Crushed Between Ocean and Sky
Ella Morton
HD | Color | 2023 | 24min 39s| Stereo | Canada
Previous Appearances
Audrey Coombe
HD | Color | 2023 | 7min 26s | Stereo | USA
Ingresso Animali Vivi
Igor Grubic
HD | Color | 2023 | 14min 33s | Stereo | Croatia
Hell is Empty
Marinah Janello Phennicie
Film to Digital | Color | 2023 | 7min 59s | Stereo | USA
Point Ahto
Kaiwen Ren
HD | Color | 2024 | 20min 15s | Stereo | USA
Total: 73 mins
Crushed Between Ocean and Sky
Ella Morton
HD | Color | 2023 | 24min 39s| Stereo | Canada
An unexpected event on a tall ship headed for Antarctica incites passengers to reflect on life, death, adventure and irony against the vast ocean backdrop. Crushed Between Ocean and Sky speaks to the transcendence of exploring new places, the power of nature and life's brutal tendency to catch us off guard.
Ella Morton is a Toronto-based filmmaker. Her expedition-based practice has brought her to projects across Canada, Scandinavia, Greenland and Antarctica. She uses experimental analogue processes to capture the sublime and fragile qualities of remote landscapes.
Previous Appearances
Audrey Coombe
HD | Color | 2023 | 7min 26s | Stereo | USA
"Previous Appearances" (2024) is a collaboration between filmmaker and artist Audrey Coombe and the poet, ethicist, and chaplain Andrew McCarron. Shot in Scandinavia, the piece pairs seemingly familiar – and at times surprisingly uncanny – images with McCarron's writing from his own travels to these locations. Moving from cemeteries to amusement park rides, through six poems, "Previous Appearances" reflects on the unseen and the obscure, transcendence, and the anti-gravity. The video includes a soundtrack by the composer and pipe organist John Brockett.
Audrey Coombe is a video artist and writer based in New York City. She creates “interventionist” works that occupy unexpected spaces such as billboards, where ads usually appear. These installations blur the lines between art and architecture, passive and active engagement. Her work explores ways of representing the individual’s reality as it stands in opposition to a general or “public” reality. This reflection on the coexistence of multiple, sometimes contradictory realities is achieved through manipulations of time, audio, or scale, usually in the attempt to make the intimate public and the public more intimate. Audrey holds a B.A in the Humanities from Yale University.
Ingresso Animali Vivi
Igor Grubic
HD | Color | 2023 | 14min 33s | Stereo | Croatia
Animals from Eastern Europe for the Italian food/meat industry used to be transported to the towns along the state border in Northeast Italy. From those conveyor-belt spaces of death, only one animal managed to come in and out alive.
Igor Grubic (Zagreb, 1969) has been active as a multimedia artist since the early 1990s. His work includes site-specific interventions in public spaces, photography, and film. He represented Croatia at the 58th Venice Biennale. His critical, socio-politically committed practice is characterized by long-term engagement, his work focusing on past and present political situations, from an in-depth exploration of the fate of historical monuments and the demise of industry, to the examination of the predicament of minority communities. Though grounded in documentarist tradition, Grubić’s work in photography and film is characterized by an affective and empathetic approach that is deeply humane and often poetic. His work has been exhibited at various international exhibitions and institutions, including the Tirana Biennial 2 (2003); Manifesta 4 (Frankfurt, 2002); Manifesta 9 (Genk, 2012); 50th October Salon (Belgrade, 2009); Gender Check, MuMOK (Vienna, 2009); 11th Istanbul Biennial (2009); 4th Fotofestival Mannheim Ludwigshafen, Heidelberg (2011); East Side Stories, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2012); Gwangju Biennale (2014); Zero Tolerance, MOMA PS1 (New York 2014); Degrees of Freedom, MAMbo (Bologna, 2015); 5th Thessaloniki Biennial (2015); Cut / Rez, MSU (Zagreb, 2018); Heavenly creatures, MG+MSUM (Ljubljana, 2018); The Value of Freedom, Belvedere 21 (Vienna, 2018); 58th Venice Biennale (2019); Yerevan Biennial – The Time Complex (2020); Bigger than Myself, MAXXI (Rome, 2021).
Hell is Empty
Marinah Janello Phennicie
HD | Color | 2024 | 7min 59s | Stereo | USA
A former portrait painter struggles to express himself until discovering a medium that speaks to his soul. Alongside showcasing the work of the artist, this conceptual documentary explores topics of poetry, religion and the alter ego.
