Program 6
curated by Samuel Breslin
Sunday, April 13, 2025 @ 5pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 48 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
Spinning
Rennie Taylor
2019 | 2 minutes | Canada | Super 8 | color | silent
A self-portrait performance capturing a symphony of perfect chaos. Spinning is inspired by the dizzying camera movements exemplified in John Porter's Cinefuge 4 (1980), and the avant-garde cemetery scene in Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966). -RT
This Person
Nora Rosenthal
2022 | 5 minutes | Canada | 16mm | color | sound
A film poem about a private person and their lover, who keeps getting distracted trying to reconcile the cognitive dissonances of desire under capitalism. -NR
Zwillinge
Luisa Greenfield
2024 | 11 minutes | Germany | 16mm | color | sound
A well-known new music composer sends encouraging words to radical young filmmakers and writes a piece based on the Zodiac for wind-up music box. Filmed on 16mm with direct sound, Zwillinge draws on rituals of memorial and repetition to reflect on the degradation of institutions through political influence. -LG
birthday song
Erica Sheu/徐璐
2021 | 4 minutes | USA/Taiwan | 16mm | color | sound
Notes for a film about birthday are deconstructed, cropped and stuck to clear film leaders to project in loops. As if an endless umbilical cord pulling out from a womb, this "interior scroll" is filled with unrecognizable writing that becomes simply moving images continuing to advance. -ES
recortes
Kimberly Forero-Arnías
2023 | 11 minutes | USA/Colombia | 16mm | color | sound
Field journal entries, both mine and of others, are ground together to explore what is filtered and what remains as families of fauna and flora move from one environment to another. -KFA
a shifting pattern
Isaac Sherman
2024 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
A collected geography of local flowers; appearing, disappearing, reappearing. Afterimage becomes before-image, physiology and pathology at play. An ode to the neighborhood, an entrapment that offers small moments for escape. The will to walk aimlessly is rejuvenated as stasis turns to movement and back again. -IS
Alphabet
Eli Noyes
1966 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | sound
Alphabet is a representational romp through the letters of the alphabet, as the artist takes us through a series of images, changing at his will and at the literal tips of his fingers, evident in the indelible ink marks made for us on screen.
Sandman
Eli Noyes
1973 | 4 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
A short film animated entirely with sand.
Rennie Taylor is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. His practice focuses on the everyday with an emphasis on nostalgic signs and symbols found in popular culture. Engaging in the practices of photography, filmmaking, animation, collage and illustration he explores themes of consumerism, the handmade and obsolescence. His short experimental Super 8 films and videos have been screened across Canada and Internationally.
Nora Rosenthal is a writer, filmmaker, and artist whose work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the NFB, and the Ontario Council for the Arts. She has attended the RIDM Talent Lab, participated in the Emerging Artist Network at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, the Momus Emerging Critics Residency in Montreal, and the 2025 Early Career Banff Artist in Residence program. Formerly the Arts and Culture Editor at Cult MTL, her writing has appeared in Momus, MUBI’s Notebook, The Editorial Magazine and Documentary Magazine. Her short film Nine Easy Dances played at Visions du Réel, Dokufest Kosovo, DOK Leipzig, the RIDM, and others, garnering her two Best Director awards. The film was nominated for Best Short Documentary by the International Documentary Association in 2024. She continues to work with researchers at York University, and as a filmmaker-mentor with Wapikoni Mobile.
Luisa Greenfield is a Berlin-based visual artist working predominantly with analog film and essay writing. She holds a PhD in Art and Media. Her practice-based research considers film a form of thought that can offer resistance against an accelerated, future-oriented perception of history. Her recent 16mm film works, which she screens internationally, come from a close study of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s films. She is an active member of the LaborBerlin analog film collective, a co-editor of the book Film in the Present Tense (Berlin: Archive Books, 2020), and an essay contributor to books and journals on film and artistic research.
Erica Sheu/徐璐 makes short films, expanded cinema, and installations with small-gauge celluloid film. Her short films explore the synesthetic qualities of memory, guided by feelings and emotions. The themes include languages, diary films, pure cinema, cathartic handwriting, cross-generational memories, Taiwanese history, and identity politics.
Kimberly Forero-Arnías (she/ella) is an experimental animator whose work has screened across the United States as well as internationally at festivals including Rotterdam, Ann Arbor, Images Festival and the Edinburgh International Film Festival. She is the recipient of various awards including the SMFA Traveling Fellowship, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and the Film Studies Center Fellowship at Harvard.
Isaac Sherman is a filmmaker, projectionist, composer and performer currently living in Los Angeles, California. His film work is informed by direct engagement with the medium; dissecting frames, manipulating and obscuring the lens, rephotographing, and hand processing. He focuses largely on his immediate surroundings, preferring subjects and topics that feel inherently close. His work has been exhibited at festivals including Prismatic Ground, Engauge Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Crossroads, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival and more.
An acclaimed animator, Eli Noyes, Jr. (October 18, 1942–March 23, 2024) directed 10 animated films and made creative contributions to 11 television series. He is known for his film Clay or the Origin of the Species (1964), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film and established claymation as a medium. Noyes is also recognized for his artistic contribution to the acclaimed TV series Sesame Street.