Schedule:

Friday March 21, 2025

7 Pm - Program 1 – The Instability Of Clouds

Films about the things that connect us together or tear us apart. Family histories stashed away in government files. Neighbors who share secrets. Portraits of the people we love and the puzzles they leave behind for us.

File No. 2304
A. S. M. Kobayashi, 2024
RT: 05:22 minutes
Canada forcibly incarcerated and dispossessed thousands of Canadian citizens of Japanese heritage, relocating them to internment camps, or in the case of the Kobayashi family, a sugar beet work farm in the Canadian Prairies. After accessing the 119 page custodial file of her great-grandfather in the National Archives of Canada, Kobayashi discovered details about her family history and their life before their internment that were previously unknown. File No. 2304 is a chapter of her interdisciplinary work, Electric Neon Clock, which explores the government’s custodial file about her family consisting of court transcripts, inventories and forms that reveal hidden narratives and family history.

I Was There
Kamila Kuc, 2024
RT: 12:25 minutes

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.

Grandma Galya and Grandpa Arkadiy
Anna Kipervaser, 2023
RT: 04:24 minutes

A jovial and dreamy rumination on love. On time passing. On what we collect, what we hold on to, and how we maintain connection to home, place, to ourselves.

Mother
Wenhua Shi, 2024
RT: 04:30 minutes

This piece is a film portrait of my mother. all shot in-camera with 16mm.

Something Went Click
Caryn Cline, 2024
RT: 03:40 minutes

The origin story of my mother’s struggle with manic-depression (aka bipolar disorder): the rural prairie in the 1950s, an old boys’ club of “deciders,” a puzzling disease about which little was known.

Adulting
James Duesing, 2024
RT: 08:10 minutes

A queer valentine has a fever dream.

Lizzy
Susanna Wallin, 2024
RT: 15:00 minutes

Like a shout and a promise, a blank page and a full page, a clean disc, a new house, a pressure wave and a song but no melody yet.

Confetti
Amanda Therese Bonaiuto, 2024
RT: 04:09 minutes

Separation, fever dreaming, and a deflated celebration.

The Instability of Clouds
Zazie Ray-Trapido, 2024
RT: 15:00 minutes

Two neighbors bond after a shared traumatic event, a continuous home development creeps into nature’s threshold, and a community celebrates freedom.

9 Pm - Program 2 – Night Music

Sometimes the closer you look and listen, the less you see and hear. Films about translation and things that are lost in it. Police horses, anechoic chambers, broken eggs, and Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

Night Music
Edwin Rostron, 2024
RT: 03:25 minutes
A little night music for the eyes. Geometric shapes dance and transform in the dark. The rain falls, a storm approaches.

Man number 4
Miranda Pennell, 2024
RT: 09:52 minutes

Gaza, December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker.

The Cavalry
Alina Orlov, 2024
RT: 16:36 minutes

This hybrid documentary explores the involuntary role of animals in human conflict. Filmed during January to September 2023 in Israel and the West Bank, the film provides a glimpse into daily life in the months preceding the Israel-Gaza War.

An egg, the white is gone but the yellow remains
Mohamed Thara, 2023
RT: 03:50 minutes

Inside an egg, the white and the yellow coexist harmoniously and naturally, even though they don’t have the same texture, color, shape, or smell. But when there is a fracture, a break, or a rupture between them, each follows its own nature.

Simple Forms
Natalia Ryss, 2023
RT: RT: 03:24 minutes

What is Music?

Listening In, Resounding Out
Eislow Johnson, Dominic Bonelli, 2023
RT: 11:23

Through the ears of an acoustic engineer, the film explores how in the near silence of the anechoic chamber, listening is a straining toward understanding and connection. It engages with cinema as a body — one given presence and depth through sound — and a body as a resounding instrument, which listens to its own vibratory depths and amplifies its feedback.

Translation Please
Rankin Renwick, 2024
RT: 15:53 minutes

A film about people who are trying hard to listen, and people who are hardly listening.

Saturday March 22, 2025

7 Pm - Program 3 – Moving Images

Special Program curated by visiting curator and scholar Genevieve Yue

Maybe the title of the program is a bit cheeky. After all, what kinds of images would appear in a film festival other than those that move? The images here, however, take movement further, in often unexpected directions. They accompany travelers, like the boy in Tiffany Sia’s A Child Already Knows (2024), who is too young to understand his family’s escape from Cold War-era Shanghai, but nevertheless grasps something of the journey in the cartoon images that float alongside him. In Malaz Usta’s space_invaders.exe (2024), archival footage, videogames, and a computer-generated voice kaleidoscopically evoke the experience of a displaced person, just as they themselves are uprooted and denaturalized from their sources. The movement of images exceeds that of the filmmaker in Adam Piron’s Dau:añcut // Moving Along Image (2022), which tracks the consumption and circulation of native American imagery worldwide. In the film’s key example, after a simple Google search for “ukrainian tattoo american indian chief,” Piron is surprised to discover the face of his relative emblazoned on the arm of a Ukrainian soldier. Finally, multiple speeds and moments of migration are rendered in Callum Hill’s Solo Damas (2016), from women riding the “only women” cars in the subway, to pilgrims gathering at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, and, furthest back, the slow glide along the ancient Aztec waterways of Xochimilco. As these films remind us, the movement of images is nothing to be taken for granted. Sometimes, they move the viewer along with them.

9 Pm - Program 4 – Near Nowhere

Films about cities that are evolving and animals that are going extinct (or maybe it’s the other way around). In-between architectures, repetition, and isolation. At the other end of the transbay tunnel, heaven awaits… or is that an office cubicle

Near Nowhere
Nora Zubizarreta, 2024
RT: 05:56 minutes
Near Nowhere plays with the fragmented but continuous nature of the experiential, examining the lively tension present in both the landscapes and human relationships with nature.

