Surreal, Offbeat, Sci-fi and Horror
Canady Creative arts Center
Bloch Hall Theater
9:30 PM - 11:00 PM
THe Night Before New Year's
Garrett Johnson
Year: 12/31/22
Created with a mixture of emerging AI technology, including face training, Ole Gary stays up to watch the ball drop and hopes to make a wish...
Run Time: 1:37
Country: USA
Bio: Garrett Johnson is a multi-hyphenate filmmaker who specializes in writing and directing comedy and comedy horror.
The Voice in Isabel Fleiss’s office
Jim Haverkamp
Year: 10/31/22
Synopsis: A woman with an unusual malady--cobweb buildup in the throat--receives an even more unusual treatment in this adaptation of a surreal poem by North Carolina writer Virgil Renfroe.
Run Time: 6:24
Country: USA
Bio: Jim Haverkamp grew up in Iowa and lives in Durham, NC. His short fiction and documentary films have screened around the world, including the London Underground Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, the American Dance Festival, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. He has toured on the Southern Circuit of Independent Film, served as a juror for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and was co-organizer of the Strange Beauty Film Festival. Jim also teaches for Duke University's Department of Cinematic Arts and bowls occasionally.
eye scream
Philipp Ramspeck
Year: 2/6/23
Synopsis: A stroll with a baby carriage through a dystopian city. (light painting and stop motion animation)
Run Time: 4:20
Country: Switzerland
Bio: Director Biography - Philipp Ramspeck
Born 1977 in Zell am See, grown up in Zurich
1990-1996 Highschool in Zurich
1999 studies in Film directing at the Filmakademie Vienna
1999-2001 stays in Berlin and Vienna as an upcoming filmmaker
2002-2013 independent filmmaker in Zurich and sidejob as a night porter in the Hotel Leoneck in Zurich
2009-2014 participation in diverse commissionary films as cinematographer and editor
since 2014 exclusively independent filmmaker
Blonde game show
Anton Burek, Meghan Martin
Year: 9/27/22
A game show with blondes set in a dystopian future.
Anton Burek (“Blonde Game Show”) is an actor/writer in TV, film and live entertainment productions in and around New York including: art installations, professional clowning, Shakespeare in the Park, and Disney+ promotions. He has a B.A in acting from Manhattanville College. Visit Fluffy-cat.com for more info about Anton’s current TV and feature-length projects.
Meghan Martin is a WV raised, Brooklyn residing actress and producer. After finishing her BFA at Marshall University she primarily worked in theater (playing several roles in the Wizard of Oz, and a lead role in the Rocket Boys Musical at Theater West Virginia) before landing her first big role as Rosanna McCoy in the History Channel’s documentary The Hatfields and McCoy’s: America’s Greatest Fued and moving into film and television. Since then she has moved to New York City, studied under Anthony Robert Grasso, and become a proud member of The Brazen Giants Acting Troupe. You can catch her in feature film The Dirty Kind or pilot episode of No Clue on Amazon Prime or starring in award winning short film Lola in May which is currently making its round in the festival circuit.
Run Time: 8:19
Country: USA
CJ
Alden Wallace
Year: 1/26/23
One bad date. Based on true events.
Bio: Self-taught writer and filmmaker from Vancouver, BC.
Run Time: 14:58
Country: Canada
Balaena
Alessia Cecchet
Year: N/A
A whale lies stranded on the beach, and a woman seeks closure through a simulacrum while human interlopers observe, collect, dissect and take selfies.
Run Time: 8:08
Country: Italy
Bio: human stories of displacement, loss, and suffering. Alessia’s work has been exhibited internationally at several film festivals and art venues, including Uppsala Short Film Festival (Uppsala, Sweden), Slamdance Film Festival (Park City, UT), Nashville Film Festival (Nashville, TN), Encounters Film Festival (Bristol, UK), Seattle Film Festival (Seattle, WA), Cork Film Festival (Cork, Ireland), Athens International Film and Video Festival (Athens, OH), Columbus Film and Animation Festival (Columbus, OH), and Torino Film Festival (Torino, Italy). Her films have won several awards, such as the Honorable Mention at Festival de Cine Silente (Puebla, Mexico) and the Best Fiction at the High Coast Film Festival (Sweden).
Portent omission
Taylor Nice
Year: 11/13/22
Synopsis: If you ignore the omens you will become one.
Run Time: 2:40
Country: USA
Bio: Taylor Nice is a non-binary multimedia artist creating work out of the Appalachian mountains in Tazewell, VA.
i am of you
Holly Mollohan
Year: 8/31/22
Synopsis: A man tortured by horrible dreams faces off with a nightmarish denizen that is much too close to home.
