Integrating
March 7th
12:00 - 1:30 pM
The Bloch Learning & Performance Hall
Dollhouse Elephant
Jenny Jokela
Year: 2025
Run Time: 11:14
Country: Finland
Synopsis: In a world that demands community participation, individual desires inevitably collide. A group of neighbours, each focused on their own goals, must learn to communicate and consider one another. But when small, everyday actions trigger unexpected consequences, they are forced into interactions that challenge their independence.
Bio: Jenny Jokela (1990) is a Finnish animation director and artist based in Edinburgh, UK. She earned an MA in Animation from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2017. Her films have received multiple awards, including the Annecy Cristal for Best Graduation Film in 2018 for Barbeque (2017). One of her notable projects is Hibernation, a hand-painted animated film performed live with a large ensemble across Europe, which premiered at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in June 2022.
She has also directed the children's TV series Hoppsorna (YLE, Finland, 2018–2022) and Arne Alligator (SF Studios, Sweden, 2023).
Filmography: Dollhouse Elephant (2025), Sweet Like Lemons (2023), Live a Little (2018), Barbeque (2017, graduation film)
All Of this Must Be Paid For
Gabi Rudin
Year: 2025
Run Time: 12:10
Country: United States
Synopsis: The wellness universe evaluates the spiritual mechanics of the pain-body as it searches for answers.
Bio: Gabi Rudin is a teaching artist and filmmaker living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is interested in the ways we cope with being a body in a system.
Their films search for synergy and mystical significance in a secular, material world susceptible to loneliness and apathy. Through mixing archival sound and image, celluloid and video, their films consider both the patterns and subversions of intergenerational belief systems.
You Do Not Exist
Dwayne LeBlanc
Year: 2026
Run Time: 8:00
Country: United States
Synopsis: In the stillness of his yard, Booker watches the sky fill and empty with passing planes. As the world moves around him, he lingers, circling a memory whose edges blur with time.
Bio: Dwayne LeBlanc is a Los Angeles-based, first-generation, Caribbean American self-taught filmmaker. His practice focuses on themes of migration, visibility, dual identities and belonging.
His debut narrative short film, Civic, was named one of The Best Movies of 2023 by The New Yorker. His sophomore film, Now, Hear Me Good, premiered in the Tiger Shorts Competition at IFFR and continues to screen at major international festivals and leading art institutions. Collectively, his films have been presented at venues including MoMA, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, NYU, and CalArts. He is nearing the completion of his trilogy with the upcoming short, You Do Not Exist.
LeBlanc is one of Filmmaker Magazine's '25 New Faces of Independent Film,' a 2024 Dolby Institute Fellow, and a 2025 MacDowell artist in residence, where he is developing his debut feature film.
Noli Me Tangere
Mahda Purmehdi
Year: 2025
Run Time: 4:29
Country: United States
Synopsis: An excavational inquiry through photographs, touch, and looking at times and places far from here and now, animating and conjuring a link between past and present.
Fačuk
Maida Srabovic
Year: 2025
Run Time: 12:47
Country: Slovenia
Synopsis: In a God-fearing village lying between two rivers, giving birth to a fachuk — an illegitimate child — is a mortal sin. Everyone in the village recoils from the young pregnant woman who is about to give birth at any moment. In this narrow-minded and harsh rural environment, fear grows inside her.
Bio: Maida Srabovic (1986, Koprivnica) completed her studies in film and TV editing at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. After graduating, she worked as a freelance editor for several years, editing numerous films and TV formats. In 2018, she co-founded the animation and postproduction studio TETRABOT in Zagreb.
In 2020, she transitioned away from editing to fully focus on animation and illustration. Facuk is her first film, which she wrote, directed, and produced.
Fumble
Mahsa Talebiani
Year: 2024
Run Time: 15:00
Country: United States
Synopsis: A series of lighthearted performative vignettes that explore the duality of immigrant and queer life, the longing to return to the familiar geographic, cultural, and bodily coordinates of the past, alongside an equally compelling desire to assimilate into a new culture and identity. It depicts both the attempts and failures to fit in and explores the felt incongruities of this experience in a hybrid form.
Bio: Mahsa Talebiani is an experimental filmmaker exploring the intersections of queerness and diaspora experience. Their work delves into the sensory explorations within intercultural cinema, often showcasing their own body to manifest an embodied vulnerability. Through performance, video art, and sculptural space, they challenge traditional narrative film structures and hierarchical productions.
giiwe πρό bizhiw / bizhiw πρό giiwe
Mystery Byrd
Year: 2025
Run Time: 3:33
Country: Canada
Synopsis: a home video, dedicated to my baby.
Bio: Mystery byrd, aka chrussy, is a queer artist and film worker based on Treaty One territory with a lifelong background in DIY moviemaking and over 16 years of industry experience. They have functioned in such roles as writer, director, editor, actor, camera op, production assistant, location scout and assistant locations manager.
Experimental production styles inspired by grassroots organizing, philosophy through montage and video as archive are core concepts in mystery’s work and outlook, as well as themes of history, economics, colonialism, community, relationships, gender and sexuality. They continue to shoot, cut and develop works.
Hiding Places
Magdalena Bermudez
Year: 2025
Run Time: 12:22
Country: United States
Synopsis: Women pretend to be rocks. Military operations masquerade as art education. One woman deserts to pursue a more radical act of unselfing.
