CROSSROADS 2025

THE EARLY SUN, RED AS A HUNTER'S MOON follows this temporal tradition in an interpolation of Kiowa lore in excerpts from N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain, a reunion in Portugal between the filmmaker and their friend after 20 years, and a historical attempt to decode a cryptic letter from 1890 with "hieroglyphic script" that arrived at Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian Industrial School sent from a reservation in the Oklahoma Territory to a Kiowa student named Belo Cozad. Shot on expired 8mm film, the film presents a collision of fragments of time and Kiowa memory. —Adam Piron

Before his legendary proto-cinematic studies in motion, photographer Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned to document the United States Army's war against the Modoc tribe in Northern California in a series of stereographs, many of them staged. Alternately unnerving, meditative, and explosive, Adam Piron's Black Glass examines the entangled histories of visual technology and the genocide and expropriation of Indigenous populations by white settlers through a violent collision of image and sound.

A short video that aims to connect Dante's Purgatory to the process of printing photos in a darkroom. Shot on Super 8. (Alice Bommer)

The only inhabitant of this non-place is a ghostly presence. She wanders through the corridors, appears in poses and sometimes suddenly disappears. The figure seems trapped in this labyrinth surrounded by rampant nature. With haunting glances, she raises questions about her meaning. For nature's apparent stranglehold grips not only the impenetrable architecture, but equally the embodiment of this ghostly figure. Pregnancy, as Simone de Beauvoir writes, is an "ambiguous" state of transformation. "Flooded with life," the woman possesses the child and is equally possessed by it. This trail of presences and absences - this confusion of the status of subject and object - is what the film attempts to tap into. We participate in the uncanniness of this in-between stage, the emergence of something hidden. In the hopelessness of the ghost as revenant anticipated here, the film creates its very own surreal phantasmagoria of corporeality, architecture and nature, in whose expressive images we become completely caught up like the ivy.
10-channel, 16mm, projection, silent, Installation dimensions variable, Duration approx. 22min
in the stranglehold of ivy
This film cannot be read linear in terms of time nor space.
Pregnancy is an intermediate state,
Intermediate locus.
One person is two persons,
Reclaiming space as a natural notion,
From both humans and nature itself.
No beginning no middle, no end yet to begin again.
Tobias Pils
The film installation IN THE STRANGLEHOLD OF IVY grants entry into a house that has been reclaimed by nature. A key grants access to a house sticking out of a green thicket. The arrangement of the ten 16mm loops expands the architecture of the exhibition space and also opens up the filmic space. The space functions as a heterotopic labyrinth through which a ghostly presence wanders. The figure seems trapped in this labyrinth surrounded by rampant nature. In poses and gazes, the apparition, trapped in this surreal place, raises numerous questions about its history. The embodiment of pregnancy, this state of transformation, is multiplied in the juxtaposition of the loops. Simone de Beauvoir's "ambiguous couple" of woman and child unsettles the categories of subject and object. "Flooded with life," the woman possesses the child and is equally possessed by it. The uncanniness lies in the indistinguishability of the self and the other, the known and the unknown. Ghosts point to a trace of absence, bridging past and present, and thus also marking the relationship between mother and child. It is this uncanny prefiguration—the emergence of something hidden—that the installation takes on in the infinity of the loop, while still maintaining a firm grip on the secrets of the house. In the hopelessness of the ghost as revenant anticipated here, the film creates its own surreal phantasmagoria of corporeality, architecture, and nature, in whose expressive images we are as completely caught up as the ivy.

