Ark

Kent Tate | Canada

Year: 2023

Run time: 4:04 min.

Synopsis:
Ark describes a time when we had a front row seat where it seemed that we could see everything yet it felt as if we were seeing nothing at all. Over the years I’ve found fewer and fewer animals when I go out into nature to look at this or to film that. In the last year I haven’t found any wild animals and I've rarely heard any birds. So where have all the other animals gone? What has happened to them and what is happening to us?

Bio:
Kent Tate is an Canadian artist/filmmaker whose work explores the dichotomy between tranquility and activity in our natural and manufactured worlds. Time, motion and stillness are intertwined through Tate's work to act like a fulcrum upon which the environmental, social and philosophical aspects of his projects are held in dynamic balance. Tate has received awards, grants, and artist residencies for his projects which have been exhibited internationally at film/new media festivals, symposiums, group screenings/exhibitions and solo gallery exhibitions/tours.

Website

Moth Print

Sarah Bliss | US

Year: 2022

Run time: 3:35 min.

Synopsis:
Handmade, laser-printed 16mm transferred to HD. 03:35 Moth Print is a collaboration with my deceased father. It traces lines of loss and confronts failure of memory. A cameraless handmade film, it employs a laser printer to image directly onto clear film leader, creating both (optical) sound and image. Each printed sheet contains 231 frames patiently composed and assembled one by one: 9.6 seconds of projected film. It utilizes two texts: digital video I shot of a Galium Sphinx moth compulsively divebombing a light that could destroy it, and a manuscript page from my father’s unpublished memoir in which he describes visiting his own father who was dying of Alzheimer’s. My father found him imprisoned in a state hospital, brutally beaten and bruised, strapped to a gurney unable to speak.

Bio:
Sarah Bliss is a filmmaker, artist, curator, educator and Buddhist practitioner working artisanally with hand-processed film and with video to make experimental and documentary films that engage personal and social history. She utilizes an experimental ethnography to investigate desire, time, memory, place and to facilitate presence and attunement with the sensate body. Her work is screened internationally at museums, galleries and film festivals including the Ann Arbor Film Festival; Edinburgh International Film Festival; Antimatter; ARKIPEL Jakarta; Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; Fracto Film Encounter Berlin; and Anthology Film Archives.

Website

A Body Appeared at the Lake Today

Brian Ratigan | US

Year: 2022

Run time: 4:44 min.

Synopsis:
A found footage examination of what happened at the lake today. Where were you? An exquisite corpse by Non Films. Images randomly selected from found footage; poem written without images; music written without images or words. A collaborative work by Non Films. Poem by Daniel DeVaughn. Music by John Touchton & Jeremiah Johnson. Directed by Ratigan. Special Thanks to Alex Faoro. 8mm found footage: New York, 1953. Assembled in Brooklyn. ©MMXXII Non Films.
WINNER: BEST BROOKLYN PROJECT / Brooklyn Film Festival.

Bio:
Brian Ratigan is an award-winning director and film curator. He is the founder of Non Films, a label for ephemeral animation and experimental cinema in New York City. Ratigan is established in the film festival circuit as a programmer and juror for the Slamdance Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Indie Memphis, and the London Indie Festival, among others. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Moviemaker Magazine, 1883 Magazine, and film festivals worldwide.

Website
Instagram

Questioning the Existence of Alec

Roger Horn | US

Year: 2023

Run time: 4:34 min.

Synopsis:
"Questioning the Existence of Alec" is comprised of found footage utilizing stop motion and additional in camera effects recorded on the beaches of South Africa during the 1940s. In this dreamlike journey, two or three friends, one of whom may be Alec are presented from adolescence through adulthood. The surreal journey blurs the boundary between the past and present, reality and fantasy, and invites viewers to question for themselves the nature of reality, dreams, and the existence of the protagonists on both sides of the camera.

Bio:
Roger Horn is a filmmaker, actor, anthropologist, and Associate Professor of Practice at Northern Arizona University in the Creative Media & Film Department. He has over 25 years of moving image experience in Los Angeles, Nashville, Berlin, and Cape Town. He obtained his PhD at the University of Cape Town in Cultural Anthropology and holds an MA in Visual & Media Anthropology. His films have been showcased at almost 300 film festivals and conferences worldwide. These include the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, where he was nominated for the International Competition category, the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, and the 21st, 22nd, & 24th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.

Website
Instagram

On the Other Side Of

Mia Felić | Estonia

Year: 2024

Run time: 6:45 min.

