I Would’ve Been Happy


Jordan Wong | 2023 | Runtime 8:41 | COLOR | SOUND |

“I Would’ve Been Happy” attempts to map a fraught relationship through the use of intricately coded pictographs and schematic abstractions applied onto glazed ceramic tiles and quilted cyanotype fabric. The aesthetics of architectural language are used to reconstruct memories of my family’s domestic spaces in the hope to uncover logic or reason to a broken home.

Jordan Wong A collector of souvenir state spoons and overpriced Uni Alpha Gel lead pencils, Jordan Wong is a Chinese-American experimental animator and nonfiction filmmaker driven by emotional honesty and analog processes. He received a BFA in Film/Animation/Video at Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA in Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts, and was most recently a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2022. His films have screened internationally, including DOK Leipzig, NewFest, Animafest Zagreb, Japan Media Arts Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where he was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker for the film Mom’s Clothes.

Trace on My Body
Trace on My Body
Yue Hua | 2024 | Runtime 3:30 | 16mm | COLOR | SOUND |

A film about self-acceptance, and a conversation with self. In spring 2023, a physical illness forced me to re-examine my relationship with my body. Scars, spots, skin, hair, and my unflattering voice, everything belongs to my body. Shoot and direct animation on 16mm film.

Content warning: Nudity

Yue Hua/华篟 is a filmmaker and multimedia artist, born and raised in Wuhu, China, currently based in Boston, MA. Her work delves into film, expanded cinema, and digital media, including projection, performance, installation, and production design. Yue’s art explores themes like spirit-body relationships, searching for belonging, and the female perspective. She holds a BFA from the China Academy of Art and an MFA in Film and Media Art from Emerson College.

The Lost Season
Kelly Sears | 2024 | Runtime 6:09 | COLOR | SOUND |

As the world experiences its final winter, desperate measures to hold onto the season awaken a radical labor consciousness.

Kelly Sears is more than an animator; she is a visionary who employs animation as a critical practice. Through cutting, collaging, and merging animated photographic and film documents with speculative storytelling, Sears creates films that challenge and expand our understanding of cultural narratives. Her work becomes a canvas where history converges with myth, resulting in uncanny and fantastical tales.

Sears’ award-winning films have graced esteemed festivals worldwide, including Sundance, South by Southwest, and the American Film Institute. Her shorts have been showcased at renowned institutions such as the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Awards from festivals like Ann Arbor, Black Maria, Chicago Underground, and Oak Cliff underscore the impact of Sears’ unique cinematic vision.

Flux

Youjin Moon | 2024 | Runtime 6:19 | COLOR | SOUND |

‘Flux’ is an experimental film that takes viewers on a journey through fluid scenes, where undulating waves, floating ice, and swirling galaxies unfold. This visual poem, fusing the physical texture of cameraless film with digital elements, muses on all things water. Changing states, mutable forms, and flowing associations invite the viewer to relax their mind and let their spirits float along for the ride.

Youjin Moon is a South Korean artist and experimental filmmaker based in Boston. Moon has shown her works at national and international film festivals and exhibitions, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, the deCordova New England Biennial, and the solo film program at Harvard Film Archive. She received the Korean EXiS Award at the 12th and 16th Seoul International Experimental Film and Video Festival. Moon’s works have been featured in the Boston Globe and Art New England, among other publications.

Reversal
Reversal Diane Nerwen | 2023 | Runtime 6:34 | COLOR | SOUND |

REVERSAL combines images and sounds from movies released or broadcast in 1973, the year the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade. In the strange new reality ushered in by the Dobbs decision, the slogan “We won’t go back” is recalled with bitter irony. This collage piece evokes the spectre of regression and repression that has followed the Court’s decision.

Diane Nerwen is a video artist and art educator. She has shown her work internationally, including screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Guggenheim Museum, NY, the Tate Modern, London, carriage trade, NY and the Berlin Film Festival. She was awarded a DAAD Artist in Residence Fellowship in Berlin in 2001. Nerwen was born in Montreal and lives in Brooklyn.

