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. —Dominic Bonelli, Eislow Johnson

Ilanga Alikho is an experimental landscape film with an element of poetry. The film follows the son of the professional mourner who has now taken up the mantle of his father. He is confused. He does not want to mourn anymore, but it is all he knows how to do. He goes to the local flea market and purchases some chickens for a sacrificial ceremony in the name of his ancestors. Soon enough he is traversing the vast mountainous landscape of Kwa-Zulu Natal as he struggles to find a place where belongs. —Advik Beni

The "bleared eyes of blue glass" in the title of this experimental short expand on a verbal image from Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves, considered the most experimental among the 20th-century British writer's literary works, from which the young filmmaker took inspiration for his film, borrowing passages and visions to explain his own understanding of what cinema is. A film that plays with water - precisely - and light, and yet in a very dark b&w lit up by rare flashes of colour, making a journey in the night in which the shadow of a man gradually acquires substance. —PARK Kyujae

Both an intimate family portrait & cinematic collage of Black and trans collective memory and (be)longing, meditating on themes of safety, bodily autonomy and generations of compounding loss across time and media.

Taking the form of a diptych, the first act interrogates the convergence of Black confrontations with police brutality and the annually increasing disparities of homicidal violence experienced by Black trans women and femmes, while the second act non-linearly traces the respective origins and evolutions of a Black non-binary trans femme scholar-artist and her late father who died unexpectedly ten years prior to filming. Organized around family VHS footage, viral media and found footage, present-day video diary using digital as well as Bolex 16mm cameras, performance, and other artifacts of an inherited personal and public archive, the film explores the continuities and cleavages of the filmmaker and her father's corresponding lived experiences, amidst the backdrop of unrelenting anti-Black, queer- and trans-antagonistic acts of violence, both state-sanctioned and otherwise and the aftermath of a deadly global pandemic. The film stands as an open-ended inquiry into what Frantz Fanon once called “the problem of time” for figuring Black life, collectivity and struggle—where past, present, blood kin and queer kin kaleidoscopically collide.

—æryka jourdaine hollis o'neil

A filmmaker explores astrophysical metaphors to make sense of a failed relationship to person and place.
—Bentley Brown