Marinah Janello Phennicie is a New England based filmmaker whose work deals with issues of circumstance through humor and creative writing. Her short films and installations have been displayed at PopopStudios International Center for the Arts, Slamdance Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, and Fantasia International film Festival amongst others. She has taught filmmaking and video editing courses at The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, Sidney Poitier Film Festival, Boston Neighborhood Network and Cambridge Community Television. After her role as a Senior Media Technician at Harvard’s Hauser Studio, she started her own production company with her partner and currently works as the Digital Media Manager at Brookline Interactive Group in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Point Ahto
Kaiwen Ren
HD | Color | 2024 | 20min 15s | Stereo | USA
Surrounding a roll of the filmmaker's family photographs developed 20 years after its exposure in mainland China, Point Ahto meditates on the persistent trauma and its placement in Californian landscapes, calling for possible recollection and reconciliation across the straits through audiovisual diaries and letter writing.
Kaiwen Ren 任凯闻 is an artist and filmmaker. His recent works focus on the synergized subjectivities of the human and audiovisual materiality, regarding collective anxiety and personal memories through 16mm/digital filmmaking, sound, and photography.
Kaiwen obtained his bachelor's degree in film studies at Monash University, Australia, and is currently an MFA student in the Film/Video program at California Institute of the Arts. He now lives in Guangzhou and Los Angeles.
Effigy House
Deb Ethier
Digital | Color | 2023 | 4min 51s | Stereo | Canada
Mombomb, part 1
Patricia Beckmann Wells
Digital | Color | 2024 | 5min 40s | Stereo | USA
THERE IS FIRE
Simon LECLERCQ & Thibault LECLERCQ
Digital | Color | 2024 | 2min 40s | Stereo | France
The Stage of Flesh
Alessandro Amaducci
AI & Digital | Color | 2023 | 7min 30s | Stereo | Italy
Confessions
Jacob Schill
Digital | Color | 2023 | 19min 48s | Stereo | Sweden
Substrat
Karl Lemieux, Patrick Bergeron
Digital | B/W | 2023 | 14min 01s | Stereo | Canada
le disque de poussière
Charline Dally
Digital | Color | 2023 | 18min 08s | Stereo | France
Total: 72 mins
Effigy House
Deb Ethier
Digital | Color | 2023 | 4min 51s | Stereo | Canada
A meditative dreamlike journey through the surreal inner spaces of the filmmaker’s mind as passing images and thoughts overlap, yearning to coalesce into a concept.
I'm Deb Ethier (Rusty Bolt Theatre); animator, musician, graphic designer, writer... Short and micro-short animated films are my passion, (including one-minute wonders) and they range from wacky off-kilter comedies to poetic immersions to surreal noir-inspired nightmares. Lately I've been drawn towards creating surreal experimental (but not abstract) films. All of my films are low/no budget creations!
Mombomb, part 1
Patricia Beckmann Wells
Digital | Color | 2024 | 5min 40s | Stereo | USA
Pez’s life is a fairy tale, but it was written by the Brothers Grimm
… and when the killer troll from under the bridge comes to harvest young girls, this girl scout must use her cookies to kill.
Feminist comedy horror series. Examines the value of inter-generational trauma against a dominant culture of naivete. Based on real events.
Patricia Beckmann Wells, a tenured professor at Irvine Valley College's School of Fine Arts for the Interactive Media Arts (IMA) program, and author of 'Face It: A Visual Reference for Multi-ethnic Facial Modeling.' Her expertise has led to roles as a consultant for the Epic Games Unreal Metahuman project and speaking engagements with Pixar and SIGGRAPH on Informed Identity in character design. Recently, she was invited to speak at the AgBO + Slamdance summer showcase hosted by the Russo Brothers (Everything everywhere all at once) as a member of the featured roundtable discussion of ‘AI and independent filmmaking’.
THERE IS FIRE
Simon LECLERCQ & Thibault LECLERCQ
Digital | Color | 2023 | 7min 17s | Stereo | United Arab Emirates
While a building catches fire, only one resident tries to alert his neighbors of the situation.
Brothers and artistic accomplices born in the north countryside in France, cinema was our escape, expanding our dreams beyond the village. Since childhood, we have created offbeat universes with humor, observing the absurdity of a modern society, where small conveniences often mask the essential.
