2025 Program

by Masha Chernaya (2024, GE, 89’)

Tuesday 5 August 7 PM
Boedecker Cinema

In Spring 2022 Masha prepares to leave Russia — her homeland that has changed. It turns into chain of unexpected farewells: her mom dies of cancer, her lover flees army conscription, everything including her own old self is falling apart. Her way to cope with the grief is to fixate everything with her camera. Her anger guides her to inner emigration to the local underground scene, which became an escape for young Russians. This kaleidoscope of shards chronicles not only spirit of the time, but the director's personality crumbling against the backdrop of global turmoil.

Doors open at 6 PM with a catered reception (included with the cost of admission).

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by Melissa Langer (2025, US, 71’)

Friday 8 August 8 PM
Boedecker Cinema

An examination of labor, capital, and displacement in modern America through the lens of one city’s trash — in sewers and streets, waterways and workplaces. A gritty dive into the inner workings of a city’s infrastructure that embraces different formats, weaving newly digitized archival material together with surveillance footage and contemporary vignettes of people at work, communities in flux, and waste in motion. Observational, off-beat, and open-ended, the film finds harmonies and dissonance in patterns of creation, consumption, and renewal.

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A workshop with Melissa Langer

Friday 8 August 10 AM
Boedecker Cinema

In this workshop, Featured Artist Melissa Langer leads a conversation on experimental filmmaking as an expanded process of gathering media for building a world over time. She shares methods for exhibiting multimedia installations and micro-screenings during the years-long process of making a feature-length film, recounts her experiences working as part of an artist collective, and shows how expanded cinema can keep us creatively sustained along the way.

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Melissa Langer (she/her) is an artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer based in Philadelphia working primarily in nonfiction and experimental film. Her first feature, In Excess, is a gritty dive into the inner workings of a city’s sanitation infrastructure that examines labor, capital, and displacement in modern America. She’s screened works at MoMA’s DocFortnight, True/False, Camden, IDFA, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and Icebox Project Space, among others, and has received a Cinema Eye Honors nomination in nonfiction filmmaking. She is a 2025 Flaherty Fellow, a 2024 Artist in Residence at RAIR in NE Philadelphia and is a member of the experimental artist collective Vox Populi.

Documentary Block

Wednesday 6 August 10 AM
Boedecker Cinema

In between childhood wonder, idle reverie, and planetary grief, a meditation emerges on what it means to tend the subtle pulse that binds species and generations. Through disappearing rituals, spells against catastrophe, and the renewed power of aging bodies, these works inhabit the delicate spaces where intimacy meets enormity. How do we belong to our lives when our lives belong to something infinitely more vast?

Program:

Hojita de tamarindo (Tamarind leaf) (2023, EC/PA, 6’)
Christian Obando

FLOWERS (2024, EC, 29’)
José Cardoso

Fjord Time (2025, US/SE/NO, 4’)
Jonathan Onsuwan Johnson, Carleen Maur

Niches (2024, US, 7’)
Janelle VanderKelen

As I Belong to my Life (2025, US, 4’)
Sarah Bliss

Why Does The Nightingale Sing? (2024, PT, 20’)
Jake Bellew

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Documentary Block

Wednesday 6 August 1 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Let us think through other eyes as they gaze upon this world so that we may unsettle reality and liberate doubt. We are looking for a version of the truth - in soft shadows, from the corner of a private room, under harsh fluorescents, through careful microscopes, or in memories made visible on film. Here, we imagine the perceptions of another to escape the confines of the body, acknowledging its limits while refusing the forces that constrain free will.

Program:

Animal Eye (2025, CR/US, 14’)
Carlo Nasisse

Flies (2024, US, 5’)
Bruno Dariva

Eurydice in the Underworld (2024, IT, 14’)
Felicity E. Palma

Catch Us on the Way Down (2025, US, 7’)
Cali M. Banks

CABINET (2024, US, 16’)
Todd Edward Herman

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Documentary Block

Wednesday 6 August 4 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Messages for a mitochondrial Eve are transmitted through time, connecting choices made in the past to renditions of our future selves. Works of reinvention, correction, and augmentation explore the construction of identity through archetypes, ancestral mythologies, and matrilineal lines.

Program:

Je m'appelle Mariia (2024, FI, 26’)
Juho Reinikainen

Texas Switch (2024, CA, 9’)
Darren Dominique Heroux
*not available virtually in Canada

Some Kind of Japanese (2025, US, 18’)
Robyn Tomiko

AUGMENTED (2025, US, 9’)
Raymond Rea

marratein, marratein (2025, US/LB, 25’)
Julia Yezbick

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Documentary Block

Wednesday 6 August 8 PM
Boedecker Cinema

A fluxus detective follows clues with too much data removed. Alienated youth forge performances and perform forgeries, redefining healing work with a new aesthetic of paranoia. Lonely lives are transformed with a trick mirror and a roar. 

