Playlist
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.
Suffused with alluring atmospherics and a slight air of the oneiric, Hong Kong-born (and future Éric Rohmer editor) Mary Stephen's debut feature evocatively traces the uncertain relationship between two Chinese women in Shanghai in 1935.
Sampling waterside vistas from the Pearl River to Victoria Harbour, the film unfolds as a scroll across the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area. Infra-sensory vibrations become reverberant layers, sensing the distance produced by total interconnection.
In the purest line of French experimental cinema of the 1970s, Masses Turbulentes explores the following cinematographic themes: experimental animation, direct animation, animated painting, scratching designs, and graphic cinema.
An 18‑minute experimental film from 1984 that uses a three‑colour separation process to capture MacKenzie Falls in the Grampians, Victoria. Filmed on 16 mm black‑and‑white negatives and printed in red, green, and blue passes onto Eastmancolor stock, the film superimposes slight temporal shifts to create luminous colour flares around moving water and foliage. The soundtrack blends multiple waterfall recordings to echo the film's visual layering
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.
I once had a vivid feeling, basking in the sunlight in a field listening to the murmuring of melting snow, that I was surrounded by sensations, sounds and sights. I wanted to express that feeling.
I wondered what it would feel like to see another image at the moment the bubble bursts. I wondered if there was a crucial difference between splicing another image onto a frame just before the bubble bursts, and splicing another image onto a frame just after the bubble bursts, so I created this work to watch that moment over and over again.
Beginning with the grounded view of bare feet walking through shallow surf, the film then seizes and, in successively cumulative layers adds frames of image-within-image until we are watching the walking feet through a tunnel. The Dutchman's Photographs becomes a kinetic reiteration of itself and in doing so, succinctly detaches from spatial illusion, beginning a temporal experiment where still photographs are transformed into cinematic "action".
A photographic animation built around a rotating image and repeated upward wipes. Photographs are replaced and rotated using a specially constructed device, while an image of a man walking, picking up a photograph, and approaching it creates a recursive visual cycle.
"Film images are projected when light is emitted from the projector lens and reaches the screen. The projector and the screen are connected by a beam of light. If you block this beam with a white board, images are projected onto it, and these images are a cross-section of the beam of light. The beam is like a Kintaro candy: you can intersect it at any point and the same images will appear. I wanted to make a film that was like staring at this cross-section of the beam of light - like staring at an image that, after being emitted from the projector, is in the process of floating toward the screen."
"I held my finger between the projector and the screen and filmed while touching the projected object with the shadow of my finger. It's like playing with shadow puppets. The shadow that was originally imprinted on the film and the shadow of the finger or hand held out in front of the projector are both filmed shadows, so they are hard to distinguish. But you can't help but trying to distinguish them somehow. The inclusion of shadows that were not originally there adds a subtle flavor of fiction. I wanted to create a work that allows you to experience the textures - the texture of the water and the frog in the image, and the texture of nature made up of light, shadow and particles."
I filmed the video as if playing with shadows, listening to the birds singing on the top of a small hill and feeling the height of the sky from the sound of airplanes passing overhead. I filmed and edited the video in three parts. I came up with the next video from the first edited video and filmed the second video, and then came up with the third video from the second edited video. It took me a year to complete it, but it felt like a year of struggling to write a haiku. I used natural sounds recorded live on location without editing, but it was strange how they somehow matched the edited footage as if they were calculated.
"I created this film using my favourite motifs and techniques - the surface tension of water, the image of night and time permeating the stone, vertical movement in space, and action cutting to transcend distance. I took my time with it, like bonsai or gardening as a hobby. I repeatedly made and remade it, and there were parts I was still unsure of, but I presented it anyway a year later. That's when the filmmaker Kanai Katsu spotted it. I had an idea based on what he pointed out to me, so I remade that part and the work took its final form. Maybe because I enjoyed making it, I'm fond of this work.
Two identically dressed women, one white, one Asian, negotiate winding, maze-like corridors. This experimental, oneiric work dating from Stephen's time in Canada plays as a cinematic meditation on cross-cultural identity, an exploration of the psychological impact of cross-cutting, or both.
