The Films
Film Details
listed in program order
Innerscapes - Alice Highet – UK
"I have been developing a series of short (1-3 min long) audio-visual loops. I was trying to capture fleeting glimpses of internal states, like moving paintings. I tried to make them retain some materiality, despite being screen-based. The films come in and out of focus. This format echoes my ideas of inner experience as multiple-faceted and hard to grasp.
Whilst making this work, I was having conversations with Marco Bernini in Medial Humanities at Durham University, who’s work looks at inner experience. In his paper ‘Affording Innerscpapes.’ He describes 'inner experience as something enactive (connected to the environment), situated and multisensory.’ He references William James’s ideas about these experiences as fleeting melting when captured, like snowflakes. He very kindly let me use the word ‘Innerscapes’ for my title.
For the sound, I mainly used field recordings that were on the videos. I then responded intuitively to these sounds and the moving-image using electroacoustic composition, trying to create different atmospheres and moods."
LOVE IS WAR - Ragnar Lasse-Henriksen – NORWAY
At CAULDRON, we are very excited to show this newly restored version of LOVE IS WAR, a transcendent film that won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize (Berlin Film Festival) in 1971, but shortly after became unavailable to audiences. This feature film eschews traditional narrative structure for a poetic resonance that recalls Rimbaud, Artaud, or Strindberg.
In a time when "make love, not war" was the slogan heard everywhere, Ragnar Lasse Henriksen aka Ragnar Go'hjerta, age 23, set out to make “Love is War”, a film expressing the complexities, casualties and fatalities that can result from romantic love.
Touch Abstract 2 - Tim Hutchings – USA
Scrolling touch movements were captured from an iPhone and then applied to an abstracted, layered, line-landscape reminiscent of 8-bit computer graphics. Correlations are created between reading lines of text on a phone and the simulation of landscape transversal in some sorts of Atari games.
Destruction of the Field - Enzo Cillo – ITALY
Destruction of the field is a work on the disappearance of each knowable element, on the deconstruction of a visual field. The device reveals visual disturbances that the eye can follow with oscillating movements in a rectangular space. Destruction becomes a new code, a new form.
Music by Ambasce
Events in the Tunnel - Penny McCann, Eric Walker – CANADA
Drawn from Super 8 films in the artists’ personal archives as well as found amateur 8mm footage, Events in the Tunnel presents an absurdist abbreviated retelling of Canada’s colonial history as defined by that great colonial trope, the cross-country train trip. In the transitional void of a train tunnel, we witness familiar 19th and 20th century paradigms of white middle-class conformity as represented by images of travel, amusement, and domesticity, with Canadian culture embodied by a chimeric portrayal of the early 20th century painter Tom Thomson.
Sound design by Chris Ikonomopoulos
Fuzzy Boundaries - Megan Young – USA
Fuzzy Boundaries (2022) juxtaposes communal methods of accountability with data-driven surveillance systems while emphasizing what evades capture in a machine vision landscape. The collage of original writing, direction, animations, and aerial images explore notions of safety and security from the perspective of those most impacted. Spoken texts draw from one-on-one conversations with unhoused persons at Ohio’s largest men’s shelter and speak to the rise of drone surveillance in Northeast Ohio. Though the opening narration declares, “we make space socially,” the exclusively drone-captured, computer generated, and digitally processed images tell another story. Technology imposes a vast cognitive distance between us.
The Silent Garden - Jonathan Onsuwan Johnson – USA
A child reads Edith Södergran’s “The Great Garden”, while moving image and sound wash over the words. A space is created to imagine beginnings and meditate on the potential of innocence and finding one's place.
Anicca - Antonella Di Tillo – ITALY
The video Anicca (the Pali word for “Impermanence”) is a succession of images born from reflection on the mystery of time and its mutations.
Both the letters that appear there and the final hi8 clip are original materials. The letters from the 90s were received by the author, while the hi8 material belongs to the actress, in fact the little girl is the actress herself at the age of 5. She therefore appears with a double and simultaneous presence.
