CAULDRON 2026
SALT LAKE CITY DOWNTOWN LIBRARY
JUNE 24-27
CAULDRON INTERNATIONAL FILM AND VIDEO FESTIVAL
JUNE 24-27, SALT LAKE CITY, UT
CAULDRON is an international film and video festival based in Salt Lake City that is dedicated to challenging and innovative motion-picture works in any genre or format. Unorthodox film narratives, rogue documentaries, avant-garde cinema, video mashups, abstract video art, genre-bending storytelling... We accept all categories with an eye towards innovation, iconoclasm, personal visions, and any/all unique motion picture experiences. CAULDRON is a swirling brew of styles and forms selected from all over the world that, while in it's first year,
aims to become a premier destination for radical cinema forms.
Trump Pinochet Director Gerald Habarth
FILM DESCRIPTIONS
Waiting Up To Meet The Wolf Director Anthony Carr
EXOTIC VECTOR
Van McElwee
Nested worlds travel to a stationary tourist, announced by bells and gongs.
UNORIGINAL
Laura Herman
What if our dreams are not the product of our subconscious but are the residue of media we have yet to consume.
DRIVING THE NEIGHBORHOD DOGS CRAZY
Atomic Elroy
Woof!
SUNNY 19 HELSINKI
Eve Le Fessant Cousso
On the border between Finland and Russia, lazy summer vibes become stifling. Under the burning sun, on an island, two beings rave. Tender wander or anxious waiting on a sensorial experience. What is there to fear from the horizon ? They seems to be the only ones foreseeing the upcoming disaster..
FEEDBACK
Hüseyin Mert Erverdi
An audiovisual work shaped by recursive image
processing and layered sound, a study of feedback
as a generative system where signals fold back into themselves and produce emergent form.
IN THE NOISE OF THE DOWNPOUR
Oleksandr Stupak
Human beings live in a world of memories, fears and passions, dreams and hopes. In our memories, we increasingly want to return to the world of childhood - summer, where joy and light reign, as opposed to cruel reality, loneliness and existentialism. But it is becoming more and more difficult to get into this world, to dissolve at least mentally in the sun's glare.
This film is about man in nature and nature in man, about cyclicality, the beginning and the end - the path to eternity. Autumn is heading towards winter, and we are so eager for light.
SOAP IS AN ILLUSION
David Finkelstein
Soap is an Illusion plunges the viewer into the volatility of our conflicting attractions to dirt and cleanliness. A collage of poetic imagery, music, and abstracted, incantatory language, the film follows two men in an excavation of our cultural soil. Their dialog gives rise to unexpected landscapes, populated by revengeful toasters, soap bubbles which fly on magic carpets, and other surprises. A postmodern video opera, Soap bathes the viewer in music and visual spectacle.
UNDER THE COVERS GIRL
Tina Rose Rea Meister, Josie Elizabeth Meister
A reflection on queer joy and comfort as an extension of the ever-changing nature of the self. Wrapping the viewer in a bundle of fabric and bringing them into the personal dialogue of the artist-couple, the film reimagines intimacy through the lens of safety and coverage.
IF THEY REALLY EXIST
Hio Lam Lei
Drawing on field research on the offering rituals in the Ghost Festival in Keelung (Taiwan), 《假如祂們是真的》(English title: If They Really Exist) looks into the imagery of ghosts in Han folk belief, examining its connection to the indelible anxiety concerning the erasure of one' s symbolic existence residing in the collective unconsciousness within the Han Chinese community.
DRIFT
Harper Austin
A video triptych meditation on the primordial beach: what does it mean to be human in relation to nature?
THE EYE IN NOTHING
Michael Edwards
Abstract, absurd montage of faces and looping imagery. Meaning is always suggested but never confirmed.
SABBATICAL
Jack McCoy
A diary film comprised of images from 2024 and voicemails from 2011-2016.
DETOURS
Vida Guzmić
Detours is an experimental documentary shot in Lebanon from 2019 to 2021. The edited footage is mostly recorded in Beirut, pre and post the 4th of August explosion in the Port of Beirut, and during the mass protests that erupted on the 7th of October 2019. The work documents, in a 'peripheral' way, a moment of Lebanon’s turbulent history and the experience of disorientation within it, as well as a moment of collective encounter, a revolution led by youth and solidarity. The film was shot using Super 8, still analog cameras, digital cameras and various lenses.
GNOSIS
Adam Jaslikowski (Justin Sight)
Struggling with deep guilt and depression over ending a long term relationship, a young man hopes to find solace at a friend's home in the desert.
THE STORY OF THE CRICKET QUEEN
Natalie Peracchio
The “Story of The Cricket Queen” recreates digital media tropes, trends, and aesthetics with analog film techniques.
FORTUNA
Esther Hoareau
From the garden to the lagoon, both protective and intermediary places, Fortuna's intimate cycle reinterprets the cosmic dance of Shiva Nataraja.
In the original story, this dance of cyclical destruction carries a liberation, as well as the world to come: the Ganges descends from her hair to us. It is also called the dance of bliss.
The dress made of automatic sprinklers is a sculpture created to perform these gestures derived from mudras, signifying elevation and happiness.
