anima
| Portugal, 4:16, 2023 |
- Joana Patrão

Anima is a slow wandering, where light and shadow reveal and hide themselves, as they leave their burnt impression on the film. It reveals a feeling of enchantment that guides the eye in discovering a new natural environment through the lens, immersing in it. Searching for a sense of transformation, where forms are fluid and transitory, it simultaneously evokes the slow and attentive time of relationship with the landscape. The air flows through an ocarina, an ancient instrument for calling birds (or other mystical entities), in a gentle breeze that turns into a melody, resulting from my own breathing, as a participating character behind the camera.

Joana Patrão (b.1992) is a Portuguese multimedia artist. With a research-based practice, she was awarded a Master in Painting at School of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (2016) after completing the Fine Arts degree in the same school. As an Erasmus+ fellow she studied at the Master in Visual Culture and Contemporary Arts (2015) at Aalto University, Helsinki/Espoo, Finland, where she was selected student for the incubator Adaptations - Utö | Site, Stories and Sensory Methods, organized by HIAP, island of Utö, Finland.

164 San Antonio Abad
|Canada, 6:20, 2023 |
- Yuula Benivolski

In March the streets of Mexico City are covered in purple Jacaranda flowers. We live in Obrera—meaning “Worker” in Spanish. It is a working class neighbourhood. Walking home one night, I follow the trail of purple flowers on the ground until I come face to face with a large bronze seamstress, locked behind the fence of an apartment building courtyard.
At home, I look up the address: Manuel José Othón, corner of San Antonio Abad. I find a photo of the monument and the following words: "Topeka, large garment factory, employed hundreds of women." And then: "Bronze statue at site of collapsed factory."

Yuula Benivolski (b. 1980, Moscow, USSR) works in photography, film/video and installation. She uses auto-fiction and personal narratives to encourage a closer understanding of collective memories and their historical contexts. Her project “Platform” currently in production, highlights the memory of a once borderless Palestine against the settler colonial policies and ongoing erasure enacted by Israel, a place where she grew up. In 2023 she will present “In a Room and a Half” - new video, textile, and photographic works that reimagine the details of the small apartment where she spent the first 10 years of her life.

...in darkness there is light.
| United States, 12:45, 2024 |
- Daniel Maldonado

Embracing the eternal harmony of light and darkness' ephemeral dance, "...in darkness there is light" draws upon the fragility of life and celluloid. It is a handcrafted film elegy told as a textured visual haiku centered on the iconic #7 subway train in New York City. A literal manifestation of sound and light, It is also a portrait on healing through time, bathed in silhouettes and locomotion.
Daniel Maldonado
Rooted in the New York avant-garde under the mentorship of acclaimed film poet Manfred Kirchheimer, Daniel has been exploring a personal vision dictated by visual motifs with a commitment to an intuitive process. As a Creative Capital- On The Radar Co-Artist, his handcrafted celluloid and digital video works have been commissioned and exhibited in galleries, conferences, symposiums and art fairs over the last 15 years. Daniel is a multi award winning LatinX filmmaker who’s experimental work has been showcased in group shows at such institutions as the Museum Of Modern Art, Rome’s Maxxi Museum, Anthology Film Archives and Miami’s Superblue Art Center.

and so it came about (A Tale of Consequential Dormancy)
| United States, 13:00, 2023 |
- Charlotte Pryce

A mythological tale - the story of Persephone - is retold, recast and relocated on the periphery of a common. The entangled intrigues of the seen and the unseen conspire to disclose an underland at once enticing and threatening. But what are the consequences of such trespassing between worlds? The title of this allegorical story refers to the ecological process that occurs when organisms enter a dormant phase in response to adverse conditions. The film was made during the months and years of the pandemic. There were two aspects of this time that I was particularly struck by: firstly, that the virus occurred because of an extraordinary contact between the animal and human worlds, and secondly, that this contact resulted in a global “dormancy”. Such events seemed terrifying and inexplicable - and yet our folklore, myths and fairy tales are replete with such events and occurrences. In turn these stories drew from observation of natural processes. Filmed in England, Scotland and California.
Hand processed 16mm, s8 and magic lantern slides

Charlotte Pryce has been making films and optical objects since 1986 and her works have screened throughout the world. She has taught experimental film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Academy of Art (San Francisco), Kent Institute of Design (Canterbury, England), and is currently a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles). She is a graduate of the Slade School of Art, University College London (BFA) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA). In 2013 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association honored her with the Douglass Edwards Award for best experimental cinema achievement. In 2019, she was honored with career retrospectives at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Bozar (Brussels), Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the [S8] Mostra de Cinema Periferico.

Adrift Potentials
| Brazil, 11:30, 2023 |
- Leonardo Pirondi

This pseudo diary film is made of found materials from an unfinished 16mm film. 'Potenciais à Deriva' is a film started by a Brazilian artist under a pseudonym while living in exile in Los Angeles, California. Isolated shots and previously assembled scenes reveal an intention to create a mysterious film comprised of disembodied interviews, empty rooms, radio recordings, soccer games, and sudden apparitions of the filmmaker that slowly ruminates on Brazil's colonial past, North American Imperialism and the military dictatorship of the time in a paranoid and anxious manner. Be aware that the film's final version never came to exist. This version presented is my mere attempt to produce a film with these otherwise lost images.

LEONARDO PIRONDI is a filmmaker and artist born in São Paulo, Brazil. His films often inhabit realities similar to ours that create friction between documentary and fictional structures; his filmmaking practice emerges from the fabulation of sociopolitical resonances within culture, myths, history, technology, and image-making. His films have been exhibited in various festivals worldwide, including Toronto, the Tiger Short Competition in Rotterdam, New York, Viennale, BFI London, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Guanajuato, Slamdance, True/False, Ambulante, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and others.

a fence is a fence but the clouds move freely
| United States, 8:10, 2023 |
- Curtis Miller

a fence is a fence but the clouds move freely is a brief essay on the origin of four small towns in rural Kansas and Oklahoma, told through each town’s respective water tower. Tall tales, public memorials, and roadside signage present in a region shadowed with settler-colonialism, imperial pursuits, identity fictions, and the threat of severe weather.

Curtis Miller is an artist working across film, video, photography, and publication. His films have screened at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Antimatter, EXIS, Fracto Film, the Montreal Underground Film Festival, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and many other underground festivals, as well as the Centre for Contemporary Arts - Glasgow, the Hyde Park Arts Center - Chicago, Nightingale - Chicago, Indiana University Cinema - Bloomington, and Renaissance TV through The Renaissance Society - Chicago. He currently lives in Chicago, IL.