Best of RPM25
Sunday, Dec. 7th, 2PM
Brattle Theatre
40 Brattle St.
Cambridge MA

As we wrap up an extraordinary year of experimental cinema, audiovisual performances, and unforgettable moments, we are delighted to invite you to our End-of-Year Screening: Best of RPM25.

This year of RPM & RPM in Motion featured 10 artists’ retrospectives, 20 shorts programs showcasing more than 100 artists and filmmakers, three large-scale performances, events across venues throughout Boston–Cambridge, and national touring programs that reached audiences well beyond New England.

Join us for a special presentation of standout short films of the year—hand-picked highlights that inspired us, challenged us, and brought filmmakers, scholars, and audiences together. This celebratory event is our way of honoring the exceptional dedication, community, and passion that shaped this year’s programming.

still: Slideshow by Janie Geiser (2024)

Best of RPM25
Sunday, Dec. 7th, 2PM
Brattle Theatre
40 Brattle St.
Cambridge MA


Les Bétes - Michael Granberry
| Digital | B/W | 2024 | 11min 38s | Stereo

Slideshow - Janie Geiser
| Digital | Color | 2024 | 8min | Stereo

Full Out - Sarah Ballard
| 16mm - Digital | Color | 2025 | 14min 25s | Stereo

entre le feu et le clair de lune - Dominic Yarabe
| Digital | Color | 2025 | 17min 46s | Stereo

Monument - Jeremy Drummond
| Super 8mm/Digital | Color | 2025 | 17min 24s | Stereo

I Carry the Universe With Me - Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu
| 16mm - Digital | B/W & Color | 2024 | 21min 20s |


Sulfur - Karen Akerman, Miguel Seabra Lopes
| Digital | Color | 2024 | 14min 44s | Stereo


still: Full Out - Sarah Ballard (2025)

Les Bétes | Michael Granberry
| Digital | B/W | 2024 | 11min 38s |

A mysterious rabbit with a set of magic keys summons a host of strange creatures to entertain a wicked king and his decadent court in this dark stop-motion animated fantasy inspired by the works of Ladislas Starevich.

Michael Granberry is a 3-time Emmy award-winning director and stop-motion animator whose work can be seen in the critically acclaimed series "Severance" directed by Ben Stiller, the Oscar-winning "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio", Henry Selick's "Wendell & Wild", Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-nominated "Anomalisa", "Tales of Halloween", "Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy" and numerous other feature films, documentaries, TV shows, web series and music videos. His independent work, which he describes as "queer, garage-punk stop-motion slam poetry" uses recycled and repurposed materials to create strikingly unique visual stories.

Slideshow | Janie Geiser
| Digital | Color | 2024 | 8 minutes |

Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price

SLIDESHOW centers on a box of slides that I found in a wooden box at a Berlin flea market in 1994. The film reveals moments in time in the lives of strangers. (Strangers to me, but probably not to each other). Time and place are suggested---sometime before the fall of the Wall in 1989.
The slides’ acetate images are ephemeral --- their color has shifted over time. But the plastic frames have retained their graphic, vivid color, especially when illuminated on a light table. They frame their faded content: families at home, friends sharing meals, outdoor gatherings, travel—familiar photographic subjects. An embossed DDR (East Germany) decorates the tops of most of the slide frames.
As I shot the film, I became familiar with the people who emerged over multiple slides, it was as if I knew them. But all that I really knew was their translucent traces. - JG

Janie Geiser is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes performance, film, installation, and art. Geiser’s work is known for its recontextualization of abandoned images and objects, its embrace of artifice, and its investigation of memory, power, and loss. Geiser is a Guggenheim Fellow, a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, and a Creative Capital awardee. Geiser received the 2023 Stan Brakhage Vision Award, presented to a filmmaker “whose work pushes the limits in avant-garde and experimental filmmaking.” She was recently awarded 2025-26 Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island.

Full Out - Sarah Ballard
| 16mm - Digital | Color | 2025 | 14min 25s |

Full Out is the inaugural work in a suite of films investigating the intricate threads between historical accounts of mass hysteria, the body's capacity for knowing, and the ways collective resonance can both fracture and heal. This film seeks to explore how the body's uncontrollable impulses can act as both a site of vulnerability and an instrument of resistance.

Sarah Ballard is a filmmaker and educator currently based in Milwaukee, WI. Her work has screened at venues and festivals such as CROSSROADS, Antimatter [Media Art], Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Light Matter Experimental Film and Media Arts Festival, San Diego Underground Film Festival, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, and Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, among others. She holds an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a BFA in Film Production from the University of Central Florida. Sarah is a recipient of the 2023 Princess Grace Award in Film and is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at UW-Milwaukee.

entre le feu et le clair de lune - Dominic Yarabe
| Digital | Color | 2025 | 17min 46s | Stereo

The filmmaker's father recounts the 10 days he spent hiding as a young boy during a war in his village in West Africa. Together, father and daughter set out to continue the book he never finished about his memory of the events quietly buried by the Ivorian government. With the help of the children living in his village today, the three generations create a mythical tapestry of entwining timelines, nightmares, and memories.

Dominic Yarabe is an award-winning nonfiction filmmaker. Her work has screened at numerous festivals, including Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, True/False Film Fest, New Orleans Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival where she won the Artistic Vision award, Athens International Film and Video Festival, and more. She is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow in Film/Visual Arts.

Monument - Jeremy Drummond
| Super 8mm/Digital | Color | 2025 | 17min 24s |

Beginning in ghostly abstraction and accumulating texture by texture into a droning meditative trance, Monument deepens to a visual and sonic intensity, mixing Super 8 film with video footage to create a complicated, multilayered encounter with the tension of protest and reclamation. A vivid and energetic durational experience of collective resistance and celebration.

Jeremy Drummond is an artist, filmmaker, field recorder, and film/video programmer who was born in Edmonton, Alberta and grew-up in Vancouver, British Colombia and Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Drummond currently lives in Richmond, Virginia where teaches experimental film, video art, and alternative media at the University of Richmond. Rooted in single-channel film and video, Drummond's work is positioned between documentary and experimental media and extends across photography, sound, and installation. At the core of his practice is interdisciplinary research and a commitment to sustained, first-person fieldwork that explores cultural, historical, and socio-political relationships between people and place.

I Carry the Universe With Me - Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu
| 16mm - Digital | B/W & Color | 2024 | 21min 20s |

In a future dominated by technological images, how will human culture be rewritten? Will history be reset? Is the land beneath my feet still habitable? Is the sky the same sky? I was curious about how artificial intelligence described the images I took of the world. Here a cow is seen as a horse, and a boat is seen as a vase. Realities and hyperrealities are woven together as if this is the prototype of the myth of modern life.

Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work is grounded in experimental literature, the conceptual avant-garde, and philosophy. Liu's works are concerned with materiality in different contexts and eras, as well as its transformation, symbolism, decay, and emotional resonance. For Liu materiality includes both living and inanimate matter. Through film, poetry, painting, sculpture, and other media, she reflects the light and darkness of the world she lives in. Her films have been shown at international film festivals and museums, including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Helsinki Festival, Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, Tokyo Image Forum, Women Make Waves Int'l Film Festival, Taiwan, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, The Museum of Kyoto, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

Sulfur - Karen Akerman, Miguel Seabra Lopes
| Digital | Color | 2024 | 14min 44s | Stereo

I am the dead. I am the living.

Karen Akerman and Miguel Seabra Lopes work together since 2010, with film and video, mixing fiction, documentary and experimental. Karen works mainly as a film editor [films and series], Miguel as a screenwriter and analog collage artist.