Tarot Portrait: Faith
Brittany Gravely & Ken Linehan | 2023 | Runtime 9 | 16mm | COLOR | SOUND |

One of a set of cinematic tarot cards in which we collaborate with the subject to create layered vignettes infused with personal symbolism. By choosing costumes, objects, actions and locations that represent their own visions, the stars of these films bring forth what they want to manifest mythically and physically within their lives. Inspired by their particular choices and personalities, we collaborate throughout the shoot, double-exposing each roll of film as a toss of the alchemical I ching to the beguiling discoveries of the serendipitous while adding a spectral layer. Sealed into the receptive emulsion, these layered iconographies are then awakened with the projection of light and then affirmed by audiences who may recognize parts of their own dreams.

Brittany Gravely, Ken Linehan Magical Approach is the live cinema practice of Brittany Gravely (Boston, MA) and Kenneth Linehan (Providence, RI). Combining 16mm film projections with live and recorded sound, Gravely and Linehan create modular films whose parts can be used in the performance of cinematic rituals. They have performed at the ICA Boston, the RISD Museum, Mono No Aware and Magic Lantern in New York, among other venues, and were awarded a Traveling Scholars Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Recently, they have been screening finished films that emerged out of the live shows. Recent festivals include Toronto International Film Festival, Crossroads, Chicago Underground, Kinoskop, FLEX Fest and Antimatter.

The Spectacle of Her Appetites
Sue Ding | 2024 | Runtime 5:00 | COLOR | SOUND |

A found footage meditation on eating your feelings. Appropriating footage from popular films and television, THE SPECTACLE OF HER APPETITES articulates this trope’s pervasiveness and visual codes, as well as its reproduction of conventional paradigms of femininity. A reimagined soundscape invites viewers to consider these images anew, as alternately humanizing, absurd, and disturbing.

Sue Ding is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores race, gender, and diaspora through the lens of visual culture and place-based poetics. Sue directed the short documentary The Claudia Kishi Club, which premiered at SXSW and was acquired by Netflix, and an Emmy Award-winning episode of the docuseries Artbound. Her films have screened at IDFA, Copenhagen Contemporary, and Miami Art Basel, and have been featured in Vice, Indiewire, and Sight and Sound. In 2023, she was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”

monolithic tenderness
Kyle Joseph Petty | 2024 | Runtime 7:18 | B/W | SOUND |

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.

Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War
Leah Loftin | 2023 | Runtime 12:13 | COLOR | SOUND |

A woman in Kherson navigates the horrors and absurdities of daily life during Putin’s war on Ukraine. A short film adapted from Olena Astasieva’s personal accounts from the front lines.

Leah Loftin is a New York-based filmmaker and actor. As an “emerging director to discover.” As a filmmaker, her work has garnered awards at festivals around the globe, premiering at the Oscar-qualifying DOC NYC and FLICKERS’ Rhode Island Film Festival, the BAFTA-qualifying Aesthetica Film Festival (UK), Shorts on Tap (London), Anthology Film Archives (NYC), and Berlin Commercial, among others. Loftin’s experimental film work was recently longlisted for the 2022 Aesthetica Art Prize.

Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke
Tomonari Nishikawa | 2023 | Runtime 6:22 | COLOR | SOUND |

Fireworks were shot at a summer festival in Japan with a Super 16 format camera in order to obtain images on the optical soundtrack area on the filmstrip. The position of the photocell to read the visual information on the optical soundtrack area in a 16mm film projector is 26 frames in advance of the position of the gate to project the image. Each footage from 2 rolls of 16mm film were cut into shots of 26 frames each, and the shots were alternated from one roll to another, which would further separate the sound and visual, while producing a distinct rhythm throughout the film.

Nishikawa ’s films explore the idea of documenting situations/phenomena through a chosen medium and technique, often focusing on process itself. His films have been screened at numerous film festivals and art venues, including Berlinale, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival. In 2010, he presented a series of 8mm and 16mm films at MoMA P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and his film installation, Building 945, received the 2008 Grant Award from the Museum of Contemporary Cinema in Spain. Nishikawa started using a 16mm film projector for his performance projects in 2013, scratching the film emulsion to produce the visual and sound. His on-going 16mm film projection performance project, “Six Seventy-Two Variations,” have been performed at Cosmic Rays Film Festival, Exploratorium in San Francisco, FRACTO in Berlin, New York Film Festival, Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland, among others. He also uses slide projectors in his performance or collaborative work with sound artists, and one of such works, “Chiratsuki,” was performed with SONTAG SHOGUN at Mono no Aware VIII in New York.