Shot in 16:9 with Sony alpha 7SII and Zenith Helios and Takumar analog lenses, it was post-produced analogically through the use of Takyon+'s Psycheneizer videosynth.
Signal corruption is memory corruption.
The Silent Garden - Jonathan Onsuwan Johnson – USA
He Got Lost in the Forest of Her Memory - Alberto Varet Pascual – SPAIN
A girl dreams, and from that dream emanates the memories of a boy.
Memories that reveal all he lost in time..
Ondine - Mary Hanlon – USA
Inspired by the Celtic myth in which a water spirit exchanges her magical powers for a human soul, Ondine is trapped in a dystopian purgatory. A more evolved woman from a future time crosses channels with her, becomes entranced by Ondine, and attempts to return her to her watery realm.
Dream Resort - Peter Belkin, Lauren Hartman – USA
Dream Resort, a collaboration between Pete Belkin and Lauren Hartman, is a visual investigation into twelve abandoned luxury resorts and hotels in French Polynesia. All in various states of ruin, rehabilitation, and decay, these sites tell a story of nature reclaiming land and the temporality of human activity, even in the more remote places on Earth. This work was filmed on location in 2023 and is slated for completion early this fall. For the prompt for this work, the artists work with AI to generate a poem about a boat lost at sea that finds refuge in an abandoned hotel. The poem is co-edited and translated visually into moving images, narrated by a futuristic voice-over that takes the viewer through a visual journey across four islands in the South Pacific. Filmed on the islands of Tahiti, Mo'orea, Huahine, and Bora Bora. This project is funded in part by California Maritime Academy and The Puffin Foundation.
Monolith - Teri Carson – USA/MEXICO
Part essay film, part videopoem, Monolith braids found footage, documentary, experimental, 3D animation and narrative filmmaking devices to explore notions of collectivity, dissent, indigenous knowledge and time as a series of folds, splits, ruptures, loops, clusters, drifts, ascents, descents, vortexes, pulses, rhythms, linkages, aberrations, burials, and unearthings. This shape-shifting film addresses ongoing legacies of nationalist archives, archeology, and coloniality.
The Elegance of Sugar - Crystal Beiersdorfer – USA
The Elegance of Sugar is a 2-minute two-channel digital
video that addresses the corporal and auditorial
release of daily life.
Jitters - Zack Schaefer - USA (Utah)
An anxious student with Tourette's syndrome finds himself on the last day of class presentations, and must choose to either take the risk of humiliation, or fail the class.
Parallel Botany - Magdalena Bermudez - USA
Still lives of real fruit meet botanical illustrations of plant galls to expose the paradox of dissection: each time we cut something in two, we merely create a new exterior.
First Hermanubis: Initiation - Michael Alexander Morris – USA
First Hermanubis is the first installment of a planned longer series of films using the figure of Hermanubis, a Hellenistic-Egyptian deity combining Hermes and Anubis, as a starting point for thinking about hybridized identities, magic and the occult. This first episode focuses on the story of my family, Greeks who came to the United States from Turkey in the early 20th Century, my relationship to growing up in the Greek Orthodox Church, self-initiation into magic, and relocation to Cairo, Egypt.
Movie of Your Life – Brian Staker – USA (Utah)
Positive X Reversal – Chad Gooch – USA
Artist's body as an art object moving in space.
A Fence is a Fence but the Clouds Move Freely - Curtis Miller – USA
A brief essay on the origin of four small towns in rural Kansas and Oklahoma, told through each town’s respective water tower. Tall tales, public memorials, and roadside signage present in a region shadowed with settler-colonialism, imperial pursuits, identity fictions, and the threat of severe weather.
Simulation: Voladores - Dominick Andrew Porras – USA
3D generated Voladores dancers perform a ceremonial
aerial dance in a digitally bleak environment simulating
the origin setting of an ancient legend.