The rain becomes gold and pearls, in gratitude, or to protect us from disaster. But perhaps it is punishment: the sinking of a pirate ship, like our world.
NO TIME OF DEEP TIME
Eric Souther
If we could witness the Earth across deep time, the ground beneath our feet would oscillate, revealing the dynamic nature of our planet—what feels permanent to us is actually in constant flux when viewed on the geological timescale.
OUR MORALS AND THEIRS
Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky
The object on which the video is based is a masterwork of the New Latin American Cinema, El Chacal de Nahueltoro/ The Jackal of Nahuletoro (Miguel Líttin, Chile, 1969). While little known in the Anglo-American context, it is one of the greatest political films about law, crime, criminal justice institutions ever made. It is based on a real story about a desperately impoverished man who kills a desperately immiserated woman and her five children and is then sent to a rehabilitative prison only to receive the death penalty in the end.
OBJECT OF STUDY
Raúl Alaejos
The shadow of anthropological objectivism haunts a clumsy director who experiments methodologically and formally around the obscene act of filming native populations in the northernmost village.
There, Robert Peary, an American explorer, thought more than 100 years ago that the only way for a human being to reach the North Pole would be to have children with Inuit to create a super-race that would combine Eskimo strength and Western clairvoyance. In the footsteps of this extravagant theory walks this film essay in search of that "super-race".
THE 8th OF APRIL, 2024
Patrick Marshall
A trip to Vermont to experience the light and the dark of the total eclipse of the sun of April 8, 2024.
GAZA REELS
A film with nearly 100 directors, Gaza Reels is a chronologically curated collection of vlogger
entries from October 7th 2023 onward. Palestinians in Gaza have been bravely capturing Israel's
brutal genocide of their people for two and a half years. Their record may not seem like
something for the faint of heart, but it is something the world needed to see. Gaza Reels
is a heroic testament recorded by heroic people. Cauldron's screening of this film is a
"pre-premiere", meaning that the audience will be the FIRST auditorium full of people to set
eyes on this new film.
DOWSING
Tim Feeny
Ten repetitive sonic interventions within the eroded landscapes of the Burren, County Clare, Ireland.
These occur at sites of local “anti-monuments:” a kilometers-long, natural limestone pavement high above Galway Bay; stone farm walls and remnants of circular structures on hillsides; cairns near a shoreline; a field of glacial boulders interrupted by a road smashed from the surrounding stone formations, in forced public work by the starving during the Great Hunger of 1845 to 1852. These structures speak to both the passage of geologic time, and the care and efforts of human survival beginning in the Neolithic period and tended through the present, though local history at each site may be lost, or unrecorded.
These are introduced in title cards in English, italicized as a term in a language foreign to the observer, and in Irish in plain font, as in an observer’s native language.
From one perspective, a sonic divining or physical research into the properties of land, space, light, and time in these locations; from another, an attempt as an “Irish-American” to reckon with language, archaeology, and history felt as formative but inarticulable without lived context.
ALPINE TUNDRA
Kathleen Rugh
At an elevation of 14,264 feet above sea level, the peak of Mount Blue Sky is too harsh for trees and common vegetation. Instead, the ground is covered with fragile tundra grass, weak soil, and rock. In this harsh climate exists the highest paved road in North America, that allows visitors traveling by car to partake in striking views and a sense of awe in the extremes of nature.
PICTURES OF A NEGATIVE CHAIR
Magdalena Bermudez
An account of a scientist trying to teach machines how to infer depth from two-dimensional pictures. A parable of a prince trying to resurrect his lover by fashioning a chair out of his lover’s things. A question about the need for human beings, and the things they are in need of..
THE RYTHMS OF PASTSPRESENT
Alexandra Banhazl
One of the themes that arose in this experiment is the past becoming transformed in the present; following this theme cultivated my experience of the cyclical and spiral temporality of my past and present identity in the unfolding of time. The film also expresses the letting go of identity into the environmental materiality of interconnected time and energy (the individual becomes light, particles of energy, and dissipates into the interconnected multi-temporal texture of the environment).
ADULTING
James Duessing
A queer valentine has a fever dream.
CUSTOM TRAILER SERIES: AUSTIN POWERS
Kelly Egan
Exploring écriture feminine and women's structural narratives, the Custom Trailer Series reimagines Hollywood films through the structure of a traditional quilt pattern. Here, "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" has been recut to construct a starburst quilt, and then scanned as a film. The work exists both as a material object (the quilt) and the visual representation (the film), drawing attention to the materiality of the filmstrip and the patriarchal biases still present in commercial cinema.
ASHES TO ASHES
Sidney Gordon
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 with common comfrey and contaminated wood ash foraged from the farm and was coated in the artist’s blood.
I KNOW THESE PEOPLE
Ian O'Neill
"I Know These People" explores the fragile interplay between memory, media, and empathy. Sourced from Prelinger Archive home videos, fragmented moments are reworked into a reflective collage. Glitches and datamoshing blur boundaries, inviting viewers to rediscover humanity in shared yet distant experiences, connecting these intimate moments through personal narratives.
GAN TANG, THE LAKE
Tianming Zhou
In the summer of 2023, the government of Jiujiang launched the Gan Tang Lake Cleansing Project. Within weeks, this ancient lake with over two millennia of history was drained. Nearby in Gan Tang Park, a boy wakes up in the rain. There, the destiny of Gan Tang awaits.
