Film Festival

Bérénice is 18’ today.
She has just moved in on her own appartment for the
first time, but confronting solitude makes her anxious.
Following the guidance of her therapist, she will redesign
and recreate her inner space, and learn to live alone in
harmony.

A visual love letter in motion, this dance animation explores the joy, spontaneity, and head-spinning excitement of love’s first spark.

Nepenthe is a surreal dance film exploring how movement can reclaim memory. Told entirely through dance, the film follows two women drifting through memories frozen in time as they attempt to rewrite the emotional past from a place of empowerment.

Moving between suspended domestic worlds, dreamlike forests and underground dance spaces, their journey transforms painful memories into spaces of connection, freedom and expression.

Inspired by the mythical Greek remedy said to soften sorrow, Nepenthe explores dance as survival, release and reinvention, tracing how female friendship and chosen family can help reshape the stories that once defined us.

Recall | Redial | Revisit | Revolve

Featuring dancer Erin O’Rourke, Revolve is an abstract narrative that explores the notions of cyclism, in which the perspective is that time, history, or events are cyclical rather than linear, emphasising the recurrence of patterns, cycles, or events that occur over time.

Cast: Erin O’Rourke
Cinematographer: Saroj Kumar Chauhan
Choreographer, Director, Editor, Costumier: Claire Marshall
Sound recording: Hannah Millar. Sound Mix: Rosco Audio

As daylight falls, La Fée Électricité (The Goddess of Electricity) awakens beneath Paris, charged to bring light to the streets above. As she moves, she galvanises her power and emerges onto the streets of Paris, illuminating the city with electricity.
By dawn having danced all night, her electric powers are overwhelmed by the daylight. By morning, her powers are extinguished.

This is a short dance film filmed on location in Paris, featuring Royal Ballet soloist, Viola Pantuso. The story is built on the concept of La Fée Électricité – the personification of electricity in France in the late 1800s, as a goddess, or fairy, who brought light and power to the people and streets.

This screen-dance explores themes of becoming and making terms with oneself. A reflectino of Haley Heynderickx’s song Gemini- a young woman travels through her own internal landscape to emerge embracing her shadow and unclouded by self doubt.

Two dancers navigate an empty space and leave their mark.

FRAMES: Perception and the framing of women.

FRAMES explores the surveillance, scrutiny, and framing of women in a post-feminist context as it works to dismantle or disaggregate the coherent body so that a whole person (a woman) becomes dissected, fragmented into a composite of datasets.

FRAMES unfolds in a 1:1 aspect (square) ratio with four frame-like windows unfolding simultaneously within the larger frame.
Including notions of peer-surveillance and self-surveillance,

FRAMES also draws on notions of the Johari window (Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955) in so much as:

– What we know about ourselves that is known to others.
– What we know about ourselves that is unknown to others.
– What we don’t know about ourselves that is known to others.
– What we don’t know about ourselves is unknown to others.

FRAMES features dancer Lucy Hood, cinematography by Jason Millhouse and Carolyn Hanlon, and is choreographed, directed, and edited by Claire Marshall.

FRAMES was supported by Brisbane City Council’s Creative Sparks Funding.

HOLD takes JG Ballard’s The Drowned World as its starting point. In the film we witness two strangers navigate a submerged landscape, whilst sharing a remnant from a world lost.

Academy Award-nominee Abigail Breslin presents:
The Liars of Black Mountain Road.

When a couple runs over a stranger’s dog, they compete for the moral high ground at any cost.

On Christmas Eve, Dejair, a former resistance fighter against the military dictatorship, gathers with his family in the backyard. A water gun gift leads Dejair to denounce the absurdity of giving a child a weapon.

The Clifford family hopes to start a new life by selling their dilapidated, impoverished farm. But when the discovery of an endangered bird on the property threatens to collapse the sale, the son Andy must decide whether to make the bird’s presence known or to shoot, shovel, and shut up.

On a spring day, an elderly man who faithfully visits his late wife’s grave each week to tend her flowers suddenly becomes aware of a middle-aged woman mourning her recently deceased husband nearby in the same cemetery.
In the quiet of the graves, fleeting glances and brief greetings ignite a spark of hope for renewal in the old man’s heart…

A short documentary about the importance of Native American Language Revitalization shot in Milwaukee, Keshena and Bjorklunden with Indigenous Nations Poets

Beyond Our Senses explores the intersection between life and perceptions. Each spring, thousands of Bank Swallows return to the Lake Michigan bluffs to build colonies, mate, and raise their young. Guided by extraordinary perceptions like tetrachromatic vision, magnetic senses, and aerial mastery, they navigate predators, rivals, and the relentless demands of survival in a hidden world beyond human perception.

