PRISMATIC GROUND ARCHIVE
2025 VENUES
Wed 4/30: Anthology (Opening Night)
Thur 5/1: BAM
Fri 5/2: Light Industry
Sat 5/3: Anthology
Sun 5/4: Anthology + Metrograph
Palestine Vaincra (Palestine Will Win)
Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (1969, 29 min)
This French agitprop ode to the Palestinian struggle was thought lost until recently rediscovered in the Third World Newsreel collection by archivist Draye Wilson. Composed of still photographs and a bit of Vietnam footage from Joris Ivens, its re-emergence echoes a call for global solidarity.
Your Touch Makes Others Invisible
Rajee Samarasinghe (2025, 70 min)
Sri Lanka ranks among the highest in the number of enforced disappearances in the world and most of the disappeared are Tamils. Fusing allegorical magic realism and investigative documentary, and made collaboratively with impacted locals clandestinely in a region still occupied by the military, this film is a lyrical examination of these missing persons through 26 years of civil war in Sri Lanka. The nonfiction elements are structured by a fictional narrative thread which tells the surreal tale of a mother who loses her son to a supernatural entity plaguing her community – a nod to the actual disappearances in the region. Followed by a Q&A with Rajee Samarasinghe.
A Black Screen Too (16mm)
Rhayne Vermette (2024, 2 min)
A meticulous sequel to the filmmaker’s Black Rectangle, screened a new 16mm print.
Adieu Ugarit
Samy Benammar (2024, 16 min)
In 2012, Mohamad had witnessed his best friend gunned down by an armed militia on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria; the blood spilled into the lake contaminated his memory. Ten years later, the reflections on the Laurentian waters bring back Mohamad's trauma. I asked him if he'd like to dig out the memories, to repair the pain by retreating for a few days into the most distressing calm possible for him. He tells us about death, immigration and anger. We wonder how and why we should tell this story. —Samy Benammar
Winter Portrait
Fernando Saldivia Yanez (2024, 9 min)
A misty afternoon returns a Mapuche couple to their wedding video. In their civil ceremony, they are noted as one of only two couples married in the indigenous language of Mapudungun. —Fernando Saldivia Yanez
Buseok
Kyujae Park (2024, 18 min)
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
How He Died is Not Controversial
Gio Lingao (2025, 14 min)
Days after the 2022 Philippine elections, a filmmaker lies to the police about making a film, just when a protest was put to a halt. Upon the retrieval of his deleted recordings of landscapes, some Filipino children began to experience a spectral figure from the dark side of history — which have taken away their ability to read and speak, and their innate sense of local language, as vengeful spirits escape and are reborn through an oceanarium underground somewhere in Manila. —Gio Lingao
Empty Rider
Lawrence Lek (2025, 15 min)
Sentient self-driving car Vanguard-3181 stands trial for attempting to murder their parent company’s CEO. Rendered from the perspective of a surveillance drone, the project explores the legal and existential dilemmas that emerge from self-aware AI. —Lawrence Lek
May the Soil Be Everywhere
Yehui Zhao (2025, 96 min)
In a remote Chinese village, a peasant family endured wars, the communist revolution, and the deadliest famine. Persecution and hardship eventually forced the family to scatter. Against the backdrop of China’s rapid urbanization, the filmmaker sets out to unearth her family’s enduring bond with this long-forgotten village, hidden deeply in the vast mountain range of Loess Plateau. —Yehui Zhao
Rhythm of a Flower
Amit Dutta (2024, 83 min)
Kumar Gandharva, a child prodigy who subsequently became one of the finest and most original geniuses of Indian classical music, was struck by tuberculosis at the height of his abilities. For years, he lay in bed, barred from using his lungs, unsure if he would ever be able to rise or sing again. Meanwhile, his senses were gathering sounds from nature, from distant folk melodies, and from every vibration of life. Sometimes he practiced, singing so softly that it was hardly audible beyond his bed. This film takes this single moment of him lying on his sick bed and expands it, where his life of music and contemplation moves like a dream. When he rises after six years in bed, with only one lung spared, he writes, sings, and teaches again, giving voice to the six long years of silence and bridging the old and new with visionary insights. —Amit Dutta Rhythm of a Flower is celebrated Indian filmmaker Amit Dutta's first feature-length animated film.