ASSETS
Christine Lucy Latimer
Hundreds of digitally generated filters and assets used by online content creators to simulate a “shot on film” aesthetic are collaged together on expired 16mm Ektachrome. Random contemporary approximations of film artifacts, ranging from industrial to experimental, move through the frame in impossible trajectories. A film of transitions that never transition, positioning moving image signifiers in a post-truth era.
ALL OF THIS MUST BE PAID FOR
Gabi Rudin
The wellness universe evaluates the spiritual mechanics of the pain-body as it searches for answers.
HURRICANE SEASON
Michelle Trujillo
Hurricane anxiety takes a visceral form as the image searches for an escape route. Inspired by true events. Created on 16mm film and developed with comfrey, mint, yerba mate and willow leaves.
RECTANGLE BOUNDARY
Enzo Cillo, Ambasce
'Rectangle Boundary' explores the concept of the image and its spatial boundaries. The work deconstructs the perimeter as a static element, revealing dynamic shifts along the edges of a rectangular structure.
DEATH IS A BRIDGE
EStephen Mlinarcik
An experimental meditation on the pervasive nature of transience.
TELEPHONE CALL FOR GOD
Nicky Tavares
Quartz is the medium—amplifier, transducer, archive. Inspired by the research of Marcel Vogel—IBM senior research chemist turned spiritual scientist—A Telephone for God oscillates between past and present, tuning into frequencies of human–plant communication and energetic healing.
A WEAK & PANICKED ANIMAL
Jake Star
The sidewalk, the fence, the clearing - each serve as a boundary, a tacit agreement between the human and non-human world: a contract stipulating that neither shall cross these thresholds without becoming subject to the law of the other. These spatial and symbolic thresholds represent an attempt to contain nature, to insulate ourselves from its unpredictable vitality.
NO MATTER WHAT
Carolyn Lambert
This essay film weaves together memories of hawk babies outside my window, my shortcomings as an wildlife observer, and Hollywood's use of the red-tailed hawk cry to signal danger and threat. No Matter What draws parallels between this slippage in auditory representation and the ongoing mass extinction event.
MIRROR
Nuno Serrão
Life, like time, is an experience correlated to the observer’s point of view.
COSMIC IMPERMANENCE
Heather Warren-Crow
Twin AI-generated avatars voice conflicting feelings about end times. The anus of the world intervenes. Recalling mood mining and other ways in which our emotions are instrumentalized through social media, COSMIC IMPERMANENCE is an experimental short that uses commercial AI and low-fi found footage to capture a vibe.
IT IS NOT ONLY ON SURFACE - FORRESTFIREPLASTICCITYSEA
Sara Koppel
Time does not heal all wounds.
GREEN BEFORE "GREEEN"
Atticus Echeverria, Paul Echeverria
A father documents contrasting stages of optical perception.
SHAPE GAMES
John Muse
“A wild, immersive, adventurous, highly physical series of optical illusions. A very Muse creation!” —Lynne Sachs
THEYTHE PEOPLE
Ryan Lewis
Symbols are often born with intended messages or ideals, but their most enduring associations accumulate over time. Symbols are not content, but are instead vessels in which content is stored by societies
RIDING DAY
Michael Alexander Morris
The music video for Black Taffy's Riding Day is a loving nod to British experimental filmmaker Malcom Le Grice's 1970 film Berlin Horse, an iconic work of Structural/Materialist filmmaking that featured a soundtrack by Brian Eno. Like that film, this film is an exploration of the material qualities of celluloid film in ways that are analogous to gestures in electronic music.
NAIHALGAI
Colten Ashley
An experimental retelling of a part of the Navajo Creation Story.
INUNDATION
Dominick Rivers
Inundation is a non-representational film that submerges the viewer in the ephemeral interplay of light and shadow. Employing cyanotype and eco-coloring techniques, the piece captures fleeting impressions and refractions, where illumination emerges only to be swallowed again by darkness.
I WONDER IF I'M SINGING WHAT YOU'RE THINKING ME TO SING
C. S. Nicholson
I Wonder If I’m Singing What You’re Thinking Me To Sing is a solo concert by Michael Gira (of Swans) in a church somewhere. When the images and the audio, both purportedly from the concert, start deviating from what is perhaps likely to have transpired, the film ceases to be the presentation of an experience, and becomes an experience all its own.
ZOVER
Anne-Sarah Le Meur
In a colorful optical ballet, Zover pits minimalist yet sensual visual pleasures against the power of numbers and cold 3D computer programming.
LYCH: THE CORPSE ROAD
David McNulty
A Son rests in a barn alongside the corpse of his dead father. Tomorrow they will journey together over Dartmoor to the graveyard.
MAMMOTH
Alexander Zoumadakis
After their father's death, Harrison feels trapped in a life he no longer recognizes. His sister Sophia watches their bond fracture, powerless to stop his descent into grief.
REPERTOIRE OF DEATH
Guadalupe Arellanes
A lucid dream leads to a dance with Death.
SPUDS
Vance Mellen
A senile old man wakes up after falling into an abandoned potato cellar. Trapped in the pit, the old man is tortured by the voice of his long-gone wife as he desperately schemes to make his escape.
