Prismatic Ground

WAVE ∞
the future is still bigger than the past

Watch from anywhere for free, May 8-12.

Homing
Tamer Hassan
34 min

Centuries prior to the colonization of the Americas, Purple Martins began to nest in gourds that people hung to store food and water and became companion species for many tribes. The birds that European settlers brought with them drove Purple Martins out of their wild habitats so that now they can only nest in birdhouses that people build to prevent their extinction. Without dialogue or narration, Homing follows the migration of Purple Martins from the Amazon to the Great Lakes, between the conservationists who study them and to the houses they are dependent on for survival. —Tamer Hassan

Entrance Wounds
Calum Walter
18 min

A meditation on the image and the bullet.

Entrance Wounds considers the modern challenge of trying to unsee an image. The film sifts through moments of the everyday, imagining a world where afterimages of disaster drift in near-transparency over the present. —Calum Walter

Camera Test (King Cadbury)
Charlie Shackleton
7 min

A documentary readymade about family lore and chocolate biscuits. —Charlie Shackleton

Listening In, Resounding Out
Eislow Johnson & Dominic Bonelli
11 min

Through the ears of an acoustic engineer, the film explores how in the near silence of the anechoic chamber, listening is a straining toward understanding and connection. It engages with cinema as a body — one given presence and depth through sound — and a body as a resounding instrument, which listens to its own vibratory depths and amplifies its feedback. —Dominic Bonelli, Eislow Johnson

Ma’loul Celebrates Its Destruction
Michel Khleifi
30 min

CINEMATEK restoration co-presented by Bidoun

Ma'loul is a Palestinian village in Galilee which was destroyed by the Israeli armed forces in 1948. Its inhabitants were driven out and expropriated. All that remains of the village are two churches and a mosque, the last visible traces for travellers between Haifa and Nazareth. Over the years, they too disappeared, under a forest planted in memory of the victims of Nazism. The Israeli authorities thus wiped off the map hundreds of Arab villages.

But the former inhabitants of Ma'loul have created a new tradition: that of going for a picnic one day a year on the site of their destroyed village, paradoxically on the day of the independence of the State of Israel. It is the day of the picnic that we filmed; the encounter with a stone, a window, a wall, an olive or a pomegranate tree... hidden under the woods. A peasant notes among the young pines certain uncertain landmarks of his lost universe. A family comments with a naive purity on the mural fresco of their village, painted according to traces from their memory. As required by the official Israeli curriculum, a teacher explains to his Arab students the history of the creation of the State of Israel… These are elements of reality that confront each other and make up the film; they allow us to pose a new dimension to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: that of time. —Michel Khleifi

121280 Ritual
Antoinetta Angelidi, Rea Walldén
16 min

The naked body of the pregnant mother. The voice of the daughter. Inside-outside. A song to life.

THE MOTHER (fragment of a text by Angelidi, which accompanied the film at its first screenings): The twelfth day of the twelfth month of the year nineteen-eighty was the day before I gave birth to my second child, my son. I. Naked. To come to terms with my fear, I felt the desire to immerse myself into black water, to re-emerge and cuddle my belly. A remembering forgetfulness that to die giving birth is like being born dying.

THE DAUGHTER (fragment from the text by Walldén, which is spoken in the film): I return to my second self. Her smell. Mine. The centre I immerse in. Safety is a smell. And I rest. Calmness. The touch. In my head the buzz stops. In her smell, I rest.

—Antoinetta Angelidi, Rea Walldén

Dau:añcut (Moving Along Image)
Adam Piron
15 min

In 2014, an unknown man in Ukraine tattooed a portrait of a relative of a filmmaker in his traditional Native American regalia. Stitched together from footage of the search for this man, the film interrogates what happens when the control of an image is lost and the time’s circular ironies. —Adam Piron

at the bamboo green
Xiaolu Wang
11 min

A one take recording of a family's visit to the bamboo green at the foot of the Helan Mountains.
—Xiaolu Wang

Bleared eyes of blue glass
PARK Kyjuae
9 min

The "bleared eyes of blue glass" in the title of this experimental short expand on a verbal image from Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves, considered the most experimental among the 20th-century British writer's literary works, from which the young filmmaker took inspiration for his film, borrowing passages and visions to explain his own understanding of what cinema is. A film that plays with water - precisely - and light, and yet in a very dark b&w lit up by rare flashes of colour, making a journey in the night in which the shadow of a man gradually acquires substance. —PARK Kyujae

Even God
Liz Roberts
12 min

All personal archival VHS engaging with a core question of artists in times of chaos: who owns a memory and what is its value? A record of the queer Midwest. Drugs, sex, love, friendship, and a failed Los Angeles movie deal. —Liz Roberts

Map to the Sirens
Demetrius Antonio Lewis
14 min

By way of Atlanta, Georgia’s railway, oral histories from local rideshare drivers with urban landscapes uncover the post-industrial American South and its fraught history with labor and space.
—Demetrius Antonio Lewis

Hinkelten
Svetlana Romanova
18 min

Constructed out of personal poems and notes, xиӈкэлтэн poses questions about image production's intersection with creation of narratives, that are embedded now in our perception of contemporaneity and manifest themselves in our performances of ideas and feelings like love. Positioned in the Yakutian Arctic, this visual essay invites the viewer to ask vital questions in relation to peripheral discourse that seems to be inseparable in relation to the etymology of the word itself - Arctic, and how does the western ontologies in relation to intimacy are fitting in immediate Yakutian realities. —Svetlana Romanova