SATURDAY 2:30 // EXPERIMENTAL

Director: Jackson Coates

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: Benji needs his phone to fall asleep.

Trailer | Website

Director: Izzy Leung

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Nashville

Synopsis: In this docu-fiction short, a group of community theater actors create a casino through a sense-memory workshop and explore the workshop’s effect on their own histories, imaginations, and performances.

Trailer | Website

Director: Ryley O'Byrne

Country of Origin: Canada

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: What are we without our dreams? What do machines become with them? Dream Synth™ is a speculative meta documentary contemplating the transcendental nature of consciousness within our increasingly techno-mediated society — and a curious archive of our blooming relationship with Artificial Intelligence.

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Director: Josh Weissbach

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: a lifetime of surgeries continues with an upgrade in battery life and a downgrade in scar tissue when the filmmaker has his original pacemaker replaced after sixteen years.

Trailer | Website

Director: John Bell, Dan Bell

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: It’s a not-so-wonderful life for George Bailey when a horde of flesh-eating ghouls come to town on Christmas Eve. Through the use of traditional rotoscoping and compositing techniques, It’s a Wonderful Life and Night of the Living Dead (both in the public domain) have been woven together to create this twisted love letter to the original films.

Trailer | Website

Director: Andrea Dratch, Andy Carrasco

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: World

Synopsis: Echo - curious and vibrant - and Silence - unconscious and subjugated - embody the living and dying essences of one soul. In exploring the rules placed around living in a physical body, they strip away layer upon layer of conditioned expectations, revealing what a momentous yet worthwhile undertaking living - really living - is. Embracing the unity of these twin halves allows the soul to discard the constraints of a systemically fearful society and swim down to the limitless unknown, the deep end of life itself.

Trailer

Director: Steven Palassis

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: World

Synopsis: A glimpse into the hypervigilant mind.

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Director: Mel Day

Country of Origin: Canada

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: Painting Cathedral Rock, is a meditative experimental work in which painting, performance, and film converge to explore landscape, ritual, colonialism, and the fragile boundaries between spectacle, spirituality, and perception.

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Director: Meg Cook

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: Patch draws inspiration from textiles, translating woven patterns into animated movement. Using cut paper, it explores pattern, movement, and play, echoing the tactile qualities of textile-making. The animation unfolds like a living fabric—shapes shifting, interlocking, and unraveling in continuous transformation.

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