I first encountered this film about a year ago, and I’ve carried it with me ever since. It is a reflective journey, but unfolds as a real time inquiry and painful desire for understanding. I, too, have a younger sister who endures pain I’ll never fully comprehend; this delicate and sincere collaboration between brother and sister restores my soul while leaving me in a puddle of tears. An act of love that cannot be missed.

Art as memory and cinematic collaborations across time? Yes, please! This experimental documentary consists of a conversation between the filmmaker and their great uncle, played over recovered footage shot in NY in the late 1960s. Yet the filmmaker takes it a step further, adding in new sound design and contemporary recreations of the recovered footage. A lovely exploration of how art evolves through time and connects generations.

Returning home after many years can often feel like a series of contradictions: it can be beautiful and painful, full of warmth and disappointment, and leave you nostalgic while also feeling lost. This deceptively simple film collects all of these emotions and more via a long awaited journey to a North Dakota farmhouse, now with an unmistakable vacancy from lost grandparents. But threading up the sun dappled 8mm home movies and projecting them on the farmhouse at night leads the filmmaker and their mother towards an indescribable contentment of life and what we share in the present.

When commercial cinema functions as an opiate for the masses and promises that life will turn out like a musical, how do we reconcile that with the realities we face day to day? This truly inspired piece uses the musical form and applies it to a socially conscious depiction of someone trapped in the gig economy. This film strikes the perfect balance between ebullient musical and biting social commentary, resulting in unforgettable results.

I have a personal obsession with playful, trickster cinema that mixes media to create new and exciting textures. This short “adapts” the 1952 French surrealist novel Mount Analogue by creating a 3D computer rendering of the titular mountain from the mysterious island. The exploration of these digital crevices is further enhanced by printing these images on 16mm film stock, then converted back to digital for our enjoyment.