“And When I Die Let Me be Buried in a Hemlock Coffin, so I’ll Go Through Hell Snapping.” - Sarah Ema Friedland – USA
Combining fantastical hand-painted and computer animations with 16mm film, a Hemlock forest in Western Massachusetts that is dying due to beetle infestation tells a larger story about climate collapse and the interconnections between the natural and the built environments.
Its not Art its Television – Atomic Elroy – USA
TV or Not Tv...
Mirrors and Screens - Janis Crystal Lipzin – USA
Risk and uncertainty lurk while navigating through history, improvisation, perception and understanding. Mirrors and screens are everywhere. Original score by Rob Stephenson.
Autoritratto all'Inferno / Self-portrait in Hell - Federica Foglia – CANADA
This hybrid piece is a collage created assembling both analog and digital material. Several layers of 8mm films merge to create a camera-less self-portrait of the filmmaker.The first layer is an 8mm orphan film (found footage) from the 1970s of a woman dancing.
The second layer is an 8mm found footage film that has been buried in earth for some months. While being covered in earth, the film emulsion has been eaten by the bacterias in the ground, plus some bacterias from yeast and sugar. This technique was originally used by the Schmelzdahin group in Germany.
After several weeks in soil, the film gets extracted, rinsed, and scanned via a 4K digital scanner.
The third layer is an 8mm home movie that has been first decayed in soil, using the aforementioned technique, then hand-painted with ink.
Trajectory 2 - Cyril Galmiche – FRANCE
Carried out in Japan during the ó-hanami season, the Trajectory 2 project simultaneously presents 9 sequence shots, each reproducing the same sequence of gestures. Filmed with a smartphone in different places, the images were designed as capsules of time and space, inviting the viewer to contemplation.
F-14 - Jesse Walton – USA
"I made this film while in residency at Wassaic Project the same month that Barack Obama was ending his second term and Donald Trump was inaugurated as president. Using actual and reenacted footage of the 1989 air battle near Tobruk that involved 2 United States Navy F-14 Tomcats and 2 Libyan MiG-23 Floggers, I superimposed objects I discovered around the hamlet of Wassaic, New York. The film plays on the naivety and playfulness of children focusing on the tiny wonders and objects of the world, all the while war rages on."
Bezuna - Saif Alsaegh – USA/IRAQ
Bezuna explores the complexities of fleeing a war-zone through the analysis of peripheral details. Through interweaving different narratives, the film presents the raw and broken feelings of a child and a cat whose lives will never be the same.
BUNNY GIRL - Monet Clark – USA
Driven by the crises that our biosphere is in, a Playboy Bunny/animal of the same name traverses sweeping landscapes layered with found footage of global events. With nature as her co-star, she points towards our dystopian present. Using wry humor, BUNNY GIRL ties environmental destruction to the suppression of the feminine principal, which is blossoming nonetheless in the face of attack and further, is primed to save the world.
Distances - Lee Tusman, Amelia Marzec – USA
Distances is a remixed video using public domain film and audio on the theme of early 20th century American immigration. The video is constructed of footage from a 1927 film on the deep sea laying of underwater transatlantic telephone cables, here appearing at times to resemble scenes of gravedigging, societal disorder and dislocation. Source footage includes trains through the Berlin countryside in the years between World War 1 and 2. This video was made using phasing techniques, created in the software Processing. The audio was created with sound samples and effects on a modular synthesizer.
Parangolé - Abinadi Meza – USA/MEXICO
A rainy morning in Rio de Janeiro; film as a membrane, a memory veil, imprinted by the body and the environment. The title is a reference to the performative cloaks/capes of the late Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, made of various materials including fabric, paper, and plastic. This handmade film is made with reclaimed pigments and physical processes including spraying, scratching, staining, and contact printing.