Friday, May 2
Light Industry
16mm Expanded Cinema Performance.
Tickets for Light Industry events must be purchased at the venue night of.
Thunderland, as a matter of fact (Y'a Matière au Pays des Éclairs)
Charles-André Coderre and Frédéric Boisclair (2024, 45 min)
Thunderland, as a matter of fact is an audiovisual performance combining soundscapes by musician Frédéric Boisclair with live 16mm projections by filmmaker Charles-André Coderre. The performance focuses on the hydroelectric, aluminum and pulp and paper plants located in Shawinigan, Mauricie. The project's initiator, Frédéric Boisclair, comes from a family of factory workers at these plants. Composed of original material and 16mm archival footage taken from corporate films shot in the region's factories, Thunderland, as a matter of fact examines the various places and materials specific to the Mauricie region's collective industrial imagination. —Charles-André Coderre
9:00 PM
Friday, May 2
Light Industry
Followed by Q& A with the filmmakers + a cocktail party for film attendees.
Tickets for Light Industry events must be purchased at the venue night of.
The Early Sun, Red as a Hunter’s Moon
Adam Piron (2025, 13 min)
An exercise in adjusting the moving image to an interpretation of time as it is perceived within the Kiowa philosophy: a circular dialogue between the mythic, the historical, and personal reflection. 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
Half Halt
Sofia Theodore-Pierce (2025, 11 min)
“pause spewing pause/ to learn the grammatical fact––/there is no going forward alone" 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
All Said Done
Micah Weber (2025, 22 min)
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
Concrete Resources
Emir West (2025, 9 min)
Inseparable from its legacy as ‘the land of lakes and volcanoes’ is Nicaragua’s legacy as a ‘country of poets,’ rendering a resistance that is encountered in all physical senses. Concrete Resources (Thank you for keeping me a company of images) examines the enmeshment of poetry and violence within Nicaragua’s national identity considering U.S. intervention and extraction in the larger void of the isthmus. Through visual and sonic collage, memories of this space as one side of my family's home and the other's site of study are pulled apart and built back again using family ephemera, U.S. government archives, and surrogate landscapes. —Emir West (Text excerpt from "La ciudad deshabitada," by Ernesto Cardenal) Research and development for this project made possible by EMPAC in Troy, NY.
Remote Views
Alexis McCrimmon (2025, 15 min)
A televisual stream of consciousness assembled from archival footage set in the Black media explosion of the 1980s. A frenetic remix of public access television, video diaries, commercial mass media, and citizen journalism sequenced as short vignettes featuring musical and poetic performance, documentation of state violence, political theater and expressions of Black love. —Alexis McCrimmon
Bhavantarana (Immanence) (35mm)
Kumar Shahani (1991, 65 min)
The first of a trilogy of ‘dance’ films (followed by The Bamboo Flute and the as-yet unreleased Priye Charushile), Bhavantarana expands on some of the modes Shahani had first explored in Khayal Gatha. The dance form is the famous Odissi, a form in Orissa that emerged from an earlier folk mode typically performed by young boys. The dancer is one of India’s leading figures, Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra. The film begins with a traditional sculptor hewing a dancer’s image from a piece of stone that he holds down with his feet, expanding from there to links from dance to sculpture, and from folk to classical forms. While several dances come from Mahapatra’s traditional repertory, the finale – the spectacular Navarasa – is choreographed specially for the film. —Ashish Rajadhyaksha *Screened with permission of the XPD Division, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. **35mm Print from the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Center (16mm)
Burak Çevik (2024, 6 min)
Made in the woods in New Hampshire at a time when I had lost focus in my life. A film that lets you experience the search for center/focus. The projectionist, provided with a set of instructions, will be part of this experience (the film) by searching and losing/finding focus as they are projecting the film. —Burak Çevik
endings
Isiah Medina & Philip Hoffman (2024, 9 min)
Trees and natural artefacts disappear in the flicker effect of landscape compositions where sweeping branches carve moving structures into the viewer's memory, and the transformations of living image threads remind us of the inexhaustible visual exuberance of meadows. —Canyon Cinema
typhoon diary 风球日记
Grace Zhang (2024, 6 min)
typhoon diary 风球日记 travels through various dream-states to explore the narrator’s personal connection to rain as a medium for both dissociation and transformation.