Program:

Radio Jammer (2024, US, 20’)
Jacob Kessler

Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (2024, US, 77’)
Julian Castronovo
*not available virtually

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Screening/Performance/Conversation

Thursday 7 August 10 AM
Boedecker Cinema

This performative screening will be followed by a conversation with artists.

Program:

Sunset Seduction (US, 45’)
Charles de Agustin

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Documentary Block

Thursday 7 August 1 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Turn on the radio. Tune in to a station that shouldn’t exist. Sense the air thicken with thoughts and words from below. Witness the emergencies of war, rampant capitalism and inequality, colonial aftermaths, and environmental decline. Galvanized by distinct and unconventional media practices, filmmakers hone our ears to underground frequencies of dissent that amplify unquiet voices ringing in the fight for liberation and restorative justice. 

Program:

Abajo y a la izquierda (Below and to the Left) (2025, CL/EC/CH, 14’)
Martín Baus

As I Witness (2024, US/VE, 8’)
Pamela Martinez Barrera

Cranes and Ships (2024, RU, 20’)
Katya Korableva

Stitch the Ruin (2024, HR, 8’)
Željka Blakšić

The Call (2025, US, 7’)
Kelly Sears

Also Resisters (2025, US, 13’)
Christina D. Bartson

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Documentary Block

Thursday 7 August 4 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Across the flyway, cigar-shaped swifts cover the sky in aerial maneuvers, drawn from afar by instinctual desires. They find night rest in the vertical plane above a seasonal migration of young humans. Their remote wish for new horizons is fledged, morphed, and curtailed as the promise of summer slides into reality. The doldrums of everyday neon illuminate the labor that drives the American dream.

Program:

In Place of a Hollow Tree (2024, US, 8’)
Eislow Johnson

The Dells (2024, US, 72’)
Nellie Kluz

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​Documentary Block

Thursday 7 August 8 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Normalization of inequality is enacted bluntly and perniciously, hiding in plain sight as an oppressive homogeneity that rejects and represses with fists both bureaucratic and ungloved. The deficit of care for the social body elicits protests across generations. Abortion clinics, needle exchanges, and collaborative communication point to mechanisms of resistance against the ache of violent pressure.

Program:

Subhuman Services (2025, US, 16’)
Dan Schneidkraut

MAIO (2025, PT, 12’)
Claudio Carbone

Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air (2025, US, 9’)
Sam Drake

As Long As We Can (2024, US, 11’)
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan

Love is the Drug (2025, US, 18’)
Liz Roberts

Invisible Machines (2024, US, 24’)
Yelena Gluzman

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Documentary Block

Friday 8 August 1 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Oil refineries bloom into nocturnal infernos, swallowing darkness with hideous hypnotic grace. In the quiet fractures of community and the melancholy of spaces once brimming with possibility, these works ricochet between aspiration and collapse. Beneath drought-stricken wells and coal-scarred fields, specters inhabit our abandoned territories, living among the remnants of a society consuming itself.

Program:

The Blob (2024, US, 3’)
Mahda Purmehdi and Cesar Herrejon

The Phalanx (2025, US, 13’)
Ben Balcom

Guardian of the Well (2025, TD/US, 6’)
Bentley Brown and Tahir Ben Mahamat Zene

Lime Kiln Workers (2025, RS, 10’)
Nevena Micić, Katarina Micić, and Filip Marojević

Burn Ceremony (2025, US, 17’)
Alexander Girav

Las Animas (2025, US, 14’)
Matt Feldman

Foot to Ground (2024, US, 9’)
Christopher Thompson

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Documentary Block

Friday 8 August 4 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Masked images, faulty memories, material memorandums, and formless histories question the shape of what is to come. Echoes reflect off the walls, destabilizing the equilibrium of our spatial awareness. Is knowledge contingent? Are we sitting in a room?

Symphonies of Sound (2024, US, 9’)
Rae Leonovich

Merlin Horse (2025, AU/GB, 6’)
Patrick Tarrant

Words Are The Problem (2025, CA, 22’)
Zebulon Zang

Counter-Reformation (2024, US, 15’)
Caroline Johnson

Unless the Eye Catch Fire (2025, CA, 14’)
Brandon Poole

Pictures of a negative chair (2025, US, 9’)
Magdalena Bermudez

A World in the Evening (2023, US, 9’)
Dan Boord and Luis Valdovino

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Documentary Block

Saturday 9 August 10 AM
Boedecker Cinema

Acts of resistance in Pinochet’s Chile come to life in a chemical bath. Darkroom routines resonate in the rhythms of a Chinese-American restaurant kitchen. Distinct image formats and processes catalyze intergenerational closeness. Beyond image-making, conversations, both casual and staged, make space to process and preserve the memory of our elders.

