Loose Dirt
Program 06

Friday, Nov. 7th 2PM
CAM Lab Harvard University
Lower Level, 485 Broadway,
Cambridge, MA

These five films examine the impact of the ever constant clash and learned symbiosis between Nature, Humanity, and Structure. Through a wide array of both technique and background, these films help us to explore and begin to understand our place in the world.
Curated by Mitch Davis

The water was Here
(l'eau était là)
Sophie Sherman & Némo Camus
| Belguim | 2025 | 15:05 min. | Color | Sound

Portrait of an urban marsh born from a human flaw, where life invents new forms of coexistence.
Filmed in 16 mm at the Wiels Marsh in Brussels. A marsh that emerged after the water table was pierced during excavation work for a real estate project. Insects, birds, and humans coexist in this refuge, where life and magic resist.

Sophie Sherman is a French and Belgium artist and filmmaker born in 1980, currently based in Brussels, Belgium. She studied fine arts at the École des Beaux-Arts in Marseille and film at Aix-Marseille University, before furthering her artistic practice at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains. In recent years, she has mainly explored the medium of 16 mm through a documentary, experimental, and poetic approach, with films such as The walk (2015, 19'), The water was here (2025, 15', co-directed with Némo Camus), and Hold my hand (2025, 17'). Her films have been screened at the Torino Film Festival (IT), L’Alternativa (ES), the Thessaloniki International Film Festival (GR), Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (UK), Wiels Art Center in Brussels (BE), Ontsteking Art space in Ghent (BE), among others.

Némo Camus is a French artist born in 1994, who lives and works in Brussels. After a degree in film theory and a Master's in sociology, he turned to sound creation and trained at INSAS. His work, strongly rooted in the practice of sound recording, investigates the back-and-forth between fieldwork and speculative approach, focusing on notions of trace, clue and tremor. He is specifically interested in the entanglement and gaps between intimate narrative and historical document in the context of contemporary memorial issues. His work takes the form of radio creations, sound installations, performances, texts and films. For performance and visual arts, he collaborates with Pélagie Gbaguidi, On-Trade-Off, Joëlle Sambi, Esther Mugambi, Robson Ledesma, Aïssatou Ciss, Sophie Sherman and Davide Tidoni. His work has recently been presented at GMEM in Marseille, iMAL in Brussels, Framer Framed in Amsterdam, the Biennale de Dakar and the Bienal Internacional de Dança do Ceará in Fortaleza, Brazil. He teaches sound creation workshops at the Université Paris 8.

Island Fever
Lu Pan
| Hong Kong, South Korea | 2025 | 20:08 min. | Color, B/W| Sound

Within a realm where dreams and reality intertwine, a hidden current of images from the past flows quietly.

PAN Lu is Associate Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. As a moving-image artist, her works include Many Undulating Things (2019), Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (2017), Traces of an Invisible City: Three Notes on Hong Kong (2016) co-directed with Bo Wang, Anachronic Chronicles: Voyages Inside/Out Asia (2021) with Yu Araki and her independently directed short, Island Fever (2026).