Documentaries
Saturday, April 12
2:30 - 3:45 PM
Canady Creative Arts Center
Bloch Hall Theater
Warp weft water weeds
John Rash | United States
Year: 2025
Run time: 11:45 min.
Synopsis:
Elizabeth Bradford draws inspiration for her paintings from a profound connection to nature through direct observations while hiking or kayaking primarily in the Appalachian Mountains and foothills where she resides.
Bio:
Assistant Professor of Film Production and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, John Rash is a filmmaker, photographer, video artist, and founder of the Southern Punk Archive. John earned his M.F.A. in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University in 2014 and has since worked as a visual storyteller and educator in both the United States and China. John has produced and directed several award winning films, and was the recipient of the Soul of Southern Film award from Indie Memphis Film Festival, History+ Film Award from the North Carolina Museum of History, and the Excellence in Community Engagement Award with Distinction from the University of Mississippi.
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Marble Madness
Zack Harold | United States
Year: 2024
Run time: 7:22 min.
Synopsis:
Some playground games never go out of style – Hide and seek, tag, and Duck, Duck Goose. Kids today still play those classics. And every spring, the students of one elementary school in Boone County, West Virginia still get excited for a game that’s more than a hundred years old. A short drive away, an Ohio River factory is likewise keeping the game alive — as the last industrial manufacturer of marbles in the U.S.
Bio:
Zack Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter, where he honed his abilities as a writer and discovered a passion for chronicling Appalachian culture. He eventually combined that storytelling acumen with a lifelong love of cameras to create short documentaries to highlight the unique people and places of West Virginia.
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No matter what
Carolyn Baker | United States
Year: 2024
Run time: 11:00 min.
Synopsis:
This essay film weaves together memories of hawk babies outside my window, my shortcomings as an wildlife observer, and Hollywood's use of the red-tailed hawk cry to signal danger and threat. No Matter What draws parallels between this slippage in auditory representation and the ongoing mass extinction event.
Bio:
Carolyn Lambert is a video artist and filmmaker. Her work engages with the vulnerability of living in a time of environmental turmoil and mass extinction. Lambert has exhibited at venues such as the Drawing Center, Eyebeam, and SculptureCenter (New York) and La Mirage (Montreal). Screenings of her work have occurred at the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück (Germany), Bomb Factory (UK), and MUMOK (Vienna, AU). Her body of work has developed out of a need to survey the scope of ecological collapse and sift through the complex human responses as the living world disappears. She lives in the Hudson Valley in New York.
Above The mountain majesties
Beth Davison | United States
Year: 2025
Run time: 12:23 min.
Synopsis:
Among the majestic mountains of North Carolina's High Country, an experienced paraglider guides a determined newcomer through her first steps toward flight. As he soars through mountain tops demonstrating the ultimate freedom of flight, their shared dialogue about fear and courage reveals the transformative nature of pursuing one's dreams
Bio:
Sociologist turned documentarian, Beth Davison is a faculty member and Co-Director of App Docs at Appalachian State University. Some of her documentary projects that have screened in film festivals, museums, on PBS and internationally, include The Denim Dynasty, Eva & Moe, Dulatown, the Nature of Art, DocuAppalachia, and Saving the Virginia Big-Eared Bats. She works ongoing with many community partners including her work with the National Park Service to produce short historical videos screened at the Blue Ridge Parkway, National Park Service Visitor center in Blowing Rock, NC
Petrichor
Juan José Arias Gil | Colombia
Year: 2023
Run time: 15:00 min.
Synopsis:
Director Juan José Arias uses old family videos to try to find out what kind of person his father was. His image comes back in dreams, his voice whispers in the smell of rain and his embrace lies in an old house in the country where they used to spent the holidays. Reality, memories and dreams blur together in a poetic way.
Bios:
Juan José Arias Gil, Colombian filmmaker, studying Audiovisual and Multimedia Communication at University of Antioquia in Medellín. Their interests are archives, gender, and family and autobiographical stories.
waiting up to meet the wolf
Anthony Carr | Canada
Year: 2023
Run time: 6:40 min.
Synopsis:
This debut 3-channel short is a quiet call to action for humanity to reverse the decline of dark skies, told via memories from the director’s childhood and adult life. Coalescing the past, present and future, the film weaves these stories around those of the Moonlight Tower, a short-lived 19th century lighting technology.
The film’s shaky visuals and day as night audio track are part of a deliberately off-kilter viewing experience, echoing the nocturnal ‘jet-lag’ felt across the natural world when darkness is lost. Shot on 16mm and hand-processed using eco-reversal techniques that complement the subject matter and message, the film poses the question but leaves the audience to decide the fate of our attitude towards darkness.
Made with the help of a 2022 Greenlight Grant from MediaNet (Canada).
Bio:
Born in London (UK), Anthony Carr is a Canadian-based visual artist working in photography, sculpture and moving image. Having exhibited widely, in 2021 Carr was awarded the inaugural Glover Rayner Prize (UK) for sustainable photography and a Greenlight film production grant from MediaNet (Canada).
His debut short film Waiting Up To Meet The Wolf (2023) has been selected in a handful of film festivals including amongst others Buzz Cinema Festival, UK; Bideodromo International Experimental Film and Video Festival, Spain; Antimatter (Media Art), Canada; and the Canberra Short Film Festival, Australia. Whilst his micro short timelapse animation Observing A Baker's Dozen: A Lunar Study in Variations of Size and Shape is featured in haus a rest’s online zine (issue no. 51, 2024) on the theme of Art and Science Collaborations. It has also been shown in Desaturated with Analogue Ensemble, Ramsgate, UK (2024) and at The Desert Festival, Central Australia (2020).
Notable recent shows of his artwork include born of isolation (after Eric), arc.hive artist run centre, Victoria, BC, Canada (solo) and You Are Welcome, Pat Martin Bates Gallery, Victoria Arts Coun-cil, BC, Canada (both 2024).
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DIN 18035
Simona Obholzer | Austria
Year: 2024
Run time: 13:12 min.
Synopsis:
A soccer pitch emerges based on a process standardized down to the last detail. Layers of sand and soil are piled up and leveled, pieces of turf are rolled out and cut to size. Nothing is left to chance. Only when nature has been cast into shape can the game begin.
Bio:
Simona Obholzer born 1982 in Tyrol, Austria, lives and works in Vienna. She is a visual artist working with graphic, text, photography and video.
She graduated from the School for Artistic Photography by Friedl Kubelka in Vienna and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Video and Video Installation, where she received her diploma in Fine Art. An exchange at the Glasgow School of Art in the department of Fine Art Photography is also part of her educational background.
Simona Obholzer received several grants, latest the most promising award for contemporary art of the federal state of Tyrol (2016), the START-grant for Video and Media Art by the Austrian ministry for culture (2015), the OE1 Talents Scholarship for Fine Arts (2013). In 2015 she held a residency scholarship at the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris. Her work is nationally and internationally shown in exhibitions and at film festivals.
