Best Before(NaN)

Dinner(en)

What are one week films? They're an assignment we do our first week back at CalArts, designed to dust off cobwebs by throwing us straight into the deep end. Our class theme was "square," and we had a lot of fun playing around with compositions inspired by East Asian graphic design.

Regulars(en)

Regulars invites you into the eclectic, unique and personal stories of the characters who frequent the local pub, whilst exploring how a place can become a hub of connection, community and comfort.

Down To The Bone(en)

Little Michael has vicious allergies, and when babysitter Meredith arrives for a night of no-nonsense, he's swiftly dispatched to the yard...where his delicate condition takes a turn for the worse.

It’s Nice in Here(en)

A fragmented portrait of a moment, a person, and a place, seen through the subjective memories of a young Black girl, Imani, and a rookie police officer, David, who both have wildly different recollections of the same fateful moment in a corner store that will leave their lives altered forever.

AlieNATION(en)

This short film shot in a small town in Sweden navigates themes of nostalgia through an original monologue, reflecting on gender identity struggle and the pursuit of a new beginning in a foreign land.

The Meadows Green(en)

Fantastical, larger-than-life puppetry and rambunctiously playful choreography is framed against an Edenic backdrop of Vermont farm country in George Griffin and DeeDee Halleck’s luminous, lyrical short film, which documents the 1974 edition of the Bread and Puppet Theater’s annual Domestic Resurrection Circus, taking place soon after the company’s relocation from downtown Manhattan to the rural New England enclave where it remains headquartered to this day.

One Way Trip(es)

Two young women try to adapt to a new city: nostalgia, loneliness, friendship and family are mixed throughout the emotional process of both characters. A reflection on the sense of belonging and the experience of being a foreigner.

Full Moon(en)

Designed for continuous single or multiple monitor display (as well as video projection), the tape is a collection of computer animated sequences of celestial images spanning time and cultures, moving objects and images in harmonic choreography and spatial play.

IMG 0000(en)

A frenetic found-footage documentary made entirely from “lost” unlabeled media on YouTube - weaving together nearly a thousand raw videos, each mistakenly or mindlessly uploaded under a generic filename (e.g., IMG 1326, IMG 5493…).

Day Sleeper(en)

A short documentary about a female truck driver in the United Kingdom.

A Dança dos Mosquitos(pt)

Litter Pickin' Punks(en)

Feeling disgruntled, a group of punks start a litter picking group to counter the amount of litter their community faces.

Moravian Hellas(cs)

Karel Vachek’s graduate film offers us a documentary essay which is both a light-hearted and aggressive little piece and also a parody of investigative film journalism. The Strážnice folk festival, backed by the cultural Party apparatus of the time, for years had little to commend itself to authentic folklore. In the film the event assumes the form of a bizarre stage spectacle with almost surrealistic elements that Vachek reinforces with unconventional approaches (commentary appearing as titles on screen, singing, declamations into the camera, feature etudes, the fusion of news coverage and fiction). The result is a stirring film collage depicting various characters, from crowd-pleasers, Easter egg decorators, kitsch artists and peddlers, to museologists and local residents, all of whom come up against the eccentric "identical” twin reporters Karel and Jan Saudek and a bored actress who appears as an extra. Using their special blend of irony and wit, they present us with the sad truth.

Rain – Memory of Cloud.1(ja)

A psychedelic animation that starts with an irregular ink spread and develops while increasing the degree of confusion.

Red Autumn(de)

A Experimental Docu-Drama about the Red Army Faction's formation, and events leading up to their imprisonment and death, from 1970 to 1977.

21 Years in 7 Minutes(en)

The director's life so far.

Ambient Chaconne(en)

A time-lapse animated meditation on geothermal energy, erosion, seismic activity and magma. Shot above the Yellowstone Caldera and amongst the Bryce Canyon hoodoos, the film explores how they connect these past cataclysms to the present endangered environment within the sixth mass extinction and future threats to an ecosystem already in collapse. The musical accompaniment, composed and performed by Pauline Kim Harris, is based on a reimagining of the Chaconne from the Partita No.2 in D minor (BWV 1004) by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bounded Intimacy(en)

Bounded Intimacy (part of the trilogy of Super 8mm shorts It’s Just Business, Baby) examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea and Tribeca districts, renowned as a sites for sex work, sex clubs and illicit sexual activity. Bounded Intimacy explores the seduction of a nameless woman and the camera. The relationship between the two remains unknown and ambivalent as to whether or not the encounter is “authentic.” The nature of their relationship is irrelevant as the camera captures the authenticity of the desire in the encounter between the two. (Ayanna Dozier)

3STIGIA(es)

En Prise(es)

An epic battle between a knight and a pawn is about to start!... Except it doesn't, they're actually chess pieces