The Garden Sees Fire
Director: Kiera Faber
Country of Origin: United States
Premiere: Tennessee
Synopsis: "A mystical tale of cloaked identities, systemic traumas, and insatiable consumption: The ecology burns, reclaiming its environs.This visionary, artist driven analogue stop-frame animation synchronously incorporates buried and hand painted 16mm film frame-by-frame with drawing and armatured puppet animations; creating a surreal disorienting world-within-a-world."
Guy Playing a Saxaphone
Director: Josh Raby
Country of Origin: United States
Premiere: World
Synopsis: A sad man goes to a lonely river to face the music. He didn't count on it being so literal.
Happy Anniversary
Director: Munjal Yagnik
Country of Origin: United States
Premiere: Tennessee
Synopsis: On their anniversary night, Sarah and Chris—an interracial couple—find their celebration disrupted when their rideshare driver’s small talk becomes an intrusive interrogation of Chris’s immigrant identity. As Chris tries to maintain his composure while bearing the weight of being othered, Sarah simmers in discomfort. The film is an intimate look at how identity and perception collide in everyday spaces.
Heirlooms
Director: Dan Abramovici
Country of Origin: United States / Canada
Premiere: Tennessee
Synopsis: Jaime’s quest for healing leads her to restore a family heirloom. But what begins as a therapeutic project, soon spirals into a battle against an ancient evil that has plagued her bloodline for generations.
Henry and the Horrible Thing
Director: Phynley Joel
Country of Origin: United States
Synopsis: The Horrible Thing eats the worst children in town, and Henry is a prime candidate.... but no matter how many times he is warned - Henry Hobbs is not afraid of the Horrible Thing.
Website
How to Make Yourself Miserable
Director: Elizabeth Katz
Country of Origin: United States
Premiere: Tennessee
Synopsis: A woman takes dating advice from her own Toxic Mind—an enthusiastic self-help guru determined to make her miserable.
I Was There
Director: Kamila Kuc
Country of Origin: Poland, UK, USA
Premiere: Tennessee
Synopsis: A haunting exploration of familial bonds, intergenerational memory, and the enduring impact of shared narratives. Filmmaker Kamila Kuc steps into the emotional stream of inherited family history as the lines between documentary, testimony, and fiction blur. (A special thank you to DELERE PRESS BOOK, If Loss Were a a Currency https://www.delerepress.com/books/iflosswereacurrency)
It’s a Wonderful Night of the Living Dead
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.
Lady Puritan
Director: Gustine Füdickar, Justin Streichman
Country of Origin: United States
Synopsis: As dream life bleeds into waking reality, a woman haunted by her Puritan ancestor must confront the terror buried deep within her bloodline.
Through ritual and violent trial of the body, she fractures the veil between worlds and is thrown into a fight for her life.
Lady Puritan is a surreal psychological meditation on ancestral trauma and the intimate horror of what we are born carrying. Set against the shadow of American Puritanism, the film explores the tension between repression and embodied desire.
Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks)
Director: Louise Flaherty
Country of Origin: Canada
Premiere: Tennessee
Synopsis: Two young women, out for a walk on the tundra, follow a trail of colourful stones left on the ground -- but it leads them to danger. They become trapped in the lair of the Mangittatuarjuk, the Gnawer of Rocks. The young women are terrified when they realize what the monster has been doing. The women and their village must use the teachings of their elders to defeat the monster.
Trailer | Website
MurderBird
Director: Barrett Lesly Shuler
Country of Origin: United States
Premiere: Tennessee
Synopsis: In an attempt to save his relationship a man buys his girlfriend a rare exotic bird for her birthday. After the couple develops a deep emotional bond with the bird, its true colors begin to emerge.
Trailer password: mb | Website
Museum of Regret
Director: Skye Braband
Country of Origin: United States
Premiere: Tennessee
Synopsis: A television repairman makes a repair.
Next In Line
Director: Danny Dolan
Country of Origin: United States
Premiere: Tennessee
Synopsis: After losing out on the job of a lifetime, a jaded choreographer's escape to the desert is hijacked by an unhinged and malicious rival.
NO SWIMMING
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.
The Oldest
Director: Cathlin McCullough
Country of Origin: United States
Premiere: Tennessee
Synopsis: 12-year-old Kate longs to escape her lonely reality as the oldest of 5 under the shadow of her father's addiction in this coming-of-age story set in late 80s rural Iowa. “The Oldest” focuses on the inner life of a girl forced to grow up too fast and highlights the gulf of difference between the heaviness of home life and the freedom of just being a kid.
On the Way Out of Time
Director: Steven Palassis
Country of Origin: United States
Premiere: World
Synopsis: A glimpse into the hypervigilant mind.
Painting Cathedral Rock
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.