If I Sound Like I’m Choking - Forrest Simmons – USA
The Ecolution - Ahmed Tahsin Shams – USA/BANGLADESH
This film deconstructs the traditional storytelling human-voiced pattern, and attempts to narrate non-human voices with an aim to promote symbiosis or co-existence for the sake of ecological peace on earth. However, Nature and species except 'homo sapiens' become the center in this film, and the human character becomes the margin. The plot is surreal and postmodern where insects decided to film a human story on a magical river named RIVER RESET POINT. Here, human visits to reset their lives, to restart with their choices--anything they desire to be in the next life.
In the age of the Anthropocene, art and cinema can play a huge role in deconstructing the non-symbiotic power relationship that humans 'greedily' formed without being eco-conscious. This film can help rethink these power dynamics for a better earth!
When I Said Express I Meant the Train Not the Clothing Brand - Ajunie Virk – USA
My sister told me the way there would have a great view of the city -- very scenic and stuff. But I accidentally went to the wrong platform and instead spent the whole ride traveling through a tunnel. There, I was forced to listen to a cover band sing a tragically off-key rendition of Empire State Of Mind in a pitch-black subway car for 15 minutes.
I am now in Bay Ridge and was stranded at a McDonald's (one of those boring, new ones that lack a play place and seems more suited to house a plastic surgeon’s office than a few deep fryers). Even though he was redeeming his free birthday fries, the man that ordered before me was holding a bunch of coins in his hands. He seemed really happy that it was his special day. He was smiling so wide I could see all of the plaque buildup on his teeth. When I went up to order, they claimed to have “broken” their ice cream machine. I used the McFlurry money to buy this journal and a pack of Lisa Frank stickers.
I’m still deciding, but I think I’ll just walk the rest of the way there.
Lick Fire - Jeff Zorrilla – Argentina
Through intimate reflections, Lick Fire delves into the ecstasy and turmoil that spring forth from the limitless realm of imagination, while fearlessly contemplating the impending consequences of artificial intelligence in breathing life into these captivating and unreal realms. MATURE AUDIENCES
Welcome to the Enclave - Sarah Lasley – USA
Two Texas sisters fled to the metaverse at the onset of the pandemic, creating The Enclave, a cyber-haven for ‘like-minded women’. Years later, the suburb is on the verge of bankruptcy, and owner Moni Calvioni is crowdfunding to save her digital utopia. With no awareness of online culture, she and her sister Blair turn to Twitch and Reddit to pitch their idealized vision only to fall prey to a slew of internet trolls who write profanities on their street signs and graffiti their walls with sexual imagery. The rapidly encroaching digital mountainscape only further unravels the delusion of The Enclave’s pursuit for the white, suburban ideal and exposes the baggage we bring to online spaces if we don't fix our very real IRL problems. MATURE AUDIENCES
MATURE AUDIENCES
Things We Swallow - Carleen Maur – USA
MATURE AUDIENCES
Mom - Hayden Lilly Daiber – USA
This film was created from all found footage and audio taken by my mother. An artist herself who one day dreamt of creating a project with it, 25+ years later I did. This film displays the intimacies of my family dynamics, love, loss and everyday experiences as I re-imagine my childhood. My mother recorded beautifully intimate and painful moments; her father never before talking about WW II, my fathers father’s passing, a reconciliation of my mother with her parents after being disowned for becoming an artist, my late godmother as her maid of honor and life becoming a mother. I intertwine a few present day moments I was experiencing while creating the film because it was impossible to separate these moments while archiving my past. I view this film as a decades long collaboration. MATURE AUDIENCES
Return of the Näcken - Cassandra Sechler – USA
A gothic horror tale about a lonely water demon and their quest for human souls.
With a Finger to her Lips – Alana Bartol - CANADA
A witch's hands emerge at the Greenhill Mine Complex, an abandoned coal mining operation in the area now known as the Crowsnest Pass, Alberta.
Passengers - Alvin Tang – Singapore
Employing the role of moving images as vehicles to relay the liminality
in places and time, 'Passengers' lure and detach the viewers from reality,
journeying them into zones of the in-between. Eschewing characters and
dialogue, twilight scenes of non-places accompanied with pensive sounds
turns the film into a transient passage for the confrontation of possibilities.