AUTUMNAL SLEEPS
Michael Higgins
In a remote rural estate house, a woman sleeps, she is alone. It’s a time not far from the dawn of the moving image, the obsessed and wealthy Dr. Epstein engineers a number of scientific experiments. He subjects his adopted children, Pete and Re-Pete, along with his darling flapper, Baby Dee, to his various scientific tasks. Things take a decidedly strange turn when Epstein makes a deal with some shifty-looking vagabonds. On doing so he opens a door to the unknown, ruptures the fabric of time and unleashes a shadow-like character bent on reducing all those he encounters to dust.
Photographed on expired 35mm film with a 50year old Soviet camera, Autumnal Sleeps takes inspiration from early silent cinema. The characters and the nature of performance resemble those from a roadshow attraction while highlighting the illusory power of voyeurism and exhibitionism. Like unrestored film of early cinema, the image flickers and the colours bleed creating a psychedelic sensation as one transported through a haunting industrial score broken up with poetic interludes that examine the deeper emotions of the characters.
THE DELLS
Nellie Kluz
THE DELLS observes the clash between fantasy and reality faced by international student workers newly arrived in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin – the self-described “Waterpark Capital of the World.” Coming from countries like Turkey, Romania, Jamaica, Thailand, and the Dominican Republic, these students land in the American Midwest via the State Department’s Summer Work Travel program. Issued temporary J-1 visas, they work low-paying jobs as lifeguards, housekeepers, and servers, living in dormitories tucked behind a glut of tourist attractions.
The film follows the rhythms of an ensemble cast of “J-1s” as they work, party, and cruise around town in taxis. Students weather the myriad headaches of making ends meet in the US – car troubles, job losses, long work hours – thanks to their friendships and youthful optimism. We see their hopes for a summer of American luck and prosperity rub up against their actual experiences, which are by turns disappointing, funny, and transcendent.
A SHIFTING PATTERN
Isaac Sherman
A collected geography of local flora; appearing, disappearing, reappearing, enmeshing. Afterimage becomes before-image, physiology and pathology at play. The will to walk aimlessly, rejuvenated, as stasis turns to movement and back again.
THIS FILM CONTAINS STROBING IMAGES
NICHES
Janelle VanderKelen
Whether it be doing yoga with ants, printing with plants, observing the quantum physics of cats, or considering the travel of an apple: not all teachers are human in a bustling Spanish farmhouse. While instances of interspecies care are enacted beneath the cool stone arches of this rambling structure, the ecological niches (or roles) of various beings shift along with their unexpected environmental relationships. In a heavily altered landscape composed of serrated mountains and meticulously-maintained olive groves, human intervention is readily apparent; however, sometimes trees bear knowledge in addition to green fruits, and humans shape and are shaped by their environment in equal measure.
WAITING UP TO MEET THE WOLF
Anthony Carr
This debut 3-channel short is a quiet call to action for humanity to reverse the decline of dark skies, told via memories from the director’s childhood and adult life.
DOXOLOGY
Mel Day
Doxology, 10 years later (+/-), is an evolving, multi-channel video project depicting each member of the artist-filmmaker's large family humming the same hymn in essentially the same way every 10 years..
ALSO RESISTERS
Christina D Bartson
Also Resisters considers solidarity across generations and geography. Adapted from a 1968 essay by the American pacifist and socialist David McReynolds, the short archival film takes the images and sounds of the American war in Vietnam to reflect on the feedback loop between militarism abroad and at home — and the people who resisted it.
CHAOS
Susanne Layla Petersen
Film inspired by chaos, the science of surprises, of the nonlinear and the unpredictable.
RAIN
Vasilios Papaioannu
Rain, as circular shapes of memory imprinted on the fast paced celluloid or as liquid moving sculptures of the present in digital form, documents a verbal interaction between two people.
SOCIAL SPHERES
What happens when our online communities, our social spheres, consume too much of our time? This short animation considers that very question in a ludicrous, but beautiful, manner.
SOCIAL MEDIA DELIVERS PEOPLE
Brandon Bauer
Social Media Delivers People is a video art piece that critically examines the role of social media in the commodification of users. Drawing inspiration from Richard Serra and Carlotta Schoolman’s 1973 work Television Delivers People, this piece reimagines the critique for the digital age, exposing how social media platforms transform users into products for advertisers. Through a blend of AI spoken text, calm visuals, and bland corporate motivational instrumental music, the video reveals the unseen mechanics of surveillance capitalism—where engagement is monetized, data is harvested, and attention is the ultimate currency. Social Media Delivers People confronts viewers with their own complicity in a system that trades connection for profit. The work serves as both a warning and an invitation to reclaim digital agency, urging audiences to rethink their participation in the social media economy.This debut 3-channel short is a quiet call to action for humanity to reverse the decline of dark skies, told via memories from the director’s childhood and adult life.
HINTERLANDS
Jude Byrne
Hinterlands is a short experimental film that explores a sense of place on the periphery. Filmed on 16mm color film and then digitally edited, Hinterlands examines rural Americana displaced by the design of American cities and interstate highways.