Taking a moment to look back, longing. These images, the cutouts of life. A quiet absence comes in with the light. Only my inabilities and a glimpse of hope remain. (Antoni Orlof)

In Mines to Caves, Smith foregrounds how traditional capitalist structures like overconsumption and land development affect our relationships to each other and the environment and draws from work Smith developed during her residence with the Aspen Art Museum and Anderson Ranch in Spring 2022. The film, shot partially on location inside [Smuggler's Mine], puts forth the artist's research around geologic extraction in the United States. (Aspen Art Museum)

In a future dominated by technological images, how will human culture be rewritten? Will history be reset? Is the land beneath my feet still habitable? Is the sky the same sky? I was curious about how artificial intelligence described the images I took of the world. Realities and hyperrealities are woven together as if this is the prototype of the myth of modern life. The work was inspired by the naturalist poet Alberto Caeiro. Slowly look at a flower; slowly listen to the flow of a river. Open the window, and the world is right before you, no matter what we call it. If you move, the world moves with you. (Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu)

everyday euphorias, may 23rd 2024 (craig scheihing)

From her home in Blackhawk Island WI, the poet Lorine Niedecker traded lively and impactful letters with numerous peers, most notably Louis Zukofsky and, later, Cid Corman. After a brief sojourn in New York, she lived alone in a one-room cabin for much of her adult life. Letter from Blackhawk Island assembles images and sound gathered on the small plot of land by the Rock River where Niedecker lived, along with ambient audio from the sole existing recording of the poet's voice, into the filmmaker's own condensed record of prismatic correspondences. (Derek Jenkins)

Humanity approaches in an ineluctable wave of uncertainty, hope and inevitability. A ferry crossing in Mumbai stands here for all such places and times of human expansion and human vulnerability.

Memories of family members and the stories and tales that nourished us in childhood often become part of our own memory. Erica Sheu dives to their inner depths to touch on the experiences of those who lived on Taiwan's Kinmen archipelago during and just after the war. She is guided by the flickering light of incense, which those seeking shelter used to light their way during the war, and the few scraps and grains that she has given the role of witnesses.
"A wound gives off its own light
surgeons say.
If all the lamps in the house were turned out
you could dress this wound
by what shines from it."
— Anne Carson (The Beauty of the Husband, I.1-5)

Emergency Exit weaves its elements together with loose precision without tying them down…. In close contact with Brecht's visually powerful text about the scorned hotel scullery maid Jenny and her revenge fantasies, the b&w 16mm images shimmer wildly and unsteadily: First, the a cappella singing sprays its venom over idyllic river views and snapshots of tourist groups of people on a historic bridge. (Searching for the emergency exit!) Then, for most of the film, there follows a solo portrait in two passes […] Standing in front of a bakery poster in her baseball cap, Angela Crupano looks as though she was pulled out of the crowd on the bridge by the filmmaker. However, the cunning wrath of Pirate Jenny is rhymed with above all the engaging seriousness with which Crupano returns the gaze of both cameras.

"We'll remember the earth as if it were a dream." This film is an exploration of the coastal landscapes of San Francisco, using darkroom developers made from the solutions of our times—bay water, hand sanitizer and "safe" detergent—in a conversation about how we internalize our climate emergency, letting mortalities large and small emerge only when the night puts our guard down. Inspired by the San Francisco Bay, dreams and novelist Octavia Butler's vision of a future California. Featuring Bill Basquin, Ivy Jeanne, Juan Aguirre, Annalise Velasquez, Valerie Soe, Mark Klatte and Mayuran Tiruchelvam. (Greta Snider)

A salute, a slap, a clenched fist and a tender caress, le mirage des mains ultra réalistes explores the masculine through the gestures and expressions of men's hands. Like the intricately layered images created with analogue film and video material, the overt and covert symbolism of masculine hands is parsed through and assembled back together to reveal the hidden intricacies of male bonds.

Among everything obscure in an image, there is always the camera. This Isn't What It Appears reconstructs and radicalizes the ways to see and interpret archival photographs of Korean women taken in the 1950s by American soldiers stationed in South Korea. This film attempts to reveal the camera within the frame, not as an omniscient eye but as a reciprocal medium that subverts the hierarchy in an image. (Heehyun Choi)