Synopsis:
The work explores the transgender and non-binary body in transition through the 19th century photographic process mordançage. The mordançage, using its tremendous chemical pressure alters the silver gelatine prints, causing them to undergo slow, gradual transformation. The tissue of the body and of the print breaks and a new life, new forms are born.

Bio:
Mia Felić (b. 1993, Čakovec, Croatia) is an anthropologist and visual artist based in Tallinn, Estonia where she studies Contemporary art at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Currently she is studying photography at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture as part of exchange studies. In her art practice she mostly works with analog image - both still and moving. Her topic of interest revolves around the idea of process, change and time, both as subject and as physical properties of photographic and film medium. She creates on a basis of trial and error, accident, playfulness and experimentation in the lab.

Man is in the Forest

anthony peskine | France

Year: 2023

Run time: 5:25 min.

Synopsis:
The first minutes of "Bambi", but the forest was updated. Closer to the forest I know, further from the innocent 1942 animated version, this soiled forest is a witness of our civilization's greatest achievement and of what will remain when we are gone.

Bio:
Visual artist.
All the images, all the objects that I create, are attempts to represent the world and to represent a more just way of being in the world.

Website
Instagram

Nature Freak

Nathaniel Hendrickson | US

Year: 2023

Run time: 5:47 min.

Synopsis:
A video artwork initiated by Nathaniel Hendrickson in collaboration with Gianluigi Biagini made in residence on Le Ventre De La Baleine near Montagne Saint-Pierre in collaboration with Project Daena for the occasion of the International Seminar, Borderscapes II. Initiated by ULiege School of Architecture. The video was screened at Farm Caestert on June 26, 2023.

This work is one of a series of works that I am calling minor-drawings. By using a drone as a drawing instrument and tool for poetic abstraction, I am perhaps working in the lineage of Jean Luc Nancy from The Pleasure in Drawing (which echoes Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind) where he says that “Drawing is the opening of form… drawing evokes more the gesture of drawing than the traced figure… it indicates the figure’s essential incompleteness, a non-closure or non-totalizing form.” This work thus proposes a use of the drone in opposition to its current use as a weaponized mapping technology and tool for ever-increasing “traced figure(s)” which lead to ever-increasing surveillance and subdivision of lands and hyper-extractionist capitalist campaigns (see James Bridle’s Ways of Being, p.27), The slow, droning, digital hum of the video invites an embodied experience of place, close to that of walking in the landscape, or as though one might be perceiving, as in a dream, the sounds as perceived by a fish in the canal or from the point of view of a bird in the air.

Bio:
Nathaniel Hendrickson works as an interdisciplinary artist, painter, curator, documentary filmmaker and freelance producer based in Casey County, KY. Their work explores the edge of performance and visual art and has worked on collaborated projects internationally with the Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski (Italy/Turkey/Lebanon/USA); Hyunji Park (Korea/Finland); Gianluigi Biagini (Finland/Italy); Pietro Varrasso (Belgium); and Meltem Chumbul (Turkey). Hendrickson’s current work focuses on the ecological crisis, human perception and the metamorphic sublime.

Website

Direction of the Road

Janelle VanderKelen | US

Year: 2023

Run time: 7:42 min.

Synopsis:
As a tree muses on their role in the Order of Things, this being (which humans normally think of as immobile) reveals the speed, agility, and finesse integral to their experience of the world. Adapted from a short story written by Ursula LeGuin, this decidedly inhuman filmic narrative uses the overlapping cyan and scarlet of anaglyph stereoscopic 3D imaging to speculate how a tree (which responds more acutely to light waves in the red and blue portions of the spectrum) might perceive the world visually. Though 3D stereoscopy is used in this film, it is intended to be viewed without 3D glasses.

Bio:
Janelle VanderKelen is an artist, curator, and educator currently based in Knoxville, TN. Her films and intermedia installations imagine alternative acts of relation between imperfect bodies (human, vegetal, geological, or otherwise) and make visible the agency of plants through experimental time-based media processes. VanderKelen’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, CO; Anthology Film Archives in New York; and Bow Arts in London, England. Her films have screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, True/False, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Revelation Perth International Film Festival, IC DOCS, San Diego Underground Film Festival, and Antimatter [Media Art] Film Festival. Recent awards include juried awards at the 2023 Ann Arbor Film Festival + 2023 Thomas Edison Film Festival.

Website