ZERO WOODS OF THE WILD PLACE
Josh Weissbach
Zero Woods of the Wild Place explores the forest that cannot conceal the trauma, the house that cannot listen while dying, and the labyrinth that spirals into the ethics of audio recording.
AIRPORTS IN THE 90'S
Laura Morell
"Airports in the 90’s" invites viewers to reflect on the cinematic language of a pre-9/11 era of travel, where every terminal was a stage and every departure gate a site of drama.
I WAS THERE
Kamila Kuc
I Was There is 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. I Was There honours the testimonial object inherited from ancestors and the living connection that binds generations in the shared pursuit of justice and healing..
SAME WATER
Martine Granby
Drawing from institutional and personal archives, this film revisits a colored-only riverside recreation space that existed alongside a celebrated white-only water park, exposing the layered histories of segregation and unequal access to nature and leisure in Jim Crow.
MONUMENT
Jeremy Drummond
Super 8 footage of the decaying monuments of Presidents Park (Croaker, VA) are layered with video footage captured on Monument Avenue (Richmond, VA) during the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Themes of registration and re-calibration are explored through form and content and the distinct features of the media employed.
THE HOUR OF DEATH
Tomaž Gorkič
Based on an iconic Yugoslavian graphic novel by Kostja Gatnik alias Magna Purga from 1977 the story follows the life of Urban, a man trapped in monotonous daily patterns from birth to death. Years pass relentlessly as Urban grows up and ages, with tireless repetitions persistently dominating his dreary, yet mysterious life like a working machine. However, just before his death, a glimmer of the meaning of life dawns upon Urban.
MILWAUKEE NIGHT AND DAY
A City Symphony. The distillation of ten years of looking at one square block in the the very heart Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A film made from stills that challenges them to move. Beauty, pathos, and turmoil, all in the course of a Joycean day.
GLASS BOTTOM FERRY, ON BORDERS AND SUBMERGED UTOPIAS
Chus Domínguez
An audiovisual essay that delves into the complexity of the border space that unites and separates Africa and Europe.
DYNAMICS
Teo Baehler
The sidewalk, the fence, the clearing - each serve as a boundary, a tacit agreement between the human and non-human world: a contract stipulating that neither shall cross these thresholds without becoming subject to the law of the other. These spatial and symbolic thresholds represent an attempt to contain nature, to insulate ourselves from its unpredictable vitality.
CAMP
Peter Freund
This essay film weaves together memories of hawk babies outside my window, my shortcomings as an wildlife observer, and Hollywood's use of the red-tailed hawk cry to signal danger and threat. No Matter What draws parallels between this slippage in auditory representation and the ongoing mass extinction event.
reality_collapse
Aaron Ross
With the proliferation of media simulacra, reality itself is under siege. We're bombarded with a bewildering array of illusions vying for attention. When information supplants knowledge, facts become irrelevant. There's no longer any terra firma on which to stand.
CROSSING
HMel Hsieh
CROSSING is an experimental short about virtual existentialism and how it shift from storytelling into story living. Eventually, we all lose tracking in the post digital age, trying to make sense in a senseless world.
ONE BIG EYE
SSobia Ahmad, Benny Shaffer
‘One Big Eye’ is a hand-processed 16mm film shot at Pando, an ancient aspen grove that extends across 106 acres in south-central Utah. Seemingly 47,000 individual trees, it is unified by a single, immense root system, making it a ‘forest of one.’ Believed to be between 16,000 and 80,000 years old, Pando is the largest and heaviest known organism on land. Pando's invisible root system is a guiding metaphor that emphasizes the interconnectedness between humans and non-human beings, as well as the notion of Oneness described by many spiritual traditions. The footage was processed at home with an eco-friendly, coffee-based developer that leaves unpredictable inscriptions and traces on the film's emulsion, at times creating visually abstract and speckled images. This materially focused film practice offers an opportunity to rethink ecological entanglements between humans and a more-than-human world.
OF SWALLOWS
Kelly Egan
A swallow’s eye is longer than other birds. Their visual acuity is said to resemble Raptors. For sailors, swallows are a good omen signifying a close shore. My father loved birds. Since his passing I've felt afloat. Lost and unanchored. At sea in overwhelming emotions. I close my eyes and look for swallows, as metaphorical groundings.
BEE MONEY: MORMON GANGSTER RAPPER
James McAllister
Bee Money is an independent rapper associated with the Provo, Utah Area, known for tracks like "PROVO!!! DON'T HATE!!!" and albums such as Bee Money Getting Down the Streets.
GIROSCOPIO
John Muse, Brendamaris Rodriguez
Giroscopio is a short experimental film by two artists, one in Pennsylvania and one in Puerto Rico, each in pandemic lockdown, each disoriented. Objects seem to control them; their bodies are unbalanced, unwieldy, comical.
REVOLUTION NO. 7
Atomic Elroy
Channeling The Sixties Man... It's so Avant Garde to be far out. Free your Mind Instead.
EVERTED SANCTUARIES VII
Everted Sanctuaries VII communicates about the complex needs of introverts. Introversion is explored through object transformation, kinetic sculpture, material, and sound. Transformed objects become metaphors to exhibit the often uncomfortable process of becoming uncharacteristically extroverted
THIS IS MY FACE
DTara Natalia
Trapped at an ornate vanity mirror, a young woman spirals into madness while attempting to conceal severe acne. ‘This Is My Face’ uses a combination of digital footage, Super 8mm, scratch film, and film painting to explore the act of concealment, what we hide from others and fail to hide from ourselves.
