CAULDRON 2026
SALT LAKE CITY DOWNTOWN LIBRARY
MAY 6-9th
CAULDRON INTERNATIONAL FILM AND VIDEO FESTIVAL
MAY 6-9, 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.
MORE FILM DESCRIPTIONS
WILL BE POSTED HERE
EACH DAY.
(about 70 more to go here...
...check back in a few days
for the full list!)
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 MAY 6
--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
--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".
--5:00 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 MAY 7
--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 - Director 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.
The Archivist is Dying - Esme Laam USA
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.
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FRIDAY MAY 8
--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.
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SAT MAY 9
--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 FREE-FORMERS: SELECTIONS FROM THE FREE FORM FILM FESTIVAL 2003-2013
The Free Form Film Festival toured North America in the early 2000's showing an eclectic mix of video forms at
cinemas, bars, garages, galleries, and just about any kind of venue imaginable. This program is a selection of
amazingly unique, and (mostly) amazingly standard-definition (before HD) video works from a recent time
when in-person video screenings were more common. You had to be there. Wanna know what we'll show at this
screening? You'll have to be there. Come and find out!
--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