“Cream City” is a moody vibes experimental short that explores the multiverse concept by applying mirror and symmetry effects on aerial footage of the Milwaukee skyline.
The project was shot over a period of six years and features music by the David Roy Collective

A labyrinth is an ancient walking path that has been known to the human race for over 4000 years. They have taken the form of rock carvings, paintings inscriptions and tiles.
Door County was the home of the first known stone labyrinths in North America. They were created by the Scandinavian immigrants in the 1800’s for good luck and to trap any trolls to insure a bountiful fishing haul.
Door County continues the tradition of labyrinth building.The designs are varied and the builders have been attracted to the natural beauty and the power of the sacred land.
This film interviews the architects, dreamers and facilitators of the unique Door Peninsula labyrinths that have emerged again at a time when we need a more balanced and reflective way of living.

The uprooted, the American dream, the thick-and-sweet sauce, and an empty dining hall—too much for any one person to face and survive. It is easier to demolish a closed restaurant. Inspired by Robert Nelson’s Oh Dem Watermelons and its meditation on race and food, this video collage combines cutouts, reenactments, found footage, and fragments of earlier films to reconstruct personal and collective memory while reflecting on the immigrant experience through the Americanization of food.

TBA

AEON is a meditation on time ; on the way things slowly shift, erode, and transform even when they seem still. Inspired by Cyprus’ landscapes, the film explores the illusion of permanence. Rocks may look immovable but they are constantly changing by wind, water, and time. AEON reflects on our own transformations: the ones we don’t always see but feel deep within. It is a visual poetry on slowness, the stillness before a shift, the beauty in decay. AEON is a reflection on how nothing truly stays the same, and how that, in itself, can be a source of power and grace.

HOLD takes JG Ballard’s The Drowned World as its starting point. In the film we witness two strangers navigate a submerged landscape, whilst sharing a remnant from a world lost.

TBA

Booker is far from home but close to friends and mentors as he hosts an exuberant party, but when the noise of the party dies down and the last guests go home a listlessness returns to him. Only the next morning, while playing his trumpet, does he find his place in the stillness of the soft early light.

This film is so simple and understated, I’d hate to ruin it in a 50 word synopsis. Can you use the brief logline instead: “Late into his career, an elderly drummer faces getting older.

my skin” is a visual representation of grief’s impact; this film works to illustrate the tumult that goes hand in hand with processing loss and is curated to portray feelings of longing, guilt, and ultimately acceptance.

An aging punk, weighed down needing to write an obituary, while writing they question the peculiar form of biographical storytelling known as an obituary and its formalities. 

A Behind-The-Scenes (BTS) Photographer arrives on set and encounters the 1st Assistant Director (AD) in crisis: the U-Haul carrying equipment is stuck in traffic. Following the 1st AD inside, they find the camera crew is having difficulty assembling the camera, with the Director of Photography out sick, the Grip & Electric team’s equipment missing, and the Sound team’s equipment defective. Desperate, the director decides to film the project in first-person point of view with the BTS Photographer’s camera. At long last, everyone assembles outside for the first shot, just in time for the camera to crash. 

A young man grapples with trauma from his past while his mother is dying in the present. He must unpack his past in order to move forward and say goodbye.

TBA

In a dystopian world where emotions can be erased by the drug “Zero,” Mo-hyeon turns to chemical numbness after a breakup. When unavoidable moments disrupt his detachment, he must choose between safely feeling nothing and reopening himself to the pain and beauty of authentic connection.

Deity is an animated parable that raises generational trauma to the level of mythology. Set in pagan-era Europe, the film explores the overlapping experiences of a divine bloodline modeled after the filmmaker’s real world family. The story follows the filmmaker’s father as his character struggles to overcome his traumatic past to save himself and others from destruction. Caught within a cycle of familial trauma, he seeks solace in Christianity, but his religious fanaticism brings harm to his family as a result.

Shot frame-by-frame on a multiplane animation stand, the film’s use of silhouettes evokes the work of German animation pioneer Lotte Reinger and pre-cinema. Its presentation emulates that of a shadow play lost to time, only to be unearthed like the traumatic past of the individuals it represents. For the filmmaker, Deity is semi-autobiographical, drawing on the trauma she experienced as a trans woman raised in a hyper-conservative household and contextualizing it within her family’s broader history.

TBA

A theater director and young playwright manifest a new, more extreme intimacy, where memories and reality blur, when one of them produces a play that jeopardizes their unspoken agreement to deny their desire for one another.

Nervous Ravenous Hunger is a film about the intimacy and chemistry between two people who have been circling each other for too long. It’s a “will they, won’t they” that jumps through time between crucial moments of connection and miscommunication between our two protagonists. It’s about what two people don’t say to each other, a look shared across a crowded room, and how intimacy gets twisted.

When a young man hides the truth about his lottery ticket winnings from his friend, conflicts erupts.