THE OTHER SIDE
Caroline Rumley
One border. Two friends. Curiosity. Naïveté. Control.
Years after moving separately through the shadow of East Germany's border wall and the unseen reach of the Stasi, two friends' memories begin to echo in ways neither can fully explain.
PAINTING CATHEDRAL ROCK
Mel Day
Part painting, part performance, part film, ‘Painting Cathedral Rock’ is a quiet meditation on the unstable edges of vision, cinematic spectacle, belief, and subjectivity. A silhouetted figure washes, cleans, and paints the iconic view of Cathedral Rock in Sedona, Arizona—a sacred Indigenous site and popular vortex destination. Ambiguous references and realities shift and collide from the cinematic and spiritual to climate change, colonialism, and landscape painting—both revealing and concealing the landscape and inviting a ritualistic exploration of looking with heightened care.
GYROGRAPH
Gitte Le Bruyn
A newspaper reader takes up residence in a room.
Her head tries to find a story in the randomness of events. In order to make sense of things, she collects and reconstructs newspaper pictures.
She doesn’t want empathy to crumble, nor does she want to feel at the mercy of a post-apocalyptic dystopia, though the newspaper sometimes feels that way.
WRITE YOUR SUNLIGHT ON MY SKIN
Billy Palumbo
The elements collide to make serenity out of turmoil, and anxiety gives way to a new normal. Point the way and I will follow.
REFRACTION(S OF THE GREAT SALT LAKE
Kelly Hannah
An exploration of Great Salt Lake and its Watershed Landscape, curated from footage shot between 2021 and 2024, the short story delivers perspective challenging contemplations related to water, land and air as the Lake re-approaches its historic low water levels in 2026
ACTION BOG
Winston Hacking
A feverish stasis collapses into infinite distraction, spinning on the axis of an algorithm. Each pulse, an uncertain tone, breathes electricity into a half-alive world. Time stretches like soft polymer; metamorphoses creep forward frame by frame, suspiciously slow, as if the film were watching me back.
SEIZE CONTROL OF THE TAJ MAHAL
Glenn Belverio
Brenda and Glennda lead a group of drag queens on a trip to Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City.
SMOKE
Erica Schreinerz
Filmed on a VHS camera in Erica’s apartment, Smoke is a visceral exploration of heartbreak and healing, following the emotional journey of the artist grappling with the sudden end of a relationship. The film visualizes the pain through a ritual of destruction.
BOOKANIMA: DANCE
Shon Kim
BOOKANIMA, a compound word of ‘Book’ and ‘Anima’, is an experimental animation to give new cinematic life to books.
TELL ME WHY
Roger Deutsch
After the eruption of the Mt. Erasmus super volcano in Holland, most of western Europe has been rendereduninhabitable.
I am one of the lucky ones who has been given the opportunity to race the lava to the Pacific ocean on the Daorklis 2, the onlytrain still running to the far east.
REVENGE OF THE VIRGINS
Trent Harris
Found footage experimental film satirizing sexploitation films of the 1960s.
ALGORITHMIC NUDES GRAPPLE WITH ENTROPY
David R Witzling
A thermodynamic melody amidst the machine and a heartbeat, days spent in shadow as shadow, with the streets empty at dusk, and the blue glow of endless day upon us.
TRUMP PINOCHET
Gerald Habarth
This short experimental animation reflects tensions and apprehensions around the growing autocratic tendencies in the US and the world at large. It references Donald Trump and Augusto Pinochet, authoritarians who successfully manipulated public perceptions and attitudes to centralize power and wealth while undermining the democratic and moral underpinnings of their respective nations. It's uncertain spaces, course textures, clumsy imagery and dissonant sounds resonate with the tenuousness of these developments and these times.
WHEREVER STREET PIECE
Panu Johansson
"Wherever Street Piece" is a found footage film that describes impersonal and fragmented memories that cannot be directly linked to the life of one particular individual. Simultaneously the film documents the way these past realities - forgotten people in forgotten situations - blend together from the perspective of the present. Obviously not everything can be stored and passed on, but If we neglect the lessons of the past, are we also bound to repeat its mistakes?
GHOST PROTISTS
Sasha Waters
A protist is an organism that is neither animal, vegetable, nor fungi. Plant-like protists are called algae – such as those “flowers of the sea” cyanotypes created by Anna Atkins and published in a landmark book in 1843. In a mesmerizing frenzy of images and text, this animated short transforms her images into a protest of the historical erasure of the colonial violence that enabled their creation.
CONFETTI
Amanda Therese Bonaiuto
What happens when our online communities, our social spheres, consume too much of our time? This short animation considers that very question in a ludicrous, but beautiful, manner.
CLOSURE
Blake Riesenfeld
In October of 2024, Gillian's Wonderland Pier, located in Ocean City, New Jersey, permanently closed after 60 years of operation.
GARDEN PATH
Big Top Collective
The BIG TOP work "garden path" is an experimental film with images of gardens and plants shot on black and white 16 mm film, hand processed in Cafenol film developer, and then transformed and layered in the editing. The soundtrack features the voices of the BIG TOP collective member artists, Trace Nelson and Peter Sandmark ,in overlapping vocal harmony.