Ashes of Roses - Sasha Waters – USA
This movie is about loving things that are embarrassing and people who are inappropriate. It's an essay film reflection on popular trash; football parties; older men; adolescent desire and the outrageous yet mundane humiliations of being a teenage girl in the 1980s. With sound design by Kevin T. Allen and performance cameos by filmmakers Roger Beebe and Jason Livingston.
Oscillating Sporadically - Gabby Follett Sumney, Hogan Seidel – USA
A conversation spread over time, distance, and hand painted film
Echoes of Pandemic - Víctor Rodolfo Jiménez – USA/CUBA
"I want a symbolic death, that leads me in a last poetic, almost desperate act: to die with a seed stuck in my throat."
Echoes of Pandemic combines the power of video and poetry to explore the impact of the pandemic on the vibrant city of Miami.
Capturing the beauty of poetry in difficult times, paints a vivid and emotional portrait of a city in the throes of a global health crisis, showcasing the universal human spirit and the transformative power of art, that resonates through the challenges faced by the community.
The Marsh - Megan Jo Capenar – USA (Utah)
"In this work, I explore memory, imagination, and the blending of the ordinary with the fantastic. Building this piece using everyday objects, photographs, and natural materials blurs the line between reality and fiction. I wanted to construct a space of comfort, demonstrating that these spaces don’t need to be positive, gentle, or necessarily grounded in reality."
Vvaaccuumm - Timothy David Orme – USA
A glass-half-empty-optimystical film because a vacuum
contains nothing and a vacuum contains everything
so knock so know.
ElectroLandscape - Zsolt Gyenes – HUNGARY
An experimental audiovisual artwork using a prepared TV, VHS camera, and SC digital app. A comprovisation (composition+improvisation). Sound and visual meet at synch points (Chion). Music for the eyes.
8 Bits or Less - Patrick Lichty – USA
A man who sees the world through his electronic devices
wanders through a surreal world of dinosaurs and alien abductions.
Helluva Way to Die - Liam Thomas Dougherty – UK
Helluva Way to Die is an experimental audiovisual study in mass, texture, and density. The film is comprised of found footage from broadcasts of the American "televangelist" preacher Benny Hinn's religious services. Hinn was known in the United States for his massive services in stadiums and arenas in major cities where he professed his healing abilities. The services often lasted extreme durations sometimes up to 10 hours, and they would frequently consist of very long-form musical accompaniment to his sermons, often sustaining the same hymn for upwards of an hour. The visual material are samples extracted from this footage and re-arranged within various digital feedback networks. The sonic material is composed of audio extracts re-orchestrated for a chamber ensemble and presented alongside a collaged version of one of Hinn’s sermons. The result is a 15-minute sound mass and to accompany an imagined experience of dense religious fervor.
Phan Acts - Jessica Parnell – UK
A collection of nine short acts and videos created by the
artist between 2023 and 2024.
The videos are shot in different locations and at
different 'phantasy' periods of the artist's internal life.
'Phantasy' means imaginative fulfillment within the
fulfillment of her artwork and her unconscious wishes
becoming conscious.
Hemorrhage – Ruth Hayes – USA
Animated agit-prop: against the end of Roe
and the evisceration of women’s rights to choose.
13th Ave Fargo Mine Cart – Raymond Rea – USA
13th Ave Fargo Mine Cart is a comment on one Big Box Store strip. There may be a different, yet familiar, strip where you live. Only conversation with someone else immersed can offer relief
The Enlightenment - Stephanie Barber – USA
Listing dangerously into poetry, philosophy and sound art, Barber's new film finds Yon and Payola in a Victorian conservatory. They are companionable, disoriented and petulant––they whip wildly through these disembodied states. Payola reads an excerpt of their experimental essay on the age of enlightenment.
