Experimental
Enough.
Directed by: Caleb Slain
Country: United States
Total Runtime: 13:28
Using footage shot over a decade, "enough." is a narrative hip hop film exploring Nathan Nzanga's journey from quirky kid born to Congolese immigrants, to an idealistic teenage artist, to a frustrated young man. The film uses dream logic to sift through Nate's most conflicted feelings about policing, love, and identity in a divided nation.
30 Second Thoughts: Volume One
Directed by: David Baeumler
Country: United States
Total Runtime: 3:00
A commercial break from another dimension.
The four shorts in Volume One include: “Attack the System”, a blessing for your enemies; “Zabrinor”, the ultimate drug for the modern world; “We Shall Overcoat”, an argument over a revolutionary rainbow; and “Evil Man”, a study of why bad things happen.
Blue Cooler
Directed by: Laura Margulies
Country: United States
Total Runtime: 7:40
Blue Cooler, an oil painted animated short film, captures small moments of life in Hawaii through a montage of richly painted and colorful brush strokes, sounds and images. Like home movies that spark an atmosphere or feeling, the moving paintings in Blue Cooler pop with familiar experiences and vivid observations. The animation is hand painted frame by frame using oil paints.
Shadow Box
Directed by: Jessenia Blackstone
Country: United States
Total Runtime: 2:30
A woman mourns the memory of her relationship with her brother.
Vodník Many Years After the Rainstorm
Directed by: Emma Penaz Eisner
Country: United States
Total Runtime: 5:58
In San Francisco, many years after his hideous crimes, the fiendish water creature Vodník emerges from Czech folklore to recount his beguiling tale.
Whisper, Rustle
Directed by: Maureen Zent
Country: United States
Total Runtime: 4:42
Order gives way to chaos. Chaos generates ferment. Ferment spurs fecundity.
Whisper, Rustle is a product of the Covid-19 pandemic, born of long walks in the forest spent memorizing poems by W.B. Yeats. Emergency measures disrupted regular patterns of human behavior and fear upended all normal interactions. The disequilibrium unsettled everyone but also brought a new understanding of the fragility of our sense of order.
Whisper, Rustle depicts this cycle with animation of natural and stylized elements drawn primarily from Yeats’s poems and prose. Stop motion animated objects include sand, pebbles, flower petals, oak bark, leaves, gravel, sponges, seeds, egg shells, a rotting log.
Devour
Directed by: Kate Raney
Country: United States
Total Runtime: 3:25
Consumption considered, the din of dining. Using reference videos from my front yard, I created animations and collaged them with cyanotypes of garden material and audio field recordings from travels near and far. The resulting moment in my microcosm becomes a consideration of life cycles and habitats.
To Live and Die in the Shadows: Meditations on Ferns, Survival, and Horizontal Gene Transfer
Directed by: Shannon Silva
Country: United States
Total Runtime: 5:29
180 million years ago, through a chance horizontal gene transfer, ferns acquired a much needed light sensor (neochrome) that allowed them to modify and survive in low light environments. We should all be so lucky.
The Cemetery
Directed by: Ali Reza Beigi
Country: Iran
Total Runtime: 3:00
An alone woman comes out of the empty graves and is confronted with of herself that ...
To Live
Directed by: Mohsen Salmani
Country: Iran
Total Runtime: 17:26
A man who has been born forcibly and sent to the world. He is unfamiliar with this environment. Therefore, he loafs around and explores things. When he moves around, he observes the evils and ugliness of the world. Once he observes and discovers such things, he decides to return, but he is doomed to stay and live there.
New Beginnings and False Starts
Directed by: Mark Street
Country: United States
Total Runtime: 2:02
A New Year's card that looks backwards to consider what might be to come. A collage made up of outtakes from "The Quick and the Dead" and educational filmstrips. (Footage courtesy Craig Baldwin)
Light Essay
Directed by: Gabriella Vincze-Bába
Country: Austria
Total Runtime: 1:22
Uku Pacha - Modular VR
Director: Diego Bonilla
Country: Ecuador
Total Runtime: 22:00