Mary Stephen's metaphor-rich, deeply compassionate contemplation of her mother's death and its aftermath, which takes its title from the 1964 book by Simone de Beauvoir.
A hovering camera exploration; The flow of a river becomes background and subject at the same time, movement creating fabric-like patterns of infinite permutations, tactile visual phenomena.
The railway advertisement To Have A Good Trip Let's Take The Train, had given me the idea of a speedy violent film with plenty of information, the intensity and speed of which cannot be perceived complacently by the spectator. All this gives an aggression to the film not unlike the actual transport system… the train was a pretext and I started to shoot as though I were using a gun-machine, trains and pseudo amusements becoming all mixed up.
"A film that hovers on the edge of structuralism but manages to avoid it. A study of colors, stillness, and different modes of superimposition. The film is a shift from a fabricated reality to a phantasm. A large part takes place on a single image that continually changes its appearance: the towers (of the Place d'Italie), seen from my window when I lived in the Italie district of Paris on the 8th floor of a kind of social housing block. You get the impression that you're going to see a boring film because it's too long on a subject that's too short. And yet the raw, unsettling concrete becomes beautiful, even hallucinatory. Little by little, you let yourself be captivated by the beauty of the colors and by the music; you think you're hallucinating, something has just happened, on the screen? Or in my head? It's the harbinger of the shift to another film. You won't remember how the shift occurred, how the buildings disappeared to give way to the sensual universe." "of Red Sunshine."
A hypnotic, painted film made directly on 16mm film stock, creating an abstract exploration of color and movement. Verified.
The third part of Claudine Eizykman's Bruine Squamma trilogy uses repeated, superimposed, and rapidly shifting image series to explore speed, texture, visual rhythm, perception, and bodily/psychological sensation. Verified.
A camera calligraphy of the coastal bush – celebrating growth, summer light, rock and plant textures.
Heat Shimmer is an experimental landscape film made using the Cantrills' three-colour separation technique. Shot during a summer journey through Central Australia in 1977–78, it observes the optical shimmer produced when rising hot air variably refracts light reflected from the landscape. Static views of the desert and vegetation are transformed by subtle movements—particularly heat shimmer, shadows, foliage, and birds—appearing as shifting red, green, and blue colour separations. The final "Near Pimba" studies produce particularly pronounced colour displacement.
Three-color separation imagery expands the experimental documentation of landscape. Alternating nuances of color conjure up; a formal beauty, which are echoed in birdsong and the buzzing of insects.
A three colour separation study filmed at Pearl Beach, which examines the same scene of Amethyst Avenue during the progression of a winter, then a summer day. With the sea in the background, the moving objects such as the pedestrians, cyclists, traffic are transparent and ephemeral while the stationary objects are opaque and retain a permanent quality. A strange, almost surreal quality illustrating the transitional nature of life.
Filmed on Stradbroke island - about its daily cycles - at a time when the film makers were shocked by the impact of tourism on it, but chose to keep it outside the film.
The beauty of the Australian bush is depicted in a carefully composed camera choreography of different aspects of flora and fauna. Close-up and panorama shots and Aboriginal music meld into a meditative view of the energy and harmony that shape the place.
Decades of scientific exploration have revealed that some regions of the Earth may be similar to the geological environments observed on the surface of Mars. Australia's central desert shares certain unique and singular characteristics with the "red planet": extinct volcanoes, traces of asteroid impact, minerals, arid valleys, sandstone and stony soils the colour of blood caused by the same weathering process. Arthur and Corinne Cantrill's film At Uluru encapsulates the essence of these environments and introduces us to the heart of this continent: the great rock Uluru. Instead of the rolling, wooded landscapes of the coastal areas, At Uluru took the Cantrills to the unfamiliar landscape of Central Australia and its great rock formations that rise up out of the reddened, flat desert. These great rocks are awe-inspiring in their magnificence and are forever changing due to the light and weather conditions. With this film, the Australian filmmakers wanted to provide an overall impression of the monolith, circumnavigating it, exploring it, flying over it and even climbing it, nevertheless realising it will always be mysterious and defy any attempt to capture it on film. In many of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill's films there are no stories or characters. Rather we're confronted with the landscape and its investigation through film, with a materialist preoccupation. As well as bringing to the foreground the harshness and rigour of the Australian landscape, these filmmakers also investigate the perception and materiality of the image itself, asking questions about the nature of film and its capacity to create other worlds.