FULL FESTIVAL SCHEDULE
ALL SCREENINGS WILL TAKE PLACE AT THE SALT LAKE CITY DOWNTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY
210 E 400 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84111
ALL SCREENINGS WILL BE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
SCHEDULE
WEDNESDAY JUNE 24
--10:30 AM CULTURE/NATURE (shorts program 1)
Exotic Vector - Van McElwee USA
Unoriginal - Laura Herman USA
Driving The Neighborhood Dogs Crazy - Atomic Elroy USA
Sunny 16 Helsinki - Eve Le Fessant Cousso France
Feedback - Hüseyin Mert Erverdi Turkey
In the Noise of the Downpour - Oleksandr Stupak Ukraine
Soap is an Illusion (Dirt: Part One) - David Finkelstein USA
Under the Covers Girl - Tina Rose Rea Meister, Josie Elizabeth Meister USA
If They Really Exist - Hio Lam Lei Taiwan and Macau
--1:00 PM ON AND OF THE EARTH (shorts program 2)
DRIFT - Harper Austin USA
The Eye In Nothing - Michael Edwards USA
Sabbatical - Jack McCoy USA
Detours - Vida Guzmić Croatia
Gnosis - Adam Jaslikowski (Justin Sight) USA
The Story of The Cricket Queen - Natalie Peracchio USA
FORTUNA - Esther Hoareau Réunion
No Time of Deep Time - Eric Souther USA
Our Morals and Theirs - Salomé Aguile USA
--3:30 PM OBJECT OF STUDY
Directed by Raúl Alaejos Spain
The shadow of anthropological objectivism haunts a clumsy director who experiments
methodologically and formally around the obscene act of filming native populations in
the northernmost village.
There, Robert Peary, an American explorer, thought more than 100 years ago that the only
way for a human being to reach the North Pole would be to have children with Inuit to
create a super-race that would combine Eskimo strength and Western clairvoyance.
In the footsteps of this extravagant theory walks this film essay in search of that
"super-race".
--6:00 PM GAZA REELS
The 8th of April 2024 - Patrick Marshall USA
GAZA REELS
A film with nearly 100 directors, Gaza Reels is a chronologically curated collection of vlogger
entries from October 7th 2023 onward. Palestinians in Gaza have been bravely capturing Israel's
brutal genocide of their people for two and a half years. Their record may not seem like
something for the faint of heart, but it is something the world needed to see. Gaza Reels
is a heroic testament recorded by heroic people. Cauldron's screening of this film is a
"pre-premiere", meaning that the audience will be the FIRST auditorium full of people to set
eyes on this new film.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THURSDAY JUNE 25
--10:15 AM DOWSING
Directed by Tim Feeney USA
Ten repetitive sonic interventions within the eroded landscapes of the Burren,
County Clare, Ireland.
--12:00 NOON CLAIMED TERRAIN (shorts program 3)
Alpine Tundra - Kathleen Rugh USA
Pictures of a Negative Chair - Magdalena Bermudez USA
The Rhythms of Pastspresnt - Alexandra Banhazl USA
Adulting - James Duesing USA
Custom Trailer Series: Austin Powers - Kelly Egan USA
Ashes to ashes - Sidney Gordon Canada
I Know These People - Ian O'Neill USA
Gan Tang, The Lake - Tianming Zhou China
Assets - Christine Lucy Latimer Canada
All of This Must Be Paid For - Gabi Rudin USA
Hurricane Season - Michelle Trujillo USA
Rectangle boundary - Enzo Cillo, Ambasce Italy
--2:00 PM INTERIOR/EXTERIOR (shorts program 4)
Death Is The Bridge - Stephen Mlinarcik USA
A Telephone for God - Nicky Tavares USA
A Weak & Panicked Animal - Jake Star Australia
No Matter What - Carolyn Lambert USA
Mirror - Nuno Serrão Portugal
Cosmic Impermanence - Heather Warren-Crow USA
"It is Not Only on Surface - ForrestFirePlasticCitySea" - Sara Koppel
Denmark
(green before "green") - Atticus Echeverria, Paul Echeverria USA
Shape Games - John Muse USA
They The People - Ryan Lewis USA
Riding Day - Michael Alexander Morris USA
Nihalgai - Colten Ashley USA
Inundation - Dominick Rivers USA
--4:30 PM I WONDER IF I'M SINGING WHAT YOUR'E THINKING ME TO SING
Directed by C. S. Nicholson Norway
I Wonder If I’m Singing What You’re Thinking Me To Sing is a solo concert by Michael Gira (of Swans) in a church somewhere. When the images and the audio, both purportedly from the concert, start deviating from what is likely
to have transpired, the film ceases to be the presentation of an experience, and becomes an experience all its own.
...before the film... Zover - Anne-Sarah Le Meur France
(this 8m short film will play before the feature)
--6:00 PM PARALLEL GHOSTS (CAULDRON "HORROR" PROGRAM)
A collection of films that address the supernatural and the speculative using genre-adjacent methods.