Adrift Potentials
Leonardo Pirondi (2024, 12 min)
This pseudo diary film is made of found materials from an unfinished 16mm film. 'Potenciais à Deriva' is a film started by a Brazilian artist under a pseudonym while living in exile in Los Angeles, California. Isolated shots and previously assembled scenes reveal an intention to create a mysterious film comprised of disembodied interviews, empty rooms, radio recordings, soccer games, and sudden apparitions of the filmmaker that slowly ruminates on Brazil's colonial past, North American Imperialism and the military dictatorship of the time in a paranoid and anxious manner. Be aware that the film's final version never came to exist. This version presented is my mere attempt to produce a film with these otherwise lost images. —Leonardo Pirondi
The World Doesn’t End When You Do
marlow magdalene (2024, 10 min)
California continues to destroy and rebuild itself. This collage film takes a surgical approach to carving through 60 years of California’s historical violence. It comprises footage of the L.A. riots, slaughterhouses, wildfires, mid-century Malibu, and 90s’ newsreels to unveil a cataclysmic future predicated on cycles of rebirth in the West. —marlow magdalene
Go Between (16mm)
Chris Kennedy (2024, 6 min)
Looking down at the Brisbane River--a play of masking and superimpositions. —Chris Kennedy
受难日/Good Friday
Xiaolu Wang (2025, 9 min)
A dragon dance troupe, an aikido class, an ice skating rink. Three scenarios or scenes through which the sensation of falling, or learning to fall, become metaphysical ruminations on modes of existence that draw strength from letting go.
Las Animas (16mm)
Matt Feldman (2025, 14 min)
A journey across the former coalfields of Las Animas County in Southeastern Colorado. In the early 1900s the region witnessed one of the bloodiest labor uprisings in U.S. history known as the Coalfield War. The conflict culminated in the Ludlow Massacre where 21 strikers and their families were murdered by the National Guard and CF&I pinkertons. After the decline of mining in the area, most former extraction sites were gradually converted into wilderness areas or flooded. It is believed that the coal fires from that era still burn somewhere deep below the landscape. —Matt Feldman
Some Strings Pts. I & II
Various Filmmakers (96 min)
Filmmakers and artists from around the world have formed Some Strings, an ensemble of unreleased filmic gestures that is rooted in Palestine, where poet and teacher Refaat Alareer was targeted by Israeli strikes along with seven members of his family. In his last poem, If I Must Die, published five weeks before his murder, Refaat Alareer calls those who should live to create a kite - a long-standing object of resistance- with bits of string and Some Strings, just like each of his readers, receives it as a legacy. The kites here are a diversity of views that share a space against the silences, international indifference and continued approval of states, which are already fabricating memorial confusions about the greatest civilian massacre of the 21st century. The systematic extermination of the Palestinian people on Palestinian soil is taking place before our very eyes, and international diplomacy is failing to prevent war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. —Narimane Mari Featuring: KHALED ABDULWAHED, WIAME HADDAD, YOUSSEF CHEBBI, CHRISTOPHE CLAVERT, SARAH BEDDINGTON, VALENTIN NOUJAÏM, YOSR GASMI, MAURO MAZZOCHI, WENDELIEN VAN OLDENBORGH & CATHLEEN SCHUSTER & MARCEL DICKHAGE, JULIE COUREL, M’HAND ABADOU DJEZAIRI & MARCEL MREJEN, AMIE BAROUH, MOHAMED BOUROUISSA, VALERIE MASSADIAN, ISMAÏL BAHRI & YOUSSEF CHEBBI, SOUMEYA AIT AHMED & NADIR BOUHMOUCH, PHILIPPE PARRENO, CLAIRE FONTAINE, ISMAËL BAHRI, PIERRE CRETON, VIRGIL VERNIER, YOHEI YAMAKADO, SAIF FRADJ & MAHSHID MAHBOUBIFAR, ALEXIA ROUX & SAAD CHAKALI, FERNANDA PESSOA, JAYCE SALLOUM, KASEU & VALERIE OSOUF, IDIT ELIA NATHAN.
