Desire, like memory, can be a fickle thing, subject to quicksilver changes in mood and taste or even the chemical transformations brought on by illness and aging. The short films in this program, about love and loss, fear and rejection, are hybrids of fiction and nonfiction because, well, that’s life.
Prelude. 2025. USA. Directed by Jen DeNike. 6 min. World premiere.
An elegy told in the written letters of three women, family photographs, and images of the lush Scottish landscape, Prelude fixes in celluloid what is lost in memory. Facing her mother’s worsening dementia, the artist Jen DeNike performs a tender mercy by reuniting her, in spirit, with the queer lover with whom she spent an erotic afternoon so long ago.
Blue. 2024. Romania/Portugal/Hungary/Belgium. Directed by Ana Vîjdea. In Romanian, French; English subtitles. 20 min. North American premiere.
Before she became one of Filmmaker magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Cinema in 2017, Ana Vîjdea was a student of the Romanian documentarian Andrei Ujicǎ (TWST: Things We Said Today), who turned her on to making nonfiction and hybrid cinema. Vîjdea’s latest short, Blue, is the claustrophobic portrait of a family smothered by love, featuring Rodica, a Romanian mother who struggles to make ends meet in Belgium and who always knows what’s best for her teenage children.
Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday. 2025. USA. Directed by Isaiah Davis. 13 min. World premiere.
In the paintings, sculptures, and video projections of his first solo exhibition, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, at Participant Inc. in 2021, Isaiah Davis used leather, metal, and reclaimed wood, as well as tropes from horrorcore and post punk, to explore themes of machismo, violence, and fetishism. A study on Black masculinity in the Bronx, Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday is his new theatrical reworking of two installations from that show, White American Flag and Yesterday by Boyz II Men, Performed by C.L.I.T.
Freak. 2024. USA. Directed by Claire Barnett. 14 min. US premiere.
Shot in a faux vérité camcorder style that seems to tremble with unease, Freak peers in on a pair of young lovers as they test their faithfulness with an almost religious intensity. What goes on in the privacy of someone else’s bedroom should perhaps be left to the imagination, but Claire Barnett’s voyeuristic camera lets us in on some dirty little secrets.
School of the Dead. 2025. USA. Directed by Hannah Gross. 33 min. World premiere.
Actor and theater artist Hannah Gross (The Mountain, Mindhunter) makes her directing debut with this intimate, elliptical hybrid film starring the documentarian Sierra Pettengill (RIOTSVILLE, USA). About their collaboration they observe, “‘We Need a Dead(wo)man to Begin.’ Thus opens the first section of Helene Cixous’ guide to writing. It is an injunction heeded in School of the Dead: a story taught by Sierra’s mother, Hannah’s grandmother, the writer Clarice Lispector, performance artist Mary Overlie, and one of the world’s largest reserves of precambrian fossils. School of the Dead was written and filmed collaboratively in Special Areas 2, Alberta, Canada. Sierra is an outsider here. Her presence explained through loss; grief’s liminal space made literal.”
Program 86 min.