Dream Machine Ballet – Pierre Ajavon - FRANCE
Like a bridge between two worlds, the user of the Dream Machine can see complex color patterns appear, these patterns can become swirling shapes and symbols, until the user feels overwhelmed with colors.
In "Dream Machine Ballet", the rhythmic impulses of the music cause patterns, shapes and symbols of colors in movement, which emerge from the unconscious according to the different musical phases.
La Citta Reale - Hing Tsang – UK/Peru
La Città Reale is an experimental narrative using puppetry and moving cardboard insects.
The hand of the puppeteer performer becomes a form of moving city, where individuals and
communities are isolated but always interconnected.The film is a testament to vulnerability
and resilience in contemporary times.
Language Unknown - Janelle VanderKelen – USA
This film embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans (who are far more sensorially limited). Leaves, mycelium, and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world, and the (supposedly) silent watchers consider what language those swift blurs of human might possibly understand.
Random Walk Through the Latent Space - David Witzling – USA
Two artificial intelligences compete to mingle truth with its statistical representation, giving birth to a generative adversarial network. Thinking machines will eat your future. In the end, all will be well in the Disney-verse. Also featuring: the Myanmar Coup Dance Routine, industrial policy recommendations from Elon Musk, and other highlights from Pandemic social media.
Over We Go - Mary Billyou – USA
Aerial views of an ancient amphitheater and a crater, holds views of landscapes on which silhouettes of furniture are placed, presenting a shared space for conversation. This film attempts to hold space in a changing world so that we may witness it.
Tales and Visions of Community with MM Serra: To Jonas With Love - MM Serra, Emily Singer –USA
We find MM Serra at 181 Mott Street - an art gallery in the heart of Soho. The current exhibition: To Jonas, With Love, curated by Chuck Smith, Film Maker of Barbara Rubin and the Exploding New York Underground, Producer and close friend of MM and Jonas Mekas. Through conversation MM and Chuck share their stories of Jonas Mekas, the founder of The New American Cinema Group and arguably one of the more prominent/commercialized experimental filmmakers
Pilgrimage - Anthony Buchannan – USA
"I would like to write a poem as long as California and as slow as a summer.''
--Jack Spicer
A devotional love poem, a City Symphony. In 2011, Craig Baldwin drew me a map of the city of San Francisco. Over the years, the city became my spiritual home, and Craig became my mentor. In 2015 I rediscovered the map and decided to literalize it. For six months I walked the streets of San Francisco with a Bolex, clicking off frames, simulating the map, enacting every single circle, mark, straight line, etc...Part performance, part love letter, the film is a celebration of the City of my dreams.
For Craig Baldwin
Eicha: The Book of Lumenations - Adeena Karasick – USA
Eicha: The Book of Lumenations takes as its jumping off point the Biblical Eicha, The Book of Lamentations, which sings the dirges of mourning, and laments the destruction of both Temples and Jerusalem. Tracking through desolation, misery, hope, lament and prayer, the 5-part suite homophonically re-situates the original text to the horrors and hope of the present moment.
Meine Inspiration - Neil Needleman – USA
"I really don't know what inspired me to make this bizarre little video. I wasn't watching "Triumph of the Will" or WW2 movies. I think the idea came to me because I had seen some news footage of Donald Trump on the campaign trail. Yeah, that must be it."
Gestrata - Kellie Bornhoft – USA
"Through my own body’s relationship to the geological make-up of the earth, I try to grasp the sounds and feelings of our current moment of unraveling stability."
Ambulance - ANDi LAND – USA
This kiss tastes like cement 👄😈✨🔪 an uncomfortable reflection on police brutality and superficial youth.
Tourist Town - Dan Sokolowski – CANADA
A visit to Dawson City in Canada's Yukon
Territory is like stepping back in time.
[The User]-^^%^%^% - Damien Looney – UK
Audio reactive animation produced in real-time.