2:15 PM
Saturday, May 3
Anthology Film Archives
Followed by Q&A with the filmmaker.
Dancing Othello (Brihannala Ki Khelkaki) (16mm)
Ashish Avikunthak (2002, 18 min)
Shakespearean theatricality meets the subtlety of Kathakali subverted in the dramatic space of street theatre to give birth to a performative 'Caliban'-Khelkali- a hybrid act of articuling the post-colonial irony of contemporary India.
Vakratunda Swaha (35mm)
Ashish Avikunthak
(2010, 22 min)
In 1997, I filmed a sequence - a friend immersing an idol of Ganesha at Chowpati beach, Bombay on the last day of the Ganapati festival. A year later, he committed suicide. After twelve years, I completed the film. Using his footage as the leitmotif, this film is a requiem to a dead friend. —Ashish Avikunthak
Antaral (End Note) (16mm)
Ashish Avikunthak
(2005, 18 min)
Three women reminisce about their times at school and rekindle and affirm old friendships. They share a strange secret about each other that is never made known to us. The film is a cinematic interpretation of Samuel Beckett's 1967 dramaticule, «Come and Go».
Kalighat Athikatha (Kalighat Fetish) (16mm)
Ashish Avikunthak
(1999, 22 min)
The film attemps to negociate with the duality that is associated with the ceremonial veneration of the Mother Goddess Kali-the presiding deity of Calcutta. It delves into the subliminal layers of consciousness, underlying the ritual of Kali worship.
Tuktuit
Lindsay McIntyre (2025, 15 min)
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. —Lindsay McIntyre
To the Moon
Tadhg O’Sullivan (2020, 80 min)
A cinematic ode to the moon, woven from archive, poetry and song - a constantly surprising night-walk through the moonlit imagination. Structured as a lunar cycle, this cinematic ode moves through tales of love, songs of longing, myths of madness, dreams of innocence and the nightmare of colonialism, building to a timely reminder of our fragility beneath the moon's mysterious eye. —Tadhg O’Sullivan
Heart Shaped
Sofia Theodore-Pierce & Grace Mitchell (2025, 13 min)
Heart Shaped (Sofia Theodore-Pierce & Grace Mitchell, 2025, 13min) Heart Shaped examines the transient lives of seven guests staying at a themed hotel in Wisconsin. Self and strangers overlap through shared spaces and intimate choreography. Letters between the two filmmakers offer an additional layer of blurred identity and the erotics of collaboration. "One hand on the clit the other on the mind." —Sofia Theodore-Pierce & Grace Mitchell
Contact Lens / 河马皮肤
Ruiqi Lu
(2024, 78 min)
Contact Lens imagines the emancipation of women from the confines of narrow spaces and the tedium of routine lives. Echoing the women’s yearning to break free, the film itself strives to transcend its boundaries. The movie metamorphoses the image into a fluid, feminine essence, revealing her multifaceted nature in a timeless space. —Kino Rebelde
Birah Bharyo Ghar Aangan Kone (The Bamboo Flute) (35mm)
Kumar Shahani (2000, 84 min)
Shahani’s cinematic ode to perhaps the most versatile and also, it is said, perhaps the most ancient musical instrument in the world: the humble bamboo flute. Like Bhavantarana, it brings dance together with stone sculpture, combining classical performance with tribal music to tell a civilisational story of the origins of enunciation. ‘Enunciation… precedes all concepts and the word’, he wrote in 2002 in a short essay titled ‘Film and Philosophy’, and now Shahani enunciates through legends enacted through speech, movement and stone. “Both Kalidasa in India and Rumi in Persia… thought of the bamboo flute as preceding the prana of human existence, that which imbues it with its own being and transmutes it to the Word and the object, unites it with the Beloved other”, he writes. The texts evoke a transformation from the Vedic age to the birth of Vaishnavism, e.g. the confrontation between Indra and Krishna from the Rig Veda. It includes performances by iconic dancers Alarmel Valli and Kelucharan Mahapatra. —Ashish Rajadhyaksha *Screened with permission of the XPD Division, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. **35mm Print from the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Necessary Trip
Kevin Jerome Everson (2025, 5 min)
Necessary Trip is about a hay-day of vice in Mansfield Ohio when it used to be called Little Chicago. *Courtesy the artist & Picture Palace Pictures Image Credit: ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures.