Divided into seven segments, Peter Bundy's Four Corners explores the physical and spiritual landscape of the American Southwest's Four Corners region, where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. The film observes jet streams and the movements of the sun and moon in the sky, while its camera studies desert light, canyons, craters, sculpted rock formations, and ancient rock/cave drawings. The work approaches the landscape as both a geological environment and a site of spiritual and perceptual experience.
A brief experimental landscape film by Peter Bundy. Film Fest Knox describes Summer Sketch as "Like a Kodachrome memory of a David Hockney painting," indicating a highly visual treatment of summer landscape, color, and painterly composition.
Tryst is an experimental short that explores the emotional sensation of infatuation through an elusive succession of skyscapes, close-ups, and city views. The film builds on the elemental imagery and color-tinting experiments found in Allen Ross's The Grandfather Trilogy, creating a poetic connection between the local, the cosmic, the concrete, and the ineffable.
Allen Ross's A Wedding (1982) uses striking and disorienting cinematography to warp the familiar contours of an American wedding ceremony. Its elliptical treatment of time transforms the documentation of the event into something resembling a memory of a lost feeling, turning an ordinary social ritual into an experimental meditation on memory, perception, and emotional experience.
Minnesota-based Peter Bundy's Alabama Departure (1978) is a brief, revelatory cinematic study of locals and landscapes quivering with life.
A dialogue with the Tibetan culture captured through photography.
The major work of Chicago filmmaker Allen Ross comprised of three parts: Papa, Thanksgiving 1979, and Burials.
The first reel of the ongoing Continuous Quantities series, contains 300 shots, 29 frames each, alternating between a notebook listing the names of shrimp boats that frequent the mouth of the Edisto River and images of these same boats.
Just barely a whisper. The minimum density, the slightest shape. A series of measurements, an equation for living. The edge of what matters, the contours of an idea. A selection of coordinates for finding one's way back. Space, time and temperature. The name of the most important person.
Film for Invisible Ink, case no. 323: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (2010), was composed as an epithalamium, or matrimonial poem, for Erin Espelie. Bringing together Western Union Telegraphic Code and Francis Bacon's list of twenty-seven privileged instances from The New Organon (1620), along with passages from the Book of Common Prayer, the film is as stenographic as it is steganographic, a shorthand for the immense and indescribable "instances" that shape a life.
"A single piece of paper, a second stab at suture, a story three times over, a frame for every mile. With words by Charles Darwin. A long-distance dedication for a far-away friend halfway up the mountain."
Studio Wall (Mur de l'atelier) is a short experimental film by South Korean filmmaker Park Kyujae, developed from 2023 to 2026. Park's earlier official filmography listed Mur de l'atelier as a work-in-progress, shot on 16mm, black-and-white, silent, while the completed 2026 version is listed at 10 minutes.
Line Describing a Cone is made from a beam of white light emitted from a film projector positioned at one end of a darkened room. Passing through the projector is an animated film of a thin, arcing line that, frame by frame, gradually joins up to become a complete circle. Over the course of thirty minutes this line of light traces the circumference of the circle as a projection on the far wall while the beam takes the form of a three-dimensional hollow cone. Mist from smoke machines gives the beam of light a greater density, making it appear almost tangible.
A flat, triangular blade of projected light rotates around a fixed central axis. The film consists of eight sequences, each using a progressively slower rotational speed. As the blade rotates, the viewer mentally reconstructs the volume of an imaginary cone, although the complete solid cone never exists at any single instant. The work explores projected light, duration, perception, geometry, and the relationship between cinematic frames and three-dimensional space.