Program:

refrigerator hum (2025, US, 15’)
jade wong

Una sombra oscilante (An Oscillating Shadow) (2024, CL/AR/FR, 77’)
Celeste Rojas Mugica
*not available virtually

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Documentary Block

Saturday 9 August 1 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Memory endeavors to keep the loss motionless, so that it stays with us and remains open to the future. Remembering does not prevent destruction, but preserves it, and what we remember is never what it once was. Our memories disrupt the coherence of absence with fragments that form patterns under our deciphering gaze.

Program:

Nigazh Unarvu (Of Presence) (2022, IN, 21’)
Vilasini Kailasam

Blurry and Forgiving (2025, US, 13’)
Alex Sulock

star born brutal (2024, MK, 2’)
Antonio Dimovski

Ode to ghosts (2024, AR, 17’)
Facundo Rodriguez Alonso

my dog is dead and other griefffs (2025, US, 4’)
Walter Smits

I Was There (2024, US, 12’)
Kamila Kuc

Gan Tang, The Lake (2024, CN/US, 14’)
Tianming Zhou

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Documentary Block

Saturday 9 August 4 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Objects become keepsakes, sloughing their intended use to transform into vessels of identity, memory, and longing. Soul flares glimmer through a piece of jewelry, singularly inert, yet alive in motion – a state of perfect symbiosis with the body that it intersects. Evergreen, yet always changing. Lost, then found again, but different now. How we manipulate and are manipulated by our environments form the contours of our lives.

Program:

Power Manual (2025, US, 8’)
Emma Baiada

kid with a pearl earring (2025, US, 8’)
Abigail Holland

Outside the Window (2024, DE, 2’)
Isabella Marquart

A Telephone for God (2025, US, 11’)
Nicky Tavares
*not available virtually in Canada, Australia, or Europe

Landscapes of Longing (2025, IN, 14’)
Alisha Tejpal, Mireya Martinez and Anoushka Mirchandani
*available virtually in Colorado only

Landforms (2024, US, 11’)
Laura Kraning

The Glass Evangelist (2023, US, 37’)
Charles G. Watson

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Documentary Block

Saturday 9 August 8 PM
Boedecker Cinema

To conquer lands, suppressive colonial powers eliminate bodies. But even after being devoured, their ghosts still roam. They migrate into stone, lake, tale, and echo. They turn into colors that shine, and movements that sprout. They manifest within the collective imagination, spreading everywhere, reclaiming ground, and shaping new landscapes.

Program:

You Are the Truck and I Am the Deer (2023, BE/HK, 5’)
Max Ferguson

¡Aoquic iez in Mexico! (Mexico will no longer exist!) (2024, MX, 80’)
Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco

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Documentary Block

Sunday 10 August 10 AM
Boedecker Cinema

Sustained movement undermines the powers that oppress. In the face of injustice and its insidious cousin, indifference, may we amplify joy. May there be music, may there be singing, may there be dancing. May we set our wings aflame and take to the sky. May we send messages of resistance and love through the airwaves and may we build monuments that reach the heavens. And if these monuments should collapse, may we revel in the beauty that remains. May we do this again and again.

Program:

Choreography of Light (2024, IR/US, 6’)
Homa Sarabi

Remote Views (2025, US, 15’)
Alexis McCrimmon
*not available virtually in Australia

What goes up (2024, SA/US, 30’)
Samar Al Summary

Silos del Cielo (2025, US, 14’)
Joseph Kolean

The Motherfucker's Birthday (2024, IQ/US, 6’)
Saif Alsaegh

Kitty Kathryn Sings The Blues (2025, US, 13’)
Joshua Markowitz

Let The Red Moon Burn (2024, CA/BG, 6’)
Ralitsa Doncheva

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Documentary Block

Sunday 10 August 1 PM
Boedecker Cinema

In the high desert grasslands, a solitary creature reads the world in frequencies beyond human cognition. Fifty years of unexplained cattle deaths have carved wounds into the pastoral mythology of the American West, defying both science and superstition. These twin mysteries reveal the fragile membrane between the known and unknowable. Fear meets wonder, illuminating how the land becomes keeper of truths too strange for daylight.

Program:

Tarantula Land (2025, US, 3’)
Andrew Motte

Not One Drop of Blood (2025, US/AU, 83’)
Jackson Devereux and Lachlan Hinton

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by Mitra Kaboli (2025, US/CA, 32’)

Sunday 10 August 6 PM
Halfway House

An experimental oral history about Mount Lebanon in upstate New York. This project spans specific histories of the mountain by weaving the stories of five different people.

This program is a hiking and listening experience on Flagstaff Mountain in Boulder. Participants may start at the Flagstaff trailhead in Gregory Canyon or the Viewpoint Trail via Panorama Point from Eben G. Fine Park. The short hike ends at the Halfway House venue where the two trails intersect.

Stay tuned for more information…

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