Films in Competition 5

  • Dear, When I Met You
  • Born Days - How to Disappear
  • Empaths & Apples
  • Back To Suburbia
  • Kyubabe
  • Universe Moves So Fast
  • Universe of Language
  • Amaranth
  • New Water Music
  • HAPPY DOOM
  • Ghost Song
  • Dreams

Showings

Description


Sponsor

Metro Times

 

Education Partner

Washtenaw Community College Digital Media Arts Department

Community Partner
EMU Campus Life

 

 

Dear, When I Met You

Craig Smith
Longmont, CO | 2023 | 6 | DCP
World Premiere

Dear, When I Met You is a meditation on how art can be both ephemeral and immortal at the same time. The film begins with a badly deteriorating 1928 musical short and reworks it into something new by celebrating the beauty of the original film’s aging.

 
Born Days: How to Disappear

Louis Morton
Milwaukee, WI | 2023 | 4 | digital file
World Premiere

Falling rain on a window transforms into scenes of fleeting thoughts and loosely grasped memories. This music video was inspired by long walks along Lake Michigan and dark rainy winter nights in the Midwest of the US.

 
Empaths & Apples

Kelli Reilly
Los Angeles, CA | 2023 | 4 | digital file

The official music video for Empaths & Apples by River Harmony features the surreal and toxic world of Adam and Eve.

 
Back To Suburbia

Elliot Sheedy
Ribeira Grande, São Miguel & Azores, Portugal | 2023 | 4 | digital file
World Premiere

Elliot Sheedy performs the song “Back To Suburbia” while advertisement memories flood into the temples of all mesmerized viewers. The landscape of American consumerism reveals itself for what it is: a multifaceted tool for breeding soldiers and stunting spiritual development.

 
Kyubabe

Ben Willis
Dearborn, MI | 2022 | 3 | digital file

Our hero, Throwaway, faces yet another challenge.

 
Universe Moves So Fast

Providence, RI and Boston, MA | 2023 | 4 | digital file
World Premiere

Music video for the band Occurence, created by cutting up sequences from 35 and 70mm trailers and projecting them onto movable screens and walls of the studio. Our goal was to create a world that looks like 3D motion graphics without using 3D digital techniques.

 

Universe of Language

Guangli Liu &, Bai Li
Paris, France | 2022 | 4 | digital file
North American Premiere
The nearly 150-year-old custom of using body language to initiate trades among traders was officially put to rest in 2021 with the closing of the Chicago Stock Exchange’s trading floor, an event that became a symbol of an entire financial era. Since the dawn of civilization, the relationship between hands and numbers has been ingrained in our trading culture. Even today, many parts of China still bargain in public using the “hand in the sleeve” technique. When the idea of “Universe of Language” takes on the sense of trading gestures and draws on the discussion of dimensionality in fractal mathematics, it ends up providing a new formula of visual expression to describe how we use our body to measure and communicate the world through mathematics.

 
Amaranth

Justin Black
Toronto, ON, Canada | 2023 | 4 | digital file
World Premiere

Made in collaboration with composer Gayle Young and sculptor Reinhard Reitzenstein, Amaranth is a hybrid music and film work exploring the implications of deep ecology, encouraging the viewer to step outside of the default anthropocentric perspective and into a continuum of experience in which all beings have equal value.

 
New Water Music

Dan Rule
New Orleans, LA | 2023 | 4 | digital file
United States Premiere

A cast of strange plants and flowers play, help, and devour each other over an original music composition by Yotam Haber.

 
Happy Doom

Billy Roisz
Vienna, Austria | 2022 | 4 | DCP
North American Premiere

Happy Doom is an audiovisual poem, an ode to color intoxication and vertigo. The screen: a vibrating membrane that simultaneously spits and swallows colors and noisy beats—a hypnotic deformed circumpolar psychedelic short trip.

 
Ghost Song

Joseph Keckler & M. Sharkey
Brooklyn, NY | 2022 | 6 | digital file

A narrator reveals the details of a mysterious, transformative encounter that took place in a remote locale.

 
Dreams

Samantha Scafiddi
Hudson, NY | 2023 | 4 | digital file

A visual journey of tongue-in-cheek commentary and provocative storytelling about humanity’s route to self-destruction through the eyes of the moon.