A sensorial attunement of the layered mysteries of oceanic zones oscillating between positive and negative 16mm black-and-white film. Abstracted studies and sonic traces of communicating species dwelling in the intertidal and midnight zones of the Pacific Ocean. Biosonar clicks of whales and vocalizations of seals are interrupted by the sounds of tanker engines, radar pings from commercial and military ships, and the growing chorus of ocean mining. Amid the din, coral forms bleach from rising carbonic acid levels, ghostly reminders of changing ecosystems.
Notes:
Organized Forgetting contains studies of erosion, sea urchins, a newly discovered species of Siphonophore, coral, coral bleaching, and the noise pollution affecting whale and seal communication. There are some exceptional sound artists featured in this film. The first one you will hear is Yoichi Kamimura, who records the sounds of ice flows in the Pacific Ocean in Hokkaido, Japan. In his recording, you will hear the ice shelf moan and whistle with escaping oxygen, and you will hear seals under the ice sheets communicating to each other. You will also hear hydrophone recordings by Pablo Diserens where he honed in on sea urchin communication and other tide pool dwellers. The remainder of the sound you will hear is of two competing sets of sounds. Whale communication and the sounds of container ships, radar pings from military and commercial vessels, and ocean mining. With the whales, you will hear some distinct vocalizations, Low-frequency D calls that have an intense vibrational quality, and biosonar clicks where each click echoing back is where distance and direction are discerned from fast-moving fish to catch and eat, and to avoid the hulls of approaching ships. Light does not travel well under the ocean. Sound travels four times faster in water than in air, and in the deep, whales can communicate with each other from hundreds of miles away. They are acoustically oriented and are finely tuned to the sonic environment of the ocean. Their consciousness and sense of self is based on sound, not sight. I learned that whale pods have their own unique dialect of calls that calves learn from their mothers over several years. This indicates complex cultural communication in the animal world.
A way to better understand our rapidly changing climate is through sound. The hope is for a recalibration of the senses to pick up subtle changes in light and texture, to listen attentively for sounds that can draw us closer to wonder and curiosity, and to allow the sonic vibrations of communicating species to deepen appreciation and interconnectedness.

Slideshow reveals moments in time in the lives of strangers. Strangers to me, but maybe not to each other. Found in a Berlin flea market in the 1990's, these slides originated in the DDR (East Germany):an embossed DDR decorates the top of many of the vivid plastic slide frames. The slides' photographic images were made of ephemeral materials. As objects, they have a certain graphic power, especially when illuminated on a light table. Scattered among the boxed-up slides were also a few educational slides highlighting working sites. Additionally, there seem to be a few commercially produced images of soldiers, the border—these were in cardboard slide frames and may have been produced by West German companies. Time and place are suggested—sometime before 1989, when the wall came down. Working with the slides, I came to feel that I knew some of the people. Many emerged across multiple slides. But I can only know their traces.

Somehow, aeons ago, consciousness came about. I'm often drawn to think of the earliest stages of life when we were swimming blindly in water. How was it possible to develop that bubble-like appendage to our brains that allowed the great miracle of sight? What a revolution in that infinite cosmos for consciousness to join with sight. (All this taking place among bubbles near a warm shore). Was this event some kind of mandate from the Universe so that it might know itself? Are we tools in that quest? How do these thoughts fit into the parade of ongoing distractions that make up daily life? Careless Passage will answer none of these questions. Its purpose is to muse and swim among migrant sights seen by the transforming eye of a camera. (Jerome Hiler)

Vivid floral specimens slosh exuberantly in a water tank, elegantly pirouette in superimposition, pulse and mutate in dizzying stroboscopic single-frame edits. Continuing Jodie Mack's (The Grand Bizarre, NYFF56) long-term project of animating alternative materials, Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love is an ecstatic and visceral reflection on temporality, both human and botanical, an amorous affirmation of death and life.

A Patriot of These Woods is a film inspired by the novel The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. Calvino's book tells the adventure of a boy who climbs up a tree to spend the rest of his life inhabiting an arboreal kingdom. He dives into the vegetal world, undertaking his own journey into the trees around him using his body as a metaphorical soldier who defends the trees and plants that grow around him. An otherwise concealed world opens up revealing the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants. A hybrid creature emerges, partially plant, partially human, their bodies merged, their thoughts processes entangled. These woods respect no borders.

