Sponsor
Sava's
Community Partner
Washtenaw Community College Animation Club
Meshes
Sine Özbilge & Imge Özbilge
Antwerp, Belgium | 2023 | 2 | digital file
Meshes pays an homages to Maya Deren, the mother of experimental and avant-garde film whose work is regarded as the modern starting point for film as a personal tool of expression. Taking a unique musical piece by Gabriel Chwojnik into the focal point of the narrative, Meshes brings together two unique symbiotic visual universes created by Sine
Özbilge and Imge Özbilge.
A Place Without Fear
Susanne Deeken
London, UK | 2023 | 30 | DCP
World Premiere
Through a nonlinear, abstract and surreal form of storytelling, this film follows a protagonist through a labyrinth of physical and emotional situations, set in a house which acts as both the set for the story and a metaphor for the mind. The techniques used in the film are a mix of analogue and digital: actual painting in the house, digital rendering and avatars, stop-motion painting, drawing, and collaging, with the majority created in Detroit and subsequent scenes finalised in London. With an original score by Susanne Deeken in collaboration with experimental and jazz musicians from Detroit.
Dissolution
Sujin Kim
Tempe, AZ | 2023 | 3 | digital file
United States Premiere
A process of dissolution is a process of creation. Through its visual portrayal of a ceaseless wave of dissolution and transition between personal and societal images, Dissolution serves as a metaphor for the interconnectedness between the individual’s psychological turmoil and the unpredictability of our unruly era, where each factor becomes the cause and consequence of the other in a continuous cycle.
St. Mickeyland
Ulu Braun
Berlin, Germany | 2023 | 13 | DCP
North American Premiere
In St. Mickeyland, a region inhabited by cartoon and media icons is shown in painting-like tableaux. The protagonists search for food, procreation, and meaning in life, reflecting on their own creations. While Snow White learns stand-up paddling, Winnie the Pooh gives birth to an offspring, adding a dash of humanity to the fictional shell.
I Would've Been Happy
Jordan Wong
Los Angeles, CA | 2023 | 9 | DCP
World Premiere
An attempt to map a fraught relationship through the use of intricately coded pictographs and schematic abstractions applied to glazed ceramic tiles and quilted cyanotype fabric. The aesthetics of architectural language are used to reconstruct memories of my family’s domestic spaces in the hope to uncover logic in a broken home.
Between you and me
Cameron Kletke
Vancouver, BC | 2023 | 4 | DCP
North American Premiere
"Between you and me" takes the viewer on a dynamic journey through a woman’s visual diaries, exploring human connection in young adulthood.
Is Heaven Blue? #2
Paul De Nooijer & Menno De Nooijer
Baarsdorp, The Netherlands | 2023 | 17 | DCP
Time leaves its mark on the bodies of the three De Nooijers: mother, father, and son. This is a farewell to their oeuvre—the result of fifty years of making art and living together, marked by photography, animation, and film.
The Expectation of the Observed
Stephanie J. Williams
Washington, DC / Baltimore, MD | 2022 | 5 | digital file
"The Expectation of the Observed" meditates on how much our bodies do not actually seem to belong to us. This experimental short considers the unrecognized labor in having and being a body. Puppets—disembodied meaty legs, flayed of skin—dance in repetition even as they start to disintegrate. Repeated stress falls on marginalized bodies as political symbols, performing for an expectant audience who is implicated in their watching.