seeing is hearing. Such a cross modality disobeys the usual lipsync illusion and replaces this so called realism with a radically different concreteness. Phytophonics is serious play with living material in a world that is increasingly based on simulated sham. Eco-punk against the abyss created by late-capitalism.

(for once I dreamed of you)

Kate Solar

Departing from a parenthetical phrase in Christina Rossetti's 1904 poem 'On the Wing', Kate Solar conjures a dark, modern, highly material form of Romanticism. A human figure gradually merges into the darkness of the woods, with only the ghostly illumination of a truck headlight; meanwhile, the celluloid image strip is worked upon with scratches, dirt and reversals of brightness and darkness. Bursts of plaintive music and glimpses of a map add to the dreamlike reverie.

Wildflower Season

Kathleen Quillian

Vignettes and small moments documenting my two daughters on the cusp of adolescence. Gestures, glances, clothing, costumes, trinkets and play-acting—perhaps the only visible elements of an otherwise mysterious transitional stage between childhood and what comes after. (Kathleen Quillian)

Dooni

Kevin Jerome Everson Claudrena N. Harold

Shimmering, kinetic, blue-black images of dancers accompany an impassioned rereading of a eulogy for Sylvester, a.k.a. "Dooni" (1947–1988), the legendary "Queen of Disco." Weaving mourning with movement, Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold's (Black Bus Stop, NYFF57) film reanimates gospel singer and preacher Walter Hawkins's words, which mark a small but pivotal moment in the history of HIV/AIDS, channeling their sense of grief and celebration into the present.

NECROPOLIS

Kevin T. Allen

A Stone Tape film inspired by the yellow fever epidemic in 19th century New Orleans, using analog camera techniques and contact microphones to excavate the material traces of trauma. Coined by archaeologist and parapsychologist T.C. Lethbridge, Stone Tape Theory posits that material objects record traumatic events of the past… and that they can be played back. (Kevin T. Allen)

PROJECTIONIST PLEASE FOCUS

Linda Izcali Scobie

PROJECTIONIST PLEASE FOCUS is a short experimental film that engages with the material language of film projection through the presence of START, FOCUS, and END leader markings. Moving between 35mm and 16mm formats, the work reflects on the physical structure of cinema, projection, and the relationship between the projected image and the mechanics of film itself.

Hiding Places

Magdalena Bermudez

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

Plastic Aortas

Malic Amalya

Plastic Aortas is a portrait of the black plastic encasing the Fells Reservoir in the unceded land of the Massachusett, Pawtucket, and Naumkeag indigenous peoples. The lining was placed there by conservationists in order to mitigate the invasive Common Reed, which is killing native plants. However, the lining also interferes with wildlife and contaminates the water.

Leather Graves

Malic Amalya

"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.

semipermeable: syringe

Marcos Serafim

Generative AI inherits the same political and epistemological infrastructures that regulate bodies, borders and viral life. Working inside these systems, the piece confronts the inability of commercial image models to imagine the HIV epidemic unfolding across the US/Mexico borderlands, where the virus disproportionately affects Hispanic and Latino communities through overlapping regimes of migration, healthcare, surveillance and state violence. Their refusals, distortions and hallucinations become the material of the work. These synthetic images circulate through custom audiovisual software where recursive processing transforms computational failure into an unstable field of contamination, desire and sensation. (Marcos Serafim)

گل‌های شب ِدریا (Daria’s Night Flowers)

Maryam Tafakory

The night flowers in Daria's garden hide the secrets of a country that has turned love stories into routine crime scenes. A tale of patriarchal violence combined with botanical (mis)uses, told from the archives of Iranian cinema.

nearer to thee in a triptych

Matt Whitman

eyes set down lots love for a locked door the silhouettes are the same but the faces have changed you know I can't go home this way came here to say the same

Body, remember…(2026)

Matthew Berka

The lens of the camera is a key to the senses and the sensual. The close-up renders tactility inviting touch, the obscured image tests the boundaries of the frame beckoning one to enter. But as all the senses are awakened, the lens of the projector relays a distance that cannot be collapsed.

The City & Her Stones

Maximilien Luc Proctor

Living in the present moment while looking forward at History. Combines 16mm, Super 8 and digital video to record pertinent facts about Berlin's past. Sound by Ruairí McCann. (MLP)

Canticle of The Sun

Nathan Swann

The quiet hum of varied streets gathers into a song of dust and light. (Nathan Swann)

Penkelemes

Onyeka Igwe

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.

Am I Mourning What I Never Lost?

R. James Edwards

In this tightly packed, provocative vignette, R. James Edwards, born Deaf, wonders why he needs to apologise for his disability. Medical and psychological institutions position him as lacking – a problem to all around him. The film is a caustic montage of rapid spoken word poetry also appearing in the image, photographed objects, comically vague on-screen captions, and sounds that become distorted through hearing aids. The cryptic density of this ensemble is confronting and haunting.

A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth

Rajee Samarasinghe

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

ouarda ouarda: yet another flower film

Samy Benammar

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

SEAM

Sheri Wills

SEAM is a short experimental film shot on Super-8mm film that explores everyday hauntings, drawing attention to the margins of experience. An early audio recording medium, wax cylinder recordings were the first commercially produced sound recordings. They create a snapshot of the daily life of those "early adopters" in the decades around the turn of the 20th century who recorded the small details of their day with what was, during its time, the newest technology. Two anonymous sound recordings from wax cylinders comprise a primary part of the soundtrack to SEAM. Thanks to the University of California, Santa Barbara Cylinder Audio Archive. (Sheri Wills)

Jones Street

Silvia Turchin

Through the use of 16mm macro cinematography and the cameraless technique phytography, Jones Street portrays latent beauty in "the unremarkable," amidst what was steel mill workers' housing, in a constantly transforming urban landscape. Can we settle into the existential mystery in our daily surroundings, finding connection to something beyond our human ambition? Jones Street explores this question through visual and sonic textures. (Silvia Turchin)

Swing Swish Sway

TT Takemoto

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

A Poem (2025)

Vasilios Papaioannu

In an underground garage, a voice message becomes the testament of a love left in limbo, while fleeting images allude to the moment that led to it.

DETRITUS (2026)

Deborah S. Phillips Zuzanna Marczak

In this collaboration between Deborah S. Phillips, seasoned 16mm filmmaker, and Zuzanna Marczak, who encounters the medium with a fresh perspective, fragments and impressions of urban debris come alive through playful stop-motion and superimpositions. Scraps, ribbons, caps, paper, plastic, cans and objects beyond identification lie scattered beneath the bridges and along the streets. A multi-lingual meditation on the poetry of waste.