Fruiting Bodies
|Canada, 2:49, 2023 |
- Mia Milardo

A vivid exploration of transformations and aesthetics in nature and the female body.

Mia Milardo is a Vancouver-based Canadian animator. She studied 2D + Experimental Animation at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, with a special interest in stop-motion and experimental methods. She enjoys a mixed-media approach to animation, creating handmade and tactile aesthetics through experimenting with intriguing materials she finds. Mia has worked as a research-creation assistant for the Animate Materials Workshop founded by media scholar and curator Dr. Alla Gadassik, and recently exhibited experimental animation work in a show titled Refractions.

The Looking Game
| Ireland, 7:02, 2023 |
- Ann Upton

"A Two Way Mirror with the Lights Switched Off"

Eyes are tracked and attentions plotted as a fictitious audience follows the narrator's orders. They are divided by the screen and though they try, neither can see through to the other side. We can't be sure if the bond they form is reciprocal, or if the audience was ever even there to begin with.

Ann Upton is a moving-image artist from Waterford, Ireland. Her work exists at the intersection of the minimal and surreal, exploring and interrogating the formal structures and conventions of filmmaking. Ann graduated from IADT (Dublin) in 2019 with a 1st Class BA (Hons) in Animation.There she received the Windmill Lane Animation Award. Her graduate film 'Dorothy' premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh. In 2020 she was commissioned by Creative Ireland and Dun Laoghaire Rathdown to produce an abstract short film, 'Act IV'. Ann graduated from the Royal College of Art (London) in 2023 with a MA in Animation. Her graduate project The Looking Game premiered at IndieCork, and was selected as part of The Next Thing Moving Image Award at Bury Art Museum. Ann works as an associate lecturer at IADT (Dublin).

monolithic tenderness
| United States, 7:18, 2024 |
- Kyle Joseph Petty

A tessellating flicker film that seeks to undo the cold, impersonal architecture of the city by dousing it in organic and domestic forms. Featuring a collaged soundtrack of spam phone calls, pulsing synth chords, bagpipe drones, and a lullaby sung to my daughter while in-utero.

FLICKER WARNING: This film contains stroboscopic imagery Kyle J. Petty is a visual artist working in film, video, photography, and collage. His film work has screened internationally at Visions du Réel, Barents Ecology Film Festival, and Antimatter Media + Art. Kyle grew up in the Merrimack Valley of New Hampshire, earned a BA from Chester College of New England, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He is a member of AgX Film Collective and teaches film production at Montserrat College of Art, Anna Maria College, and Tufts University. Kyle lives in Medford, Massachusetts.

Ottu
| Canada 20:00 2023 |
- Sandra Ignagni

A filmmaker searches for the eight winds of the Mediterranean on the island of Corsica. Using found footage and employing 16mm hand-processing experiments that attempt to expose its ethereal subject, the film brings audiences to abandoned churches, cemeteries, and ravaged beaches in its quest to find meaning in that which is invisible and has neither source nor end.

Sandra Ignagni is an award-winning nonfiction filmmaker, a recent graduate of the MFA program in Film Production program at York University, and an alumna of the summer fellowship program at the UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art in Brooklyn, NY. She also holds a PhD in Political Science and a Master of Arts in Indigenous & Canadian Studies. Her previous short films have screened at festivals around the world and are currently streaming on CBC Canadian Reflections, Knowledge, En Route/Air Canada, and on the National Film Board of Canada website (NFB.ca). She is an occasional contributor to Documentary Magazine.

STITCH THE RUIN
| United States 8:28 2024 |
- ZELJKA BLAKSIC

“Stitch the Ruin” is an experimental film that reflects on the conceptual, historical, and social concerns surrounding clothing production. In this film we see interconnected microscopic images of textiles gathered from Zagreb’s legendary flea market “Hrelić”, lists of shut factories, many named after the partisan heroines of the Antifascist Women’s Front. By focusing closely on details like stitching and tags, this work explores knowledge of time and labor and reflects on the specific industrial structure of feeling established by workers in these socialist factories.
Željka holds an MFA from The School of Visual Arts (SVA) - Photography, Video and Related Media (NY) and BFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Most recently she was a participant at the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in NYC. She presented her work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Anonymous Gallery (NY), AIR Gallery (NY), BRIC Brooklyn, The Kitchen (NY), Framer Framed (Amsterdam), Gallery Augusta (Helsinki), Urban Festival (Zagreb), Gallery of SESI (São Paulo), The Khyber Center for the Arts (Halifax, CA) among many others. Selected awards include the Residency Unlimited & National Endowment for the Arts Award, Fondazione Pistoletto Residency (Italy), MuseumsQuartier Program (Vienna), Recess Session (NY), A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship Program (NY), Paula Rhodes Award (NY), and Alserkal Avenue in Dubai (UAE).

If Only We Had Eyes To See
| United States, 3:34, 2023 |
- Peter Whittenberger

If Only We Had Eyes To See explores how quickly fortunes can change for gatekeepers of safety, natural resources, and wealth in the ravages of climate change. Trapped by antiquated concepts of nationalism and land rights, a lone figure is left to find safety in an world that denies migration as a fundamental human right.
Peter Whittenberger is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose work explores how the nature of the landscape serves as a continuous network of time and history, containing the data of all Earth’s species. Whittenberger has presented his work at the FILE Festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the Digerati Emergent Media Festival in Denver, CO, the Athens Animfest in Athens, Greece, the 2-Minute Film Festival at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg, PA, and many others across Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, South America, and Australia. His work has also received funding from the Puffin Foundation and the Reno-Tahoe Artists Award for Best in Digital Media.

Symphonic Distress
| Canada, 10:00, 2023 |
- Marco Joubert

The music came first: a mixed contemporary piece by composer Yuliya Zakharava, in which instrumentalist Pamela Reimer plays a piano score, while also triggering prerecorded sequences and incorporating vocal and percussive elements. Asked to provide a visual component for the work, I was struck and conquered by its intensity and beauty from the very first listen. Although both the music and the film are in themselves apolitical and stateless, the wish to collaborate and the urgent impulse to express ourselves through art have been exacerbated by the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. The intention, therefore, while avoiding any direct reference to war, is to tacitly evoke certain universal emotions born out of its consequences: fear, suffering, outrage, vulnerability, abnegation, hope.
Marco Joubert is a self-taught Canadian filmmaker and video artist, with a background in architecture and visual arts. His audiovisual practice, characterized by its formal rigor, tends toward the development of a personal language, situated at the crossroads of cinema, video art, poetry and philosophy.

We Made Believe
| Colombia, 3:30, 16mm, 2024 |
- Nanda Borja, Daniel Gomez, Danna Gutierrez, Lida Rincón Casas, Lisa Danker Kritzer

An experimental narrative collectively shot and inspired by conversations in Bogotá, Colombia, quoting from Mexican artist and author Verónica Gerber Bicecci's Conjunto Vacío (Empty Set), in which a mother mysteriously disappears.

Lisa Danker Kritzer makes experimental and documentary films using Super 8mm, 16mm, and digital formats, which have been shown in over 75 national and international venues. In 2023, Lisa was awarded a U.S. Fulbright Scholar fellowship to Bogotá, Colombia, where she directed collective film workshops and hand-processed Super 8 and 16mm film in the Media Remediation Laboratory at Javerian Pontifical University.