FRIDAY 7:00 EXPERIMENTAL - SHORT FILM BLOCK

Director: Brian Padian

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: World

Synopsis: A man makes a series of phone calls across several late nights as he drives home from work.

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Director: Trasparente (Federico Montaresi)

Country of Origin: Italy

Premiere: United States

Synopsis: "...but I’ll be BACK before you are DONE is a found footage video exploring the pure essence of destructive energy. A relentless stream of over 500 explosions, sourced from cartoons, artificial intelligence, video games, films, online archives, and war footage, unfolds in a frantic and chaotic montage. The obsessive repetition of detonations dissolves

the boundaries between reality and simulation, turning the

video into an extreme sensory experience. The work reflects on media manipulation and the spectacularization of violence, subjecting the viewer to a perceptual overload that defies linear interpretation."

Trailer | Website

Director: Dylan Simon

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: World

Synopsis: An experimental video shot and edited on VHS video about gender identity and transformation.

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Director: Jess Anderson

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: TN.

Synopsis: A momentous cliff draws near a pained woman as she makes an offering to her former self.

Trailer

Director: Balca Elif Sagmanli

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Nashville

Synopsis: In an effort to fall asleep, a unique young woman, Audrey, struggles through the entrapment of a dream-like state where she encounters the various challenges of time past, time present, and time future.

Director: Abigail Holland

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: Obsessed with forgiveness, a filmmaker builds a self portrait through two relationships with men and the objects they left behind.

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Director: Masha Vlasova

Country of Origin: United States / Finland

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: Midsummer is a cyanotype photogram film, where the sunlight, along with plants, insects, and water, are all employed in the process of filmmaking. The production of the film began in Finland, during Juhannus, the celebration of the longest day of the year in, when the sun doesn’t set. Blank 16mm film strips are coated in cyanotype emulsion and exposed to sunlight with natural materials, capturing the fleeting moments of nature's cycle. The landscape is both material and collaborator, where its physicality is literally imprinted into the filmic surface. The film explores the ephemeral nature of life, the swift passage of time, and the interplay between humans and the environment. Each frame captures not only the landscape but also the transient and dynamic processes of nature, creating an image that is at once tangible and elusive, grounded in the physical world yet imbued with a sense of mystery.

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Director: Saif Alsaegh

Country of Origin: Iraq | United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: Through dancing, the Motherfucker's Birthday shows the evil of the dictator and the horror people endure under powerful political leaders. The film presents dancing, a universal and uniquely human activity often representing joy, with eerie footage of Saddam and his sons’ torture tools while they dance. Bush also dances with a smirk across the screen while announcing a war that would destabilize a whole region. Contrasting the dancing of these powerful men, who seem disturbingly unconcerned with the lives they impact, with the dancing of the people of Iraq amplifies the fear, control, and horror the general public lives under. Everything becomes a gesture of dance: the torture, the hesitant political humor, and the war.  Everyone becomes a dancer, the dictator and the oppressed performing a distorted version of this human act. Saddam dances, Bush dances, so what's left for the Iraqi people except to join in.

Trailer | Website

Director: Annie Gallup

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: If you believed no one would ever know, what would you be capable of?

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Director: Ben Balcom

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association, the frictions that give way to fracture. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time.

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Director: T.J. Masters

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: World

Synopsis: Taking inspiration from classic genre films made on 16mm, this music video short features one mad scientist's frustrated attempts to break through to his own home-brewed Large Language Model that communicates via sign language (viz., "talking with hands"). The classic and by-now expected twist once the machine gains its sentience does not end well for the protagonist.

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