A hand-drawn animation composed of fragments rotoscoped from various films; began with replacing Frankenstein's monster with a person the filmmaker knows.

Visceral sound and abstract animation converge in a raw audiovisual performance. Noise artist Daniel Menche conjures a seismic wall of sound—dense and physical—while filmmaker Karl Lemieux manipulates 16mm film loops in real time across multiple projectors. Menche's massive, textural drones and percussive detonations stir a sense of elemental unrest while Lemieux's flickering visuals collapse and resurrect with each improvised gesture. Nothing is stable and caught in the tension between precision and chaos, in a shared physical space vibrating with the energy of the now. (Karl Lemieux)

The cast is in flux—the animate and the inanimate get double billed with that dynamic duo—Push and Pull. […] A broken vow of stasis, a flood of energy. What beautiful instability and pulsation in this floating world off a hinge, drawn through invisible bellows, exhaled, exultant. Figure and ground (such a quaint term for what we really see) do a slow motion see-saw on shifting tectonic plates, and fold into Cezanne-like origami. If this dance weren't so meticulous, so slow, so molecular it would describe a calamity. But in fact this happens every day, every moment in the blink of an eye. Tilts with perfect pitch. The eponymous Flo moves slanted and enchanted down a street in Taormina—as casual, momentous and as "on time" as the Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat that rounded the corner of another century. (Mark McElhatten)

Boyd v. Denton is the name of the landmark case that closed the Ohio State Reformatory in the artist's hometown of Mansfeld, Ohio in 1990. The OSR was used as a location for big Hollywood films including Air Force One (1997) and a remnant of set design can be seen in the final moments of the film. (Kevin Jerome Everson)

In A Metamorphosis, Lin Htet Aung transforms the uncanny and absurd experiences of what it is like to grow up with state television propaganda into a kind of counter-broadcast, redefining the compositions and narratives that defined them. This distorted, eerie broadcast explores the daily experiences of living in a dictatorship and the imagery you get accustomed to as a child, accompanied by a lullaby that will haunt you afterwards: Yee, lé-lé! Yee, lé-lé-

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's 2024 LP release "Landlines".

Created with handmade and manufactured emulsions, Tuktuit explores the close and enduring connections between Inuit, caribou, lichen, and land use. Lichen developers help process the images of a caribou hide being fleshed down to rawhide to make gelatin for handmade emulsion that is subsequently used to shoot the film.

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.

"Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya" traces alternative cartographies of time, rooted in the very geologic formations of our planet. Examining volcanic time as a means to comprehend and express Earth's geological history, the film seeks a sensing and knowing that recognizes the divergent nature of the time scales that surround us. From almost instantaneous catastrophic ruptures to the formation of mountains over millions of years, the film invites us to become immersed in time.
Using tectonic plates as imaginary maps, Szlam films a constellation of ancient landforms, from the eroded vestiges of volcanic activity to the relics of the Gondwana Rainforest, tracing a path along the central eastern ranges of Australia, which were illuminated in the afterglows of the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai eruption. Szlam films on 16mm and edits in-camera, creating dazzling landscapes through multiple exposures. The vibrations, murmurings and signals of Earth form the soundscape composed by Australian artist Lawrence English. "Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya" evokes the layered histories of Mount Beerwah to the titular Bunya Mountains, rendering a unique perspective on the shifting faces of our environments.

From the disordered-saying(s) of a lifetime, to the material tracings of an unstructured narrative, 'All said done' is less a portrait of a person than an incomplete image of class relations and affective labor. This film is dedicated to the memory of my father, the one who laughed, 'kill'. —Micah Weber

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.

"A Certain Light' is a journey through the different processes of capturing light through pinholes, accompanied by a cassette recorder during my residency at Nanolab (Daylesford, Australia). It's a step between indoors and outdoors, between moving forward and circling back. It's about the space I inhabit, walk through, and capture it.