Empire - Grant Petery – UK
The nocturnal city reveals a machine of desiring forces linked to the spectacle of Capitalism. In the consuming night, the dazzlement of the city as a networked flow of information and surveillance is revealed. Affective forces create and shape the experience of this machinic city, but within this illumination and control, seeking out the liminal, queer spaces of desire becomes more urgent.
Everlasting Happiness - Deborah White – AUSTRAILIA
'The tongue-in-cheek antics of spiritual anarchists
fighting for a utopian desire in a battle against the
pathology of the post-truth world.'
REVERSAL combines images and sounds from movies released or broadcast in 1973, the year the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade. In the strange new reality ushered in by the Dobbs decision, the slogan "We won't go back" is recalled with bitter irony. This collage piece evokes the spectre of regression and repression that has followed the Court's decision.
Reversal - Diane Nerwen – USA
GRID - Alexandre Alagôa – PORTUGAL
A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).
Morning: Yukon River - Dan Sokolowski – CANADA
The mist rises on the Yukon River.
A Visitor Arrived at the Museum Today - Christopher Lynn – USA
A Visitor Arrived at the Museum Today is a short video essay about a typically atypical visitor to a museum
Know No Now - Karl Erickson – USA
Know No Now is an animation of two puppets, Jelly Pop and Perky Jean, struggling to figure out how to live beyond the present moment of extraction-based capitalism and the resulting environmental destruction. Working through fear (of language, of the other, of time, and of the self), Jelly Pop and Perky Jean arrive at a mental space in which they imagine themselves outside of time, no longer ego driven, and having a long view of existence.
DVA - Alexandra Karelina – RUSSIAN FEDERATION
During the inexplicable state of emergency in Moscow, a lonely young man is trying to find his missing dog and to figure out what is truly going on. Eventually, he finds himself in a parallel world where the dead and the living are inseparable, but the word "death" is strictly prohibited.
MygaloMorphae - Dusty Deen – USA
An experimental film that explores life's variations through various found footage and visual augmentation
Image Me - Till Gombert – GERMANY
A photographic image in its production: exposure, development and reproduction. As the subject of its recording the faces of two people. The experimental short film "IMAGE ME" equates the face with the photographic image, exposing the merge with our depiction and a mechanics of rotation around our own axis.
Horrendum 36DOT 06 - Eduardo Molea - BOLIVARIAN REPUBLIC OF VENEZUELA
H O R R E N D U M, which comes from Latin and means horrible, seeks to decompose and distort the typographic's figure, to destroy it.
Projections From The Third Half Trilogy - Zeina Barakeh – STATE OF PALESTINE
Barakeh's trilogy Projections From The Third Half combines Homeland Insecurity (2016), Slam Bang Blue (2018), and [Cloud Storm] (2020). It references mechanisms of war and colonialism, and the evolving nature of warfare, encompassing kinetic and cyberwarfare. The colonizing Centaur, a central figure in Barakeh's work, originates from a 1933 archival image captured in Jaffa Square, depicting mounted soldiers of the British Mandate of Palestine (1920–1948) confronting Arab demonstrators. The photograph’s graininess merges the horse and its British rider, inspiring the concept of the Centaur as the emblem of colonization. Within this imagery, the Horse, representing the artist's own body with a horse's head, confronts the Centaur, embodying the agency and resistance of the colonized subject.
With You - Heather Brown – USA
A woman shovels snow in the Akita, Japan. A man appears behind her with a snow blower following the same path. A woman checks her wrist, what time is it? "Con te partirò" or "Time to say Goodbye" plays while people crisscross in front of an empty stage.
Morning Shadows - Rita Cruchinho Neves – PORTUGAL
"I spend my life sitting, like an angel in the hands of a barber."
Rimbaud
Sunny Talk - Bing-Chi Wu – TAIWAN
Sunny Talk shows a series of dialogues to display something that happened in the East and West daily life, enclosing the possible thinking points of the cultures and values of both sides. The interwoven languages and scripts in the work include Taiwanese, Traditional Chinese, and English to imply language is the medium of cultural interaction.