Underground
Kaori Oda (2024, 83 min)
The "shadow" begins to see fragmented memories that transcend time and place. In an underground, it touches and listens carefully to the memories of people existed.
Courtney Stephens and Shiv Kotecha present Films and Poems from the Fifth Season
Feat. Courtney Stephens, Shiv Kotecha, JJJJJerome Ellis, Tiziana La Melia, Diana Hamilton, and Courtney Bush
"They tell me there are four / seasons, but I believe in a fifth one" writes Etel Adnan, "which is your space / and your time." Referencing Adnan, the poet Rainer Diana Hamilton defines this fifth season as a way for poetic form to burst forth and sense the social. Featuring films and readings by filmmakers and poets, "The Fifth Season" brings together works that exceed the expectations of their genres in order to share language in modes of transfigured time. With works and performances by Courtney Bush, Jjjjjerome Ellis, Rainer Diana Hamilton, Shiv Kotecha, Tiziana La Melia, and Courtney Stephens, "The Fifth Season" is imagined as a night of exception, probing Lacan's definition of the voice as a standalone object, not unlike the eye.
Kasba (35mm)
Kumar Shahani (1990, 115 min)
Widely considered Shahani’s most accessible film, Kasba returns to the melodramatic mode he had earlier experimented with in his three-hour epic Tarang. Here he adapts a Chekov story set in a small township in the mountainous Kangra valley. Maniram, an old-style entrepreneur made his fortune adulterating food, has two sons. One is arrested in the city for printing counterfeit currency, the other is mentally retarded and the Shakespearean fool in the story. There are two daughters-in-law, one a canny businesswoman and the other an innocent villager. Much of the film deploys a savage irony, as e.g. the movie star Shatrughan Sinha, who plays the elder son as a small-town braggart, often plays ‘himself’ in his swaggering style. The film’s main generic achievement is to recall to the Indian cinema’s melodramatic mode its original function, of integrating marginalised peoples and their languages. —Ashish Rajadhyaksha *35mm Print from the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Some Strings Pts. III & IV
Various Filmmakers (110min)
“Each memory that is freed is the first step for all memories to gather” —Edouard Glissant Filmmakers and artists from around the world have formed Some Strings, an ensemble of unreleased filmic gestures that is rooted in Palestine, where poet and teacher Refaat Alareer was targeted by Israeli strikes along with seven members of his family. In his last poem, If I Must Die, published five weeks before his murder, Refaat Alareer calls those who should live to create a kite - a long-standing object of resistance- with bits of string and Some Strings, just like each of his readers, receives it as a legacy. The kites here are a diversity of views that share a space against the silences, international indifference and continued approval of states, which are already fabricating memorial confusions about the greatest civilian massacre of the 21st century. The systematic extermination of the Palestinian people on Palestinian soil is taking place before our very eyes, and international diplomacy is failing to prevent war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. —Narimane Mari Featuring: PABLO SIGG, APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL, IGNIACIO AGÜERO, BANI KHOSHNOUDI, DORA GARCIA, KHRISTINE GILLARD, MOHAMMAD HAMMASH & FILIP MOMIKJ,AXELLE POISSON, KYOSHI SUGITA, MICHAËL ANDRIANALY, AUDE FOUREL, ANNE PENDERS, JERÓNIMO ATEHORTÚA ARTEAGA, IDIT ELIA NATHAN, EVA GIOLO, SEPIDEH FARSI, ERIC BAUDELAIRE & CLAIRE ATHERTON & MARIUS ATHERTON, FRANSSOU PRENANT, ELLIE GA, FRANCIS ALŸS, MARIELLE CHABAL, BEN RUSSELL, KISWENSIDA PARFAIT, KABORE, YANNICK KERGOAT, SILVIA MAGLIONI & GRAEME THOMSON, TAYSIR BATNIJI, MITRA FARAHANI.