Speculative Speciation: Passenger Pigeon
Jacklyn Brickman, Sharon Gill, 2024
RT: 05:28 minutes

Since the 1600s, more than 160 species of birds have gone extinct. Not only are those extinctions profound losses in and of themselves, but they also represent devastating losses of what could have been. Over time, would these species have changed, evolving into new species not yet seen? Would these species have diversified into many more different and wonderful forms increasing biodiversity

Species of Analogy
J.M. Martínez, 2023
RT: 13:00 minutes

A field guide: Flora evolving with environmental changes, and pollinators utilizing biomimicry. Natural objects are gathered, and sculptures of and from the landscape cast reflections of nature being infinite, self-knowing, and alive.

Go Between
Chris Kennedy, 2024
RT: 06:30 minutes

Looking down at the Brisbane River–a play of masking and superimpositions.

Aeon
Dominic Angerame, 2024
RT: 12:00 minutes

Searching of the artist soul of a filmmaker. First reflections of images past films that were created and then camera goes into the water to seeking the dark and bright side of visual soul. What emerges is new perspective on the urban areas being superimposed over the cosmic, creating a balance for a brief moment.

ESP
Laura Kraning, 2024
RT: 02:45 minutes

A brutalist monument to the Empire State as manifested by a malfunctioning inkjet printer. Chroma and luminance are made audible as architectural and printed lines converge and dissolve into pattern and noise. Photographed in the Capitol City of Albany, New York.

Mary Bauermeister: light and stone
Baba H Hillman, 2023
RT: 03:45 minutes

Remembering my last visit with Mary in her garden at Rosräth.

Sinking Feeling
Zachary Epcar, 2024
RT: 20:00 minutes

Three white collar commuters recall an experience of getting trapped on a train in San Francisco’s transbay tunnel, each drifting into fantasies of sex, death, and intimacy between strangers.

Sunday March 23, 2025

1 Pm - Program 5 – I’m Not Your Monster

Movies about the movies inside the movies. The roles we play, the scenes we steal. Stand-ins, stars, and stunt doubles. Opposition politicians disguised as commercial photographers, aviators cast as ventriloquist dummies, and cherry pie playing itself.

Cherry Pie
Ella Berke, 2024
RT: 01:08 minutes
A 16mm non-narrative film. A stomach and a slice of cherry pie.

The FLOWER CULT of Amelia Earhart
Rebecca Barten, 2024
RT: 05:45 minutes

A synaptic celluloid requiem, propelling the High Priestess Aviator Earhart through far-sighted passages of flora, fauna, air, fire and water.

I’m Not Your Monster
Karen Yasinsky, 2024
RT: 04:33 minutes

I’m Not Your Monster is a hand-drawn animation composed of fragments rotoscoped from various films. It began with replacing Frankenstein’s monster with a person I know. The idea of fear creating violence inspired the project, coupled with ideas about the self, its construct and its relation to the body.

Ode to R.G. Springsteen
John Winn, 2024
RT: 14:19 minutes

Ode to R.G Springsteen is a collection of daily dedications to R.G. Springsteen, a minor artisan of the Hollywood b-western. Each segment was originally a kind of letter, a private correspondence, sent in fragments to friend and film critic Benjamin Crais over a few weeks—an ode to R.G. but also to B.C. (an ode to cinema, to everyday life, and to the cinephilic fantasy of their becoming indistinguishable).

Exo Gestus #2
Yvette Granata, 2024
RT: 04:30 minutes

Exo Gestus #2 is an experimental animation exploring the way that motion capture sensors incorrectly track my body. It is an amalgamation of the glitches that occur from tracking my movements while wearing a MOCAP suit that is too big for my body. The sound is a recording of my feet dragging across the floor.

Semi-precious
Kara Ditte Hansen, 2024
RT: 15:00 minutes

Semi-Precious is a portrait of the filmmaker’s mother, a retired holistic practitioner framed through her crystals, supplements, jewelry, healing instruments, and household adornments.

thread, chain, beads and tacks
Ela Kazdal, 2024
RT: 02:03 minutes

thread, chain, beads and tacks is an experimental film made on 16mm and 35mm film, alongside materials such as thread, chain, beads, tacks, hex nuts, bolts, steel eye pins, hooks, clasps, tracing paper, prints, IKEA paper measure, bobby pins, 35mm photographic film strip, 16mm film strips, nail polish, screenprint, mesh fabric and lace.

Passages II
Maya K Jeffereis, 2024
RT: 11:30 minutes

Passages II considers oceanic thinking as means to connect related histories of exploitation and resistance between islands in the Pacific and Caribbean. The video combines digital and archival footage, cyanotypes on 16mm, and excerpts of Japanese, Caribbean, and Pacific poetry and prose. The video is loosely inspired by my maternal great-grandparents’ history as Japanese immigrant laborers on Hawai?ian sugar cane plantations in the early 20th century.

sunspots, burnt into my heart
craig scheihing, 2023
RT: 02:14 minutes

a play on the light, lost in the woods, longing.

The Big Day of Coloane
Keng U Lao, 2023
RT: 17:30 minutes

In a little-known city called Macau, an opening ceremony is set to take place to celebrate the establishment of the “Coloane Development and Construction Association.” All the big names in the area will be attending the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Date: March 21-23,2025

Location: Chelsea Theater - 1129 Weaver Dairy Rd Suite AB, Chapel Hill, NC 27514

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