2025 Odds & Ends Program

FRIDAY 2/21

*Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

7:00 p.m. - Relict: A Phantasmagoria (2023), a magic lantern show by Melissa Ferrari

Relict: A Phantasmagoria is an experimental documentary performed with antique magic lanterns and hand-drawn animation.  Invoking the history of magic lantern phantasmagoria as an exercise in belief and perception, Relict considers the zeitgeist of pseudoscience, fake news, religion, and documentary ethics collapsed within contemporary cryptozoology.  

8:00 p.m. - INTERMISSION 

8:15 p.m. - SHORTS BLOCK 1

Scratch, Paint, Film! (2025) by Cole Arbour, Ella Ginsburg, Elodie Kahrl, Muriel Kahrl, Madeline Lazzara, Violet Racine, and Charlotte Trimble (10:00)

This winter our festival co-directors led a camera-less 16mm workshop at Light House Studio where middle and high school students created looping animations by printing, scratching, painting, collaging, and taping materials onto 16mm film! 

Rafaela (2024) by Anna Brotman-Krass (4:54)

In an interview with Rafaela, a Dominican woman who has been a domestic worker in Madrid for 30 years, she talks about how color and clothing give her the energy to resist exploitative working conditions.

Britney Spears: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (2024) by Sam Gurry (1:24)

"It’s about nothing, about everything, it’s about life." - Jonas Mekas  

"Every time I try to fly I fall without my wings, I feel so small" - Britney Spears

Desire Path (2023) by Sofia Theodore-Pierce (2:27)

Snatches from personal archives compiled during the month of forced slowness following a surgery. The dog died. Her oranges ripened. The horse unbridled. Cantering around Circle A. Reflections on leaving Milwaukee.

Mysterious Purple House (2024) by Z E L D A J U N E (1:00)

A liminal sanctuary where the mundane warps into the mystical.

monolithic tenderness (2024) by Kyle Joseph Petty (7:18)

A tessellating flicker film that seeks to undo the cold, impersonal architecture of the city by dousing it in organic and domestic forms. Featuring a collaged soundtrack of spam phone calls, pulsing synth chords, bagpipe drones, and a lullaby sung to my daughter while in-utero.

Visions of Waves (2023) by Desirée Tolchin (2:41)

Submerged into a stream of life and death, we meet different forms of people, places, and things. All shot on Super 8 film over the course of 3 years.

Poem for three voices (2023) by Lananh Chu (2:44)

The film weaves “Poem for Three Voices” by Bhanu Kapil and dropped frames of a VHS tape of “New York: A Documentary Film” by Ric Burns to comment on the tape’s decaying state and somatic experience of living in New York.

Moonshine Babies (2024) by Arghavan Heydareslam  (5:11)

When I moved to the U.S. from Iran, I felt physically out of place and continually sensed something was missing. The architecture and surroundings heightened my homesickness, leaving me longing for familiar textures, objects, and spaces. During a short visit back home, I took pictures of the things that belonged to me and my family—home furniture, my mom’s clothes, my favorite rugs. These images became fragments of familiarity, the only way I could carry these belongings with me. Their one-dimensionality felt close to how I remembered those spaces, like single frames captured in the mind just before leaving a place forever.

The Instability of Clouds (2024) by Zazie Ray-Trapido (15:14)

An exploration of growth and decay, The Instability of Clouds navigates an ecosystem of comfort, spectacle, and disaster in a Southern California neighborhood.

SATURDAY 2/22

*Doors open at 5:30 p.m.

6:00 p.m. - Nonfiction and Fantasy, an artist talk by Courtney Stephens

How can nonfiction films account for the increasingly fantastical elements of our present reality? How are genre conventions at play in, for example, the news we receive? In a media landscape of slippery truths and authors, how can we go beyond the informational/educational model of documentary film, and enter into the collective dreamlife of the present? Filmmaker Courtney Stephens (Terra Femme, The American Sector, Invention, John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office) will share clips from her own and other films to think collectively about the instability of the present, and how it might generate adaptive cinematic techniques, inviting parafictions and other modes of displacement. Experience is our guide, more than facts. Stephens will share footage and reflections from a work in progress, which deals with fairytales.

7:00 p.m. - INTERMISSION

7:30 p.m. - SHORTS BLOCK 2

Scratch, Paint, Film! (2025) by Elaina Dabney, Horatio Perry, Enrique Rodriguez, and Nyx Spillman (10:00)

This winter our festival co-directors led a camera-less 16mm workshop at Light House Studio where middle and high school students created looping animations by printing, scratching, painting, collaging, and taping materials onto 16mm film! 

spot healing (2024) by Ryan Woodring (8:49)

A software tutorial from the “Image E.R.” YouTube channel in which the host undergoes a series of intense physical and emotional transformations while demonstrating how to “heal” sick images using increasingly experimental methods ranging from miming to machine learning.

What Lies in the Weeds (2024) by Judy Zhao (3:05)

Another Pierrot appears in the weeds, uncomfortable in his own skin and consumed by envy, lust, and anger toward the harmonious Columbine and the Harlequin. Overwhelmed by his emotions, he fails to keep his composure.

appendaged (2024) by Alex Christie (2:13)

appendaged is an act of translation and reanimation. The images you see are generated by homemade analog circuits—circuits I typically build for synthesizing sound—fed into CRT televisions. These circuits speak in modes we usually listen to, but in this case they breathe new visual life into forgotten bodies. Connections form and functions emerge between image and image, image and sound, and sound and sound.

Invisible World (2023) Kym McDaniel (4:47)

This film is a record of my introduction to healthcare in the state of Utah. My processing of the appointment and consequential aftermath as a video object serves as a reclamation and assertion for understanding disability and the physical world otherwise.

Gentle Fiddling (2024) by Darren Douglas Floyd (2:31)

Here remains a kind of man. A violence was worked upon his body by cancer and its treatments. He is not himself.

Exit Danish Flats (2023) by Natasha Woods (8:45)

Exit Danish Flats explores friendship and speculative futures in the desert through a variety of “translations” of the space. An ephemeral landscape film that takes place in the former ghost town, Cisco, Utah, centering the sole resident, Eileen Muza, and their visitors Gosha Ananchev and Lucio Arellano.

The Wood Thrush and the Bobwhite Quail (2024), by Kevin Jerome Everson (4:35)

Birdwatchers in Washington D.C. and in Tennessee are summoned by Glenn Goins and George Clinton.

NBA hoops #205 (2024) by Jules Biller (1:28)

A colorful exploration of American passive viewership, true crime media, basketball, and mixed media animation.

Tiger Lily Mountain Pass (2024) by Nate King (5:18)

Tiger Lily Mountain Pass is a hand drawn animation inspired by Nate King's time spent in the forests of Appalachia. King animates with a combination of pencil, paper and digital processes, weaving together a dreamlike poem that tells a story of ecstasy, meditation, and heartache.

Braided Sand (2024) by Tracy Abbott Szatan (15:00)

What if the rock could be a lens? Filmed at a sand mine, glass factory and nanotech laboratory, Braided Sand contemplates the geologic materiality of imaging and communication technologies to highlight human embeddedness in deep time.

9:00 p.m. - Closing Party at Visible Records

Please join us as we celebrate the close of our festival!

1740 Broadway St, Charlottesville, VA 22902