Run Time: 15:59
Country: USA
Bio: N/A
welcome to the enclave
Sarah Lasley
Year: N/A
Two Texas sisters fled to the metaverse at the start of the pandemic, creating The Enclave, a cyber-haven for ‘like-minded women’. Years later, the digital suburb is on the verge of bankruptcy, and owner Moni Calvioni is crowdfunding to save her utopia. An onslaught of Reddit trolls and the encroaching digital mountainscape further unravel the delusion at the heart of The Enclave’s pursuit for a white, suburban ideal and expose the baggage we bring to online spaces if we don't fix our very real IRL problems.
Run Time: 12:00
Country: USA
Bio: Sarah Lasley is an award-winning filmmaker from Louisville, Kentucky. She has screened internationally at film festivals and universities, notably the Cairo Video Festival in Egypt and National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. Her museum and gallery exhibitions include the Katonah Museum of Art and Leslie Hellar Workspace in New York and LAXART in Los Angeles. Lasley worked as an animator for Martha Stewart Omnimedia and title animator on Todd Haynes’s Academy Award Nominated film Carol, Panda Bear, and MGMT music videos. She holds an MFA from Yale School of Art and will be a summer 2023 Artist in Residence at Darmstädter Sezession in Germany.
Joan jonas of arc
Anya Liftig
Year: 11/6/21
An experimental performance for camera film about an encounter with an iconic iconoclast infested with baby lobsters.
Run Time: 4:07
Country: USA
Bio: Anya Liftig is a writer and performer. Her work has been featured at TATE Modern, MOMA, CPR, Highways Performance Space, Lapsody4 Finland, Fado Toronto, Performance Art Institute-San Francisco, Queens Museum, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, The Kitchen at the Independent Art Fair, Performer Stammtisch Berlin, OVADA, Joyce Soho and many other venues. In “The Anxiety of Influence” she dressed exactly like Marina Abramovic and sat across from her all day during “The Artist is Present” exhibition. Her work has been published and written about in The New York Times Magazine, BOMB, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue Italia, Next Magazine, Now and Then, Stay Thirsty, New York Magazine, Gothamist, Jezebel, Hyperallergic, Bad at Sports, The Other Journal, and many others. She is a graduate of Yale University and Georgia State University and has received grant and residency support from MacDowell, Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Franklin Furnace Fund, KHN Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, The New Museum, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Flux Projects, University of Antioquia and Casa Tres Patios-Medellin, Colombia.
the way the stars started
Jami Dent
Year: 10/10/22
Synopsis: As the doomsday clock moves 90 seconds to midnight, fear is used as a weapon of global manipulation and dominance.
Run Time: 3:42
Country: USA
Bio: My name is Jami Dent. I'm from Petersburg, VA. I've always had a passion for many different arts forms. It is a passion I've shared w/ my longtime partner in crime, collaborator & husband of 28 yrs, Jon. We met in high school several years ago in acting class. We moved to NYC after high school where Jon attended American Academy of Dramatic Arts & I worked at record stores & attended costume & makeup workshops. In between raising 4 children & work, we continued our passion for the arts through out the years volunteering at film festivals, writing stories & playing music in our spare time.
Showtime
Michael Fleming
Year: 2023
Our consumer society is dominated by show, the "outside world" passes us by as a long stream of images without much meaning. We have become passive spectators of pictures from popular culture, the media and advertising, we are swallowed up by them and experience less and less difference between image and reality, yearning for sovereignty, wanting to be transcendent, for liberation and looking for cohesion, justice, reason, coherence and like-mindedness. In short; control versus loss. Entangled in this dichotomy, the intertwining, the intermingling of waste and utility brings us into a supplementary tension; drowning in this void in search for an eternal present!
Run Time: 14:00
Country: UK
the mirror neuron (poetry mix)
Tommy Becker
Year: 2023
The Mirror Neuron (poetry mix) is an art rock film divided into three vignettes that investigate complexities of interconnection beneath an awakening of the sun. Mirror neurons activate when we observe the actions of others. They allow us to empathize through feeling, not thinking. Their discovery confirms our evolutionary path to see others as similar to ourselves. The Mirror Neuron celebrates our biology through a series of musically driven gestures intended to activate our neural networks. VIDEO, MUSIC & TEXT: written, recorded, edited & performed by Tommy Becker. Director Biography - Tommy Becker
Bio: Tommy Becker attended the San Francisco Art Institute as an undergraduate before receiving his MFA in Film/Video/Performance from California College of Arts where he was awarded, "The All College Honor Award”. A poet trapped in a camcorder, Becker continues to feed his video, music and poems into his never-ending saga, “TAPE NUMBER ONE”. Often Becker’s single channel works are translated to live cinema performance. He has been an artist in residency at Headlands Center for The Arts and the Wexner Center for the Arts. His work has been shared at Bay Area Now 4 at the Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, Freewaves’ 10th Biennial Film, Video & New Media Art Festival, Los Angeles; White Columns, New York; Ann Arbor FF; Chicago Underground FF; Currents New Media FF; Perth International FF and Black Maria FF. Since 2004, he’s worked as an arts educator in the Bay Area.
Run Time: 10:18
Country: USA
