THANK YOU TO
Michigan Theater
Grasshopper
Jussi Eerola
Helsinki, Vantaa, Hyvinkää, & Salo, Finland | 2022 | 9 | DCP
North American Premiere
Night falls on an abandoned business building—and the lights go up! A minimalistic musical.
Language Unknown
Janelle VanderKelen
Milwaukee, WI / Barcelona, Spain | 2022 | 7 | DCP
This film embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans who are far more sensorially limited. Leaves, mycelium, and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world. These supposedly silent watchers consider what language these swift human blurs might possibly understand.
To Do
Saul Pankhurst
Edinburgh, UK | 2022 | 4 | Digital File
North American Premiere
A reflection on the self-improvement industry through the filmmaker’s attempts to participate in a guided pseudo-mindfulness exercise.
Aralkum
Daniel Asadi Faezi, Mila Zhluktenko
Moynaq, Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan | 2022 | 14 | DCP
A desert landscape that looks as if it could be from another planet. A few lonely, rusty shipwrecks. Low desert scrub grows around them to hold the sand together during the merciless storms. Aralkum, the Aral Desert, is the bare seabed, the last thing left of the Aral Sea. By weaving together different cinematic textures, Aralkum reimagines the dried-up sea and allows an old fisherman to set sail one last time.
Glazing
Lilli Carré
Los Angeles, CA | 2021 | 3 | DCP
The animated body shifts in smear frames through the history of painting, parroting famous depictions of women. She tests the postures by inhabiting them and promptly discarding them, rejecting the fantasy that each one represents. The cartoon body is confined by the frame but thrives in constant transition.
Eclipsis
Tania Hernández Velasco
Mexico City, Mexico | 2022 | 16 | DCP
United States Premiere
A recently discovered monarch butterfly subspecies (Danaus plexippus eclipsis) possesses strange toxins in its scales that cause powerful sensorial alterations in its predators. Intertwining vivid colors and textures of microscopic footage with the sway of the human body, Eclipsis is a sci-fi speculation of what would happen to human beings if they came across the Eclipsis butterfly in the midst of our painful world.
Diomysus
Emily Elizabeth Morus-Jones
Bangor, UK | 2022 | 5 | DCP
An experimental film where a group of mice (voiced by members of the UK polyamorous community whose identities are masked using puppetry) discuss their experiences of polyamory. Diomysus asks the question, “Are we (the audience) more open to taboo ideas if unconscious bias is eliminated?”
11
Vuk Jevremovic
Jelsa, Croatia | 2022 | 6 | DCP
United States Premiere
Three masters of football perform wonders during a match and score impossible goals. But what goes through their minds just before they take a penalty kick?