Khayal Gatha (The Khayal Saga) (35mm)
Kumar Shahani (1988, 103min)
Moving away from the contemporary, Shahani engages with the musical form of Khayal, as represented by one of its foremost schools, the Gwalior gharana. The form came into being around the 18th Century, adapting the more classical form of Dhrupad with folk literatures and performative styles often drawn from peasant and tribal cultures. In the film a student moves through, sometimes watches, and otherwise actually enacts, several musical legends such as the folk sagas of Heer-Ranjha and Nala-Damayanti, historical sagas such as the story of Rani Rupmati and Baaz Bahadur (Queen and King of Mandu) etc. The music comes from legendary musical figures from Gwalior (Krishnarao Shankar Pandit, Sharatchandra Arolkar, Jai Balaporia and Neela Bhagwat). Shahani also uses the dance of Birju Maharaj, India’s leading Kathak dancer and the veena maestro Ustad Zia Moyuddin Dagar. Shahani explores the link between cinematic sequence and forms of musical improvisation in a visually stunning narration condensing legend, history and poetry, emphasising hybridity in all cultural practices. —Ashish Rajadhyaksha *Screened with the permission of Rewati Shahani, Uttara Shahani, and Rimli Bhattacharya. **35mm Print from the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above
Ayanna Dozier (2023, 6 min)
Part of the trilogy “It’s Just Business, Baby,” Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea district, specifically foregrounding the act of cruising and public sex. The film (like the trilogy) intentionally lack a soundtrack to have audiences follow what the image is doing rather than the sounds associated with the image (specifically sex). —Ayanna Dozier
It's Just Business, Baby
Ayanna Dozier
(2023, 6 min)
It’s Just Business, Baby (part of the trilogy of Super 8mm shorts "It's Just Business, Baby") examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea and Tribeca districts that was renown as a site for sex work, sex clubs, and illicit sexual activity. The titular film of the trilogy captures an encounter between a client and a working girl where the lines of care are blurred following a session. The film repeats this encounter with the same actors switching parts to trouble the relationship of power that exists between that dynamic.
Bounded Intimacy
Ayanna Dozier
(2024, 6 min)
Bounded Intimacy (part of the trilogy of Super 8mm shorts "It's Just Business, Baby") examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea and Tribeca districts that was renown as a site for sex work, sex clubs, and illicit sexual activity. Bounded Intimacy explores the seduction of a nameless woman and the camera. The relationship between the two remains unknown and ambivalent as to whether or not the encounter is "authentic." The nature of their relationship is irrelevant as the camera captures the authenticity of the desire of the encounter between the two. —Ayanna Dozier
Hemel
Danielle Adobi Dean (2024, 30 min)
A portrait of Hemel Hempstead, where Dean was raised, unfolds as a personal essay on the town’s history as a planned community under the New Towns Act of 1946. Titled Hemel, the work’s central reference is a 1957 sci-fi horror B-movie shot in town about the arrival of a non-human entity that infiltrates the minds of residents and endangers life with a toxic black slime. Playing a composite character based on herself and the movie’s detective protagonist, Dean brings together real and imagined worlds, both past and present. Hemel blurs fiction and documentary to expand a critical reading of the colonial overtones in the original movie, while recasting its visual language to consider the race, class, and labour dynamics of a small English town in the post-Brexit context. —Danielle Adobi Dean
The Swallow
Tadhg O’Sullivan (2024, 69 min)
An artist, isolated from the world but not from her memories, unpacks the remnants of a life long-lived and tries to make sense of her own unwillingness to let go. —Tadhg O’Sullivan
A Message From Humboldt (16mm)
Matt Feldman (2025, 7 min)
Glances at an emptied apartment in Milwaukee drift into a psychodrama confronting fears of death and loneliness. Through the use of in-camera experiments, fractured imagery inquires into the hauntings and mysteries of the everyday. —Matt Feldman
Translating one's own (or the symptom to be remembered)
Nicolás Onischuk (2025, 60 min)
In a border crossing of register, archive and memory, Translating one's own (or the symptom to be remembered) transforms the experience of a journey into a trace. It navigates as a gesture that persists over an open wound that resonates between landscapes and the passing of the days. This personal log explores the nebulous state of those who remain in a deja vu, searching for a texture with their gaze.