A man searches for memories of his family's past, alternating between Geomeunyeo, Buseok Temple, and his grandmother's house, all of which are located along a straight line on the map. Geomeunyeo is a rock located in the reclaimed area of Buseok, Seosan, South Korea. It was originally a reef that was exposed above sea level, but is now above ground. The name of Buseok, which means floating rock, is said to be derived from Geomeunyeo. —Kyujae Park

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

Through dancing, the Motherfucker's Birthday shows the evil of the dictator and the horror people endure under powerful political leaders. The film presents dancing, a universal and uniquely human activity often representing joy, with eerie footage of Saddam and his sons' torture tools while they dance. Bush also dances with a smirk across the screen while announcing a war that would destabilize a whole region. Contrasting the dancing of these powerful men, who seem disturbingly unconcerned with the lives they impact, with the dancing of the people of Iraq amplifies the fear, control, and horror the general public lives under. Everything becomes a gesture of dance: the torture, the hesitant political humor, and the war. Everyone becomes a dancer, the dictator and the oppressed performing a distorted version of this human act. Saddam dances, Bush dances, so what's left for the Iraqi people except to join in.

Fragmented records reveal a concealed history of Cold War–era human radiation experiments, surfacing through a haze of manipulation and embedded studies. Desert dust settles into teeth, inscribing a residual record. Contaminated images conjure the unseen.

In 19th-century Paris at the Salpêtrière Hospital, patients were hypnotized onstage to reproduce the symptoms of hysteria for public audiences. Over a century later, high school cheerleaders are fainting en masse.

Stereo photos of 1950s-era cocktail parties are transformed into an intense visual playland. (Scott Stark)

Ashes to Ashes depicts fragments of the artist's diary as they undergo physical and emotional transformation through a blazing agricultural landscape. Words turn to ash as the past is consumed by flames. Rivers ignite from embers, flow through vessels, and begin to crack. Manifested through the land and material processes lies a situated reflection on recovery, loss, and evolution.
The film was shot at the 2024 Independent Imaging Retreat. It was developed in Common Comfrey and contaminated wood ash foraged from the farm, and coated with the artist's blood.

In horsemanship a half halt is a pulse on the rein to say, hey I'm still here, holding you. It indicates something around the bend, a warning and a reassurance. Here, a series of interruptions are held together by those who catch me when I'm falling. Rosie reads their poem. Grace and I brave the dark. Camera breaks. Record skips. Lovers reunite through a viewfinder. We're all filming each other on horseback. A meditation on intimacy in times of offscreen emergency, both personal and political. Seizures as elevators. —Sofia Theodore-Pierce

At the heart of the human being, in the air and under the sea, Beyond these tableaux, the worst is happening, An invisible off-screen disaster, A human-made desolation that, if it doesn't kill, requires to open up to other realities, To tremble in the turmoil in order to survive. (Sophie Watzlawick)

Three filmmakers (L. Leszez, J. Lainé & S. Canapa) bring back images of the forest. They are reworked and destructured with the means of the photochemical laboratory. Bosco is a visual breakthrough punctuated by a contrasted and hypnotic black and white.

The sound will be produced from the visual on the optical soundtrack – for some parts, I used a 35mm still camera to expose the soundtrack area, and I scratched off the film emulsion directly for other parts. This is my senior thesis project at Binghamton University, and Julie Murray was my advisor.

All images were filmed on Market Street, one of the main streets in San Francisco. The visual was carefully composed frame by frame, while shooting on the street. This project was commissioned by Exploratorium and San Francisco Arts Commission for the outdoor screening event, A Trip Down Market Street 1905/2005: An Outdoor Centennial Celebration.

A vibrantly kinetic portrait of New York's Times Square, shot through technicoloured filters, by Tomonari Nishikawa

Webs have a unique relationship with light. It is possible to peer through them, as a camera lens, to see light refractions and otherworldly distortion. They are also performance art and art installations. This is an attempt at documentation or perhaps artistic appropriation and a commentary on the historic spinster archetype through video editing and manipulation. (Tori DotNet)

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.