The Stage of Flesh
Alessandro Amaducci
AI & Digital | Color | 2023 | 7min 30s | Stereo | Italy
“Long ago sexuality, eroticism and pleasure were declared illegal. A resistance movement was created that clandestinely made digital films to recover the memory of lost senses. They were created with the first text-to-video generation algorithms, struggling with linguistic censorship that limited their operation. They circulated in secret form: most were discovered and destroyed, and their authors eliminated. A small archive survived in the form of partially restored fragments. These digital films represent the survival of the concept of eroticism and humanity, and direct testimony to a very dark period in our history.
The following show contains scenes of nudity that some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.”
Alessandro Amaducci
Born in Torino (Italy) in 1967. He worked with the Archimedes Centre of Visual Arts (a cultural centre of a District in Torino), were he held workshops on video, with the National Film Archives of Resistence (Torino), where he realized documentaries about the Second World War, the Resistance, about workers struggle and other subjects relevant to the activity of the Archive, and with Theater Juvarra in Torino in the realization of multimedia shows and videoperformances. He is also professor of video language and practice in DAMS, University of Torino. He wrote several books about videoart; video technics and aesthetics of electronic arts. Since 1989 he produces experimental videos, music videos, videoinstallations, multimedia shows, videoscenographies for dance performances and digital photographies.
Confessions
Jacob Schill
Digital | Color | 2023 | 19min 48s | Stereo | Sweden
Confessions is a 6-channel video installation staging dissonant self-talk and the troubles of subjectification through six encounters between a filmmaker and phantasm-like characters in public spaces and intimate interiors.
Jacob Schill
I’m a Swedish artist and filmmaker based in Copenhagen, Denmark. My artistic practice is concerned with the psychological fabric of our age. Characterized by psychologically charged cinematic scenarios, my video installations and films interrogate mental health, subjectification and questions of subjectivity: be it in merging a human with an MRI scanner, imagining a half-canine and half-human hacker who longs to leave the offline world, or in letting toxic self-talk be embodied in actors that assault, compliment, subjugate and virtually stroke the viewers cheeks with soft whispers.
Substrat
Karl Lemieux, Patrick Bergeron
Digital | B/W | 2023 | 14min 01s | Stereo | Canada
Triggered by the catalyst, the substrat undergoes a chemical reaction leading to alterations of its underlying structural properties. The images for this film were first hand-painted on 16mm film by Karl Lemieux, a traditional animation film technique, then captured and digitally reanimated by Patrick Bergeron, an artist and specialist in digital visual effects. This film is the result of a unique analog and digital dialogue.
Karl Lemieux has been directing and producing cutting-edge time-based media art since the early 2000's. His films, installations, and performances have screened internationally in museums, galleries, music venues and film festivals including: the Montreal Contemporary Arts Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the Venice International Film Festival. His collaboration with sound artists and musicians such as BJ Nilsen, Philip Jeck and Godspeed You! Black Emperor has made him an essential voice in avant-garde cinema and art.
PATRICK BERGERON
Graduated as engineer, Patrick Bergeron turn towards creation after a job at the National Film Board of Canada. Since then, he shares his artistic career with his work in the visual effects industry. In this field, he worked on major projects such as The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix. His art installations and experimental videos have been showed internationally in several galleries and festivals (South by Southwest, ARS Electronica, ...). In his projects, he modifies and manipulates the sound, the image and their details. Exploring the concepts of time, movement and memories, the result is a mix of animation, experimental film and documentary.
le disque de poussière
Charline Dally
Digital | Color | 2023 | 18min 08s | Stereo | France
le disque de poussière invites us to probe tiny meteorite particles, the terrain of an intriguing investigation into the origin of stars. Their irregular morphology reveals a mineral writing that researchers attempt to decipher.
charline dally (she/they) lives between France and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. Her practice combines analog video signals, computer generated imagery, glass and textile through films, installations, and performances. Graduated from Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains and UQAM in visual arts, she has realized artistic residencies at Signal Culture (Owego, NY) and the Society for Technological Arts (Montreal). Her work has been presented in various institutions and festivals such as MOCA (Toronto), MAJ (Joliette, QC), FIFA (Montréal), Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor, MI), FNC (Montréal), VIFF (Vancouver), CTM Festival (Berlin), MUTEK (CA, ES, AR), BISFF (Beijing), OMAF (Séoul), Les Abattoirs (Toulouse).