Artist Spotlight: Cho Seoungho
Guest Curated by Joshua Minsoo Kim of Tone Glow.
Lyrical and visually striking, the video works of Korean artist Seoungho Cho are distinguished by a unique confluence of complex image processing and sound collage. Resonating with a highly metaphorical sensibility, Cho's single-channel tapes and installations are formalist, almost painterly explorations of subjectivity and the subconscious. The natural and urban landscapes that Cho depicts often move with a continuous fluidity, shifting from dreamlike abstractions of light to fleeting reflections of objects and people. Figures and their environments are mirrored and diffused through one another, silhouetted with a haunting anonymity that is echoed in the poetic texts and soundscapes that accompany each piece. These often tense meditations focus on the nature and cost of isolation and loneliness while integrating into a culture, landscape and language other than one's own. —Electronic Arts Intermix Featuring: Forward, Back, Side, Forward Again (1995, 11 min) + ws.3 (2003, 6 min) + Horizontal Intimacy (2010, 8 min) + I Left My Silent House (2007, 9 min) + Shifted Horizon (2009, 6 min) + Blue Desert (2011, 12 min) + Latency/Contemplation 1 (2016, 7 min) + Late August 1993 (2024, 10 min) + No Re (2024, 7 min)
Some Strings Pts. V & VI
Various Filmmakers (84 min)
Filmmakers and artists from around the world have formed Some Strings, an ensemble of unreleased filmic gestures that is rooted in Palestine, where poet and teacher Refaat Alareer was targeted by Israeli strikes along with seven members of his family. In his last poem, If I Must Die, published five weeks before his murder, Refaat Alareer calls those who should live to create a kite - a long-standing object of resistance- with bits of string and Some Strings, just like each of his readers, receives it as a legacy. The kites here are a diversity of views that share a space against the silences, international indifference and continued approval of states, which are already fabricating memorial confusions about the greatest civilian massacre of the 21st century. The systematic extermination of the Palestinian people on Palestinian soil is taking place before our very eyes, and international diplomacy is failing to prevent war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. —Narimane Mari Featuring: NEWTON IFEANYI ADUAKA, SARAH WOOD, ALI ARKADY, ALAIN KASSANDA, ANNIK LEROY & JULIE MOREL, MONICA MAURER & MILENA FIORE, PHILIP RIZK, 2024, DOUGLAS GORDON, DECLAN CLARKE, GENESIS VALENZUELA, VINCENT GUILBERT, DANIA REYMOND-BOUGHENOU, WILMARC VAL, PRIMO MAURIDI, GHASSAN SALHAB, UGO RONDINONE.
A Body to Live In
Angelo Madsen (2024, 98 min)
The world of queer body modification and its intersection with BDSM is brought to life through this rich portrait of an artist and his philosophy of a spirit-body connection. Merging oral history with 16mm abstraction and photographic meditation, A BODY TO LIVE IN uses the life story and artworks of Fakir Musafar to guide us through processing questions of belonging and the search for an authentic way of being.