Time
8:45-10:00 pM
The Bloch Learning & Performance Hall
A video about red balloons
Walter Smits
Year: 2023
Run Time: 5:41
Country: N/A
Synopsis: Weaving thru footage of my grandpa’s retirement party I explore ghosts, death, and masculinity.
fracture summer
Kym McDaniel
Year: 2026
Run Time: 8:30
Country: N/A
Synopsis: Unexpected broken bones in June. The sun passing through the kitchen. Bursts of summer rain. Time is marked through light changing in my apartment, chosen family visiting, playing the piano, and getting my period. My broken Super 8 camera needs to be shaken for the shutter release to catch, and I wonder how to stay functioning, myself. The document of being unable to walk during an especially Crip summer inside my apartment.
Bio: Kym McDaniel is an interdisciplinary artist working across fields of moving image, choreography, and disability studies. She has recently screened within exhibitions at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Slamdance, Antimatter, ICDOCS, The Whitney Humanities Center, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, and at UnionDocs, among others.
She began filmmaking after a head injury and chronic illness changed her relationship to time, her body, and dance.
She has an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and an Advanced Certificate in Disability Studies from the City University of New York. She is currently an Assistant Professor teaching film and choreography at The Ohio State University.
www.kymmcdaniel.com
Purgatorio
Auden Lincoln-Vogel, Stephanie Miracle and Philip
Year: 2024
Run Time: 6:00
Country: United States
Synopsis: You can't win a game you don't know how to play, but you also can't lose.
Bio: "Purgatorio" is the result of a collaboration between Stephanie Miracle (choreography), Auden Lincoln-Vogel (cinematographer / editor), and Philip Rabalais (sound design). Through collaborative processes, their site-specific dance films are committed to experimental fusions of choreography, cinematography, and sound that resist traditional classifications of both dance and cinema. More of their work can be found at stephaniemiracledances.com, audenlincolnvogel.com, and philiprabalais.com.
How Now, House?
Tess Martin
Year: 2025
Run Time: 13:00
Country: Netherlands
Synopsis: How Now, House? investigates our yearning to leave traces behind through the prism of one house in Rotterdam. Using archives, personal memories and the philosophy of time, the film questions whether a space can ever really belong to one person, or time period, at all.
Bio: Tess Martin is an artist and filmmaker based in Rotterdam since 2014. She had an international upbringing and studied both fine art and animation, resulting in a mixed artistic practice. Tess has exhibited and attended residencies internationally and she occasionally lectures and gives workshops. She was a participant in Berlinale Talents in 2024.
Filmography: How Now, House? (2025), 1976: Search for Life (2023), Voice (2020), Orbit (2019), Ginevra (2017), The Lost Mariner (2014), Mario (2014), The Whale Story (2012)
Buses don't stop here anymore
Penny McCann
Year: 2024
Run Time: 7:28
Country: Canada
Synopsis: Buses don't stop here anymore is a chronicle on Super 8 of the closure, abandonment, and demolition of the Greyhound bus station in Ottawa, Canada. Once an important site for coming and going, an emotive epicenter, the camera observes the building’s erasure, dismantled by machines that writhe in the dust of demolition. Optical printing translates the act of observation into a requiem for a building, once so present and vital, now a ghost of the past.
Filmed on Ektachrome Super 8 over a three year period from the sudden closure of the Greyhound station in April 2020 to its demolition in 2022, Buses don’t stop here anymore speaks to the heartbreaking loss of long-distance bus travel in hundreds of small towns and cities across Canada.
Bio: Canadian media artist Penny McCann's body of work spans thirty years and encompasses both narrative and experimental films and video. Since 2000, she has been engaged in creating a body of experimental films that journeys through an abstract and poetic terrain, forming a sustained meditation on landscape, place and time. According to Cecilia Araneda in her essay titled Penny McCann: Within the Unsaid, A Response to Land Lines (of time and place) in no particular order: “McCann intervenes with our sense of the familiar with her use of hand-crafted analogue filmmaking approaches … purposefully setting it back into a kind of suspension that we immediately associate with the dream state of processing memories.”
Her work has been exhibited extensively at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor, Michigan), Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg (Germany), the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Cinémathèque Québecoise (Montreal, Quebec), and the Canadian Film Institute (Ottawa, Ont.). http://www.vimeo.com/pennymccann
Out of Nowhere
Billy Palumbo
Year: 2025
Run Time: 6:18
Country: United States
Synopsis: Wandering the familiar and uncanny of Oklahoma, roaming through a future past.
Voices of the mountains
Laboratory for visual storytelling
Year: 2025
Run Time: 10:00
Country: Tajikistan
Synopsis: “Voices of the Mountains” is an animated documentary created with young authors from Tajikistan, reflecting on a mountain town affected by mudslides. Through drawings and personal narration, the film explores how natural disaster becomes part of everyday memory — not as a catastrophe, but as a lived reality. Nature here is not a backdrop, but a fragile archive where human voices, loss, and resilience coexist.
Bio: Dante Rustav is a documentary filmmaker and curator working with animated documentary forms.
His work focuses on memory, landscape, and collective experience, often developed through collaborative processes.
He is particularly interested in animation as a documentary language that allows access to fragile and intangible realities.
Role in the film: mentor and curator.
10 52
Amirmohammad Zand
Year: 2024
Run Time: 14:57
Country: Iran, Islamic Republic of, Netherlands
Synopsis: A solitary musician, haunted by lost love and the absence of emotional warmth within his family, seeks solace in artificial intelligence through shared silence, creative tension, and emotional resonance. Against a world overwhelmed by social media and digital noise, the film moves through a hybrid internal and external world, where it paints a tender portrait of loneliness, the ripple effects of global conflict, the error and comfort in the digital echo, and the fragile hope that love, even in its most elusive form, might still rescue us in an age of hyper-connection and disconnection.
Bio: Amir Mohammad Zand, born in Tehran, is an established Iranian actor and an emerging director. Graduated in film directing from the La Sapienza University of Rome, Zand has cultivated a dynamic career in cinema and television since the early 2000s.
He made his television debut in 2003 with his role as Shahriar in the long-running drama Be Donya Begoyed Beystad (2006), earning two Commerce Award nominations from the national Television. His cinematic breakthrough came with Taghato (2005), followed by the critically acclaimed The Night Bus (2006), which won him the Best Actor award in the country. Zand’s filmography includes more than 90 cinematic and television performances. His acting experience equips him with great expertise in directing actors. His artistic range and dedication continue to leave a lasting impression on Iranian cinema.