Visions, Insights & Reveries
Saturday, April 12
1:00 - 2:00 PM
Canady Creative Arts Center
Bloch Hall Theater
The Hungry Ghost & The Earthshaker
Takahiro Suzuki | United States
Year: 2024
Run time: 10:30 min.
Synopsis:
The Hungry Ghost & The Earthshaker is meditation on greed. The film pulls from the Buddhist figure of the Hungry Ghost, the Japanese myth of the Namazu, and various personal retellings and interpretations. As the film weaves through its narrative, we are left in pursuit of a gold coin, questioning its existence, while the giant fish further challenges the ideals in pursuit.
Bio:
Takahiro Suzuki (he/him/his) is a Maine-based artist and educator. He completed his BA in Studio Art from the University of Virginia, and received his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His work and research practices as an artist serve as a form of inquiry, where the end product is not so much a thesis upon which to land, but an open hypothesis for the audience to consider. His works have exhibited and screened nationally and internationally. Suzuki is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Colby College and also serves as the co-founder and co-curator of aCinema, a collaboration with Janelle VanderKelen, which presents experimental film and video screenings at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee, WI.
Website
pictures of a negative chair
Magdalena Bermudez | United States
Year: 2025
Run time: 9:24 min.
Synopsis:
An account of a scientist trying to teach machines how to infer depth from two-dimensional pictures. A parable of a prince trying to resurrect his lover by fashioning a chair out of his lover’s things. A question about the need for human beings, and the things they are in need of.
Bio:
Magdalena Bermudez (she/her) is a filmmaker and educator whose practice examines the entangled relations between people and technologies, prodding at the slippery boundaries between human and informational bodies through essayistic film and video works. She received a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work has screened internationally at various film festivals, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], Athens International Film + Video Festival, BIDEODROMO International Experimental Film and Video Festival, Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Black Maria Film Festival, West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival, Tranås at the Fringe, and The Festival of (In)appropriation. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film and Video at Hampshire College.
Website
Toil and Spin
Maureen Zent | United States
Year: 2024
Run time: 5:05 min.
Synopsis:
Cast off from shore. Into the dim, the dark. Away, away. Adrift in an oarless boat. And deep, deeper below the mirror surface.
Then snap. Caught in eddies of regret, past slights, tasks undone, worries fresh and aged. Ever searching for a channel back to the elusive elsewhere.
Toil and Spin uses the visual language of minimalism to describe sleep and sleeplessness.
Bio:
Maureen Zent is a filmmaker and writer in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Her animated shorts include Whisper, Rustle, Tango Sparks, and Yank Tug Yank. Zent’s experimental works take viewers to shadow worlds that lie beyond surface illusions. The visual language is influenced by modernist art and design. Zent’s animation has screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Thomas Edison (Black Maria) Film Festival, London International Animation Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, and more. She has served as a juror for the Florida Animation Festival.
Website
Instagram
Soiled dreams
Nathaniel Hendrickson | United States
Year: 2023
Run time: 8:03 min.
Synopsis:
Soiled Dreams is a video meeting and collective improvisation lamenting the death of science made on a sunny afternoon in residence at The Soil Factory, Ithaca on the site of The Marshy Garden, a future food forest and possible carbon sequestration project.
Bio:
"Nathaniel Hendrickson is an interdisciplinary artist, painter, curator, documentary filmmaker, and freelance producer based between Casey County and Louisville, KY. Their work explores the edge of performance and visual art and has worked on collaborative projects internationally with the Open Program of the Work center of Jerzy Grotowski (Italy/Turkey/Lebanon/USA); Hyunji Park (Korea/Finland); Gianluigi Biagini (Finland/Italy); Pietro Varrasso (Belgium); They most recently staged an intervention with Pietro Varrasso at the University of Liege School of Architecture’s: Borderscapes 2023 on the unique geopolitical region of Mt. St. Pierre, and presented their work at the Multispecies Ethnography and Artistic Methodology conference at the University of Liege School of Anthropology and in 2024, they were invited to speak at ENDA: École nationale d’art de Paris on their walking practice. Currently, their focus lies on exploring themes related to the ecological crisis, human perception, and the metamorphic sublime.
Aside from their artistic pursuits, Hendrickson is committed to education. They have served as Drawing and Painting faculty at the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts since 2022 and have co-facilitated intensive summer workshops in collaboration with Projet Daena and the Royal Conservatory of Liege in Belgium of and on since 2019. In the academic year of 2022-2023, they served as the Art & Design Artist-in-Residence at Campbellsville University. They currently serve as Assistant professor of Interdisciplinary Painting and Performance at Kentucky College of Art + Design.
Hendrickson holds an MFA in Studio Art from Florida State University."
Rain
Vasilios Papaioannu | USA, Greece, Italy
Year: 2024
Run time: 6:00 min.
Synopsis:
Rain, as circular shapes of memory imprinted on the fast paced celluloid or as liquid moving sculptures of the present in digital form, documents a verbal interaction between two people.
Bio:
Vasilios Papaioannu is a filmmaker, photographer and mixed media artist currently based in Washington, DC. In his work Papaioannu explores the fleeting dreamscapes of reality using noise, movement and disturbance. He hybridizes different modes of filmmaking, unifying variegated media, primarily 16mm film, digital video and archival footage. His works have been shown in various venues around the world, such as Crossroads at SFMOMA, Anthology Film Archives, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Cork International Film Festival, Festifreak, Analogica, Cámara Lúcida, Engauge Film Festival, EXiS, L’ Alternativa, Antimatter [media art], Montreal Underground Film Festival, Revelation Perth Film Festival and Sharjah Film Platform. Papaioannu holds an MA in Communication, Text Semiotics and Cinema from the University of Siena in Italy and an MFA in Film and Cinematography from Syracuse University in New York. Papaioannu is currently an Assistant Professor at the Cathy Hughes School of Communications, Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Howard University.
Website
smirnov fedot
Misha Ketov | Russia
Year: 2024
Run time: 4:00 min.
Synopsis:
"The ordinary life of an ordinary person, condensed into seven days and two quatrains.
What happens if you go with the flow until the very end? Maybe not much, but it could make for an interesting film obituary.
The text is based on an old English nursery rhyme. The image is taken from Soviet and Russian film footage."
Bio:
Misha Ketov. Non-fiction film director. A fourth-year student in the found footage workshop by Alexander Markov & Maria Popritsak
Gyrograph
Gitte Le Bruyn | Belgium
Year: 2024
Run time: 14:15 min.
Synopsis:
A newspaper reader takes up residence in a room.
Her head tries to find a story in the randomness of events.
In order to make sense of things, she collects and reconstructs newspaper pictures.
She doesn’t want empathy to crumble, nor does she want to feel at the mercy of a post-apocalyptic dystopia, though the newspaper sometimes feels that way.
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Blink Once
Jim Haverkamp | United States
Year: 2024
Run time: 3:17 min.
Synopsis:
A metal detectorist reminisces while going through the day's routine. Based on a poem by Karin Gottshall.
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, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. He has toured on the Southern Circuit of Independent Film and was co-organizer of the Strange Beauty Film Festival. Jim also teaches for Duke University's Department of Cinematic Arts and is co-conspirator at Shadowbox Studio in Durham.
Website
Instagram