Trouble with Johnny - Paul Echeverria – USAather Brown – USA
Cosmic Quest - Paul Baker – USA
Cosmic Quest is a visual soundbath. The final track from Crystal Voyager's The Meltiverse, it is a restful interlude before the beginning of a new cycle.
Easy for You to Say - Jonathon Kiefer –USA
In this wry ode to the blank page, a melancholy Barcelona poet visits the tiny California college responsible for an English translation of his possibly final work.
SEE ME: A WALK THROUGH LONDON’S GAY SOHO, 1994 and 2020
"As I walk down the streets that were so important in shaping my life as a young gay man living in London, I revisit the gay bars and pubs that have been my safe spaces for the last twenty years and more, spaces that are now closed."
A Landscape to be Invented - Josh Weissbach - USA
Other than the ocean, the rest of the planet was bathed in purple, which was due to the color of the vegetation. The change in the sun's radiation had probably caused the plants to evolve as they adapted to the new light.
Crude Aesthetics - Isik Kaya, Thomas Georg Blank – USA
No other nation consumes as much oil as the United States, which accounts for more than 20% of global consumption annually. The hunger for this resource has defined the nation’s politics for decades and the efforts to secure its flow are inscribed in the landscape. In Los Angeles and its vicinity, home to the country’s largest urban oil field and refineries, America is being transformed into a bizarre engine, the pacemaker of the passing age of petroleum.
Phase II - Kelly Sears – US
In the near future, real estate developers deploy sonic weapons used at protests to clear neighborhoods for high-end high rises. On the front lines are sound medics that tend to those injured by the assaults. As they respond, one member of the team documents the incidents to create a future archive for other sonic activists.
When I Close My Eyes I See Everything - Alexandre Alagôa – PORTUGAL
A Sunday walk in a forest turns into a poetic journey on perception
Pulse - Jason F Bernagozzi, Debora A Bernagozzi – USA
Pulse is a single channel video recording from a live performance that explores connectivity and circulation within the sensorial landscape of Japan.
Why Are You Image Plus? - Diogo Baldaia – PORTUGAL
In a small and poor village, a local Saint controls the realm of the abyss, making it impossible for dead people to talk to their loved ones who are still living. Ima, a curious dead child, tries to meet the Saint, so he can let her talk to her beloved grandmother.
Abalone Point, 129,600° View - David Baddley – USA (Utah)
To investigate the relationships between physical action, technology, nature, and myself, I swung a camera in a (360°) circle 360 times at Abalone Point on the North Coast of California.
Fiddler’s Green - Tao Delport, Alexandre Jamin – FRANCE
A diver trapped at the bottom of the sea and an astronaut in distress prepare for their final journey.
Milk Trucks - Brian Staker – USA (Utah)
Flesh Ballet - Frederick Kroetsch, Kasie Campbell, Daniel Ennett, David Baron – CANADA
A quadruple amputee and a seamstress metamorphose into a giant flesh mound.
-Inundada – Michelle Trujillo - USA
Inundada is a retelling and reclamation of the Latinx folk tale of La Llorona. It explores different versions of her story that were passed on to the maker through the tradition of oral story telling and research. It approaches the subjects of intergenerational pain, guilt, and shame as products of a colonial-patriarchal environment.
YOU’LL NEVER KNOW – Robin Aubert – CANADA
Confined in his nursing home room, an old man will do everything to see the woman he loves one last time.
We are enthused to show this feature as our final film! Robin Aubert has created a very unique work of cinema that teaches it's audience to WAIT.
Set in the very real and recent past, this film explores
the actuality of what it meant for hospitalized patients
to be shut away from the world during the
the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Speaking personally, I have never seen a work of accurate realism that is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot, Endgame).
You'll Never Know masterfully fuses the type of themes
that one might see in an absurdist play (abstracted explorations of existentialism, despair, irony, and purposelessness) with a real-world / real stakes narrative
that is very believable, very real, and very human.
-Tyrone Davies
CAULDRON festival director