Lych: The Corpse Road - David McNulty United Kingdom
Mammoth - Alexander Zoumadakis USA
Repertoire of Death - Guadalupe Arellanes USA
SPUDS - Vance Mellen USA
Autumnal Sleeps - Michael Higgins Ireland
In a remote rural estate house, a woman sleeps, she is alone. It’s a time not far from the dawn of the moving image, the obsessed and wealthy Dr. Epstein engineers a number of scientific experiments. He subjects his adopted children, Pete and Re-Pete, along with his darling flapper, Baby Dee, to his various scientific tasks. Things take a decidedly strange turn when Epstein makes a deal with some shifty-looking vagabonds. On doing so he opens a door to the unknown, ruptures the fabric of time and unleashes a shadow-like character bent on reducing all those he encounters to dust.
Photographed on expired 35mm film with a 50year old Soviet camera, Autumnal Sleeps takes inspiration from early silent cinema. The characters and the nature of performance resemble those from a roadshow attraction while highlighting the illusory power of voyeurism and exhibitionism. Like unrestored film of early cinema, the image flickers and the colours bleed creating a psychedelic sensation as one transported through a haunting industrial score broken up with poetic interludes that examine the deeper emotions of the characters.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FRIDAY JUNE 26
--10:30 AM THE DELLS
Directed by Nellie Kluz USA
THE DELLS observes the clash between fantasy and reality faced by international student workers newly arrived in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin – the self-described “Waterpark Capital of the World.” Coming from countries like Turkey, Romania, Jamaica, Thailand, and the Dominican Republic, these students land in the American Midwest via the State Department’s Summer Work Travel program. Issued temporary J-1 visas, they work low-paying jobs as lifeguards, housekeepers, and servers, living in dormitories tucked behind a glut of tourist attractions.
The film follows the rhythms of an ensemble cast of “J-1s” as they work, party, and cruise around town in taxis. Students weather the myriad headaches of making ends meet in the US – car troubles, job losses, long work hours – thanks to their friendships and youthful optimism. We see their hopes for a summer of American luck and prosperity rub up against their actual experiences, which are by turns disappointing, funny, and transcendent.
--12:00 NOON FIGURES AND GROUNDS (shorts program 5)
A Shifting Pattern - Isaac Sherman USA
Niches - Janelle VanderKelen USA
Waiting Up To Meet The Wolf - Anthony Carr Canada
Doxology - Mel Day Canada
Also Resisters - Christina D Bartson United Kingdom
Chaos - Susanne Layla Petersen Denmark
Rain - Vasilios Papaioannu Greece
Social Spheres - Stephan Larson USA
Social Media Delivers People (After Serra & Schoolman) - Brandon Bauer USA
Hinterlands - Jude Byrne USA
Zero Woods of the Wild Place - Josh Weissbach USA
Airports in the 90's - Laura Morell USA
I Was There - Kamila Kuc United Kingdom
--2:00 PM MARKING TIME (shorts program 6)
Same Water - Martine Granby USA
Monument - Jeremy Drummond Canada
The Hour of Death - Tomaž Gorkič Slovenia
Milwaukee Night and Day - Dick Blau USA
Ashes to Ashes - Sidney Gordon Canada
--3:30 PM GLASS BOTTOM FERRY. ON BORDERS AND SUBMERGED UTOPIAS
Directed by Chus Domínguez Spain
An audiovisual essay that delves into the complexity of the border space that unites and separates Africa and Europe.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SAT JUNE 27
--10:30 AM ANOTHER SIDE (shorts program 7)
Dynamics - Teo Baehler Netherlands
Camp - Peter Freund USA
reality_collapse - Aaron Ross USA
Crossing - Mel Hsieh Taiwan
One Big Eye - Sobia Ahmad, Benny Shaffer USA
Of Swallows - Kelly Egan Canada
Bee Money: Mormon Gangster Rapper - James McAllister USA
Giroscopio - John Muse, Brendamaris Rodriguez USA
Revolution No. 7 - Atomic Elroy USA
Everted Sanctuaries VII - Ryan Lewis USA
This Is My Face - Tara Natalia Canada
The Other Side - Caroline Rumley USA
--12:30 PM DOWSING
Directed by Tim Feeney USA
Ten repetitive sonic interventions within the eroded landscapes of the Burren,
County Clare, Ireland.
--2:15 PM WHEREVER STREET (shorts program 8)
Painting Cathedral Rock - Mel Day USA/Canada
Gyrograph - Gitte Le Bruyn Belgium
Write Your Sunlight On My Skin - Billy Palumbo USA
Refraction(s of Great Salt Lake - Kelly Hannah USA
Action Bog - Winston Hacking Canada
Seize Control of the Taj Mahal - Glenn Belverio USA
Smoke - Erica Schreiner USA
BOOKANIMA: Dance - Shon Kim South Korea/USA
Tell Me Why - Roger Deutsch Hungary
Revenge of the Virgins - Trent Harris USA
Algorithmic Nudes Grapple with Entropy - David R Witzling USA
Trump Pinochet - Gerald Habarth USA
Wherever Street Piece - Panu Johansson Finland
Ghost Protists - Sasha Waters USA
Confetti - Amanda Therese Bonaiuto USA
Closure - Blake Riesenfeld USA
Garden Path - Big Top Collective Canada