Landscape
Convergences
March 7th
2:00 - 3:30 pM
The Bloch Learning & Performance Hall
Alpine Tundra
Kathleen Rugh
Year: 2025
Run Time: 5:35
Country: United States
Synopsis: At an elevation of 14,264 feet above sea level, the peak of Mount Blue Sky is too harsh for trees and common vegetation. Instead, the ground is covered with fragile tundra grass, weak soil, and rock. In this harsh climate exists the highest paved road in North America, that allows visitors traveling by car to partake in striking views and a sense of awe in the extremes of nature.
Bio: Kathleen Rugh is a filmmaker and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her film and photographic work has been exhibited in screenings and galleries throughout the US and internationally, including the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Images Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], Fracto Experimental Film Encounter, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Rugh is an Assistant Professor of Film at Kean University in Union, NJ. She has received funding for her films through the New York State Council on the Arts.
Sulfur
Karen Akerman &
Miguel Seabra Lopes
Year: 2024
Run Time: 14:44
Country: Portugal
Synopsis: I am the dead. I am the living.
Bio: Karen Akerman and Miguel Seabra Lopes work together since 2010, with film and video, mixing fiction, documentary and experimental. Karen works mainly as a film editor [films and series], Miguel as a screenwriter and analog collage artist.
Hurricane Season
Michelle Trujillo
Year: 2026
Run Time: 6:26
Country: United States
Synopsis: Hurricane anxiety takes a visceral form as the image searches for an escape route. Inspired by true events. Created on 16mm film and developed with comfrey, mint, yerba mate and willow leaves.
Fjord Time
Jonathan Onsuwan Johnson &
Carleen Maur
Year: 2025
Run Time: 4:00
Country: United States
Synopsis: Two young sisters guide us through a meditation on time, play, and nature—using the present moment as a spell against acceleration.
Bio:
Jonathan Johnson is a photographer and filmmaker whose work examines the idea of place and the shifting relationships between humans and the natural world. His practice weaves together autobiography and landscape, drawing from his mixed-race background, travel, and backcountry exploration. Through still and moving images, he reflects on how personal and collective histories shape our understanding of place.
In Its Fertile Shade
Andrés Dávila
Year: 2025
Run Time: 11:28
Country: Colombia
Synopsis: In the Sibundoy Valley, Mercedes Cuatindioy cultivates her chagra as an act of resistance and memory. Through the way she plants, cares for, and interacts with her plants, she transmits indigenous knowledge that is threatened by oblivion and monoculture.
Bio: He holds a PhD degree in Film and Audiovisual Studies from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University - Paris 3. His artistic practice explores the relationship between ethnography and experimental cinema. His short documentary film Sour Lake (2019) has been screened at international film festivals and contemporary art venues, and in 2021 he received the Jury Prize (Prix Psyché) at the French festival Cinemabrut.
amphibolos lithos
Valery Grysha
Year: 2024
Run Time: 9:22
Country: Ukraine
Synopsis: from the Ancient Greek αμφίβολος (amphibolos) — ambiguous, deceptive; λιτος (lithos) — stone
This is a poetic story in which the main character is a stone whose existence transcends human time. As a mute witness to the apocalypse, it appears in the last dream of a man seeking salvation. The stone opens the way to the unknown, where the boundary between the end and the beginning is blurred.
Bio: Valery Grysha (b. 2001, Tetiiv, Ukraine). A member of the Contemporary Ukrainian Cinema and the Ukrainian Association of Cinematographers.
Valery graduated with a bachelor's (2022) and a master's degree (2024) in Film and Television directing at the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts. Student films participated in national and international film festivals.
In 2021, he worked as an assistant director on Philip Sotnychenko's full-length fiction film La Palisiada.
Co-organizer of the Ivano-Frankivsk International Short Film Festival 4:3, which started in 2021. He has been serving as program coordinator for four years.
WHY-EEELA
Ian Gibbins
Year: 2025
Run Time: 4:11
Country: Australia
Synopsis: "im an' 'im an' me a'ways in wide-blue out low-a-drift clou's all windfeath'ry..."
The Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo (Calyptorhyncus funereus) has a distinctive, relaxed loping flight and a loud plaintive call: "why-eeela, weee-la". It feeds on the seeds of diverse trees including eucalypts, banksias and hakeas. Much of this habitat has been destroyed or degraded by human activity. However, the cockatoos are often seen around the outer suburbs of Adelaide, feeding on seeds in the cones of introduced Monterey Pines planted along roadsides and in parks and gardens.
As a yellow-tailed black cockatoo searches for food and missing companions in urban deserts, we hear fragments of its calls...
Recorded at various locations around Adelaide on unceded Kaurna Land in South Australia.
Bio: Ian Gibbins is a South Australian poet, video artist and electronic musician. His poetry has been widely published, including four books, two of which are in collaboration with artists. His video and audio work has been shown to acclaim around the world in festivals, on-line collections, gallery installations, and public art commissions. Until he retired in 2014, he was an internationally-recognised neuroscientist and professor of anatomy at Flinders University, South Australia. See www.iangibbins.com.au.
Katelin Describes a Crisis
Stephen Wardell
Year: 2026
Run Time: 9:30
Country: United States
Synopsis: This is a musical documentary about a family at the end of the world.
Bio: Stephen Wardell (he/him) is an American filmmaker and teaching artist who makes experimental narratives, documentary portraits, and handmade films. His documentary work chronicles family histories through the construction of collaborative utopian fantasies. Currently he lives in Massachusetts where he works as a visiting assistant professor at Amherst College.
Las Animas
Matt Feldman
Year: 2024
Run Time: 14:00
Country: United States
Synopsis: A journey across the former coalfields of Las Animas County in Southeastern Colorado. In the early 1900s the region witnessed one of the bloodiest labor uprisings in U.S. history known as the Coalfield War. The conflict culminated in the Ludlow Massacre where 21 strikers and their families were murdered by the National Guard and CF&I pinkertons. After the decline of mining in the area, most former extraction sites were gradually converted into wilderness areas or flooded. It is believed that the coal fires from that era still burn somewhere deep below the landscape.
Linija Među Nama/ A Line Between Us
Milena Jovićević
Year: 2025
Run Time: 6:15
Country: Montenegro
Synopsis: The work A Line Between Us stems from the artist’s personal experience of loss, symbolically emphasizing the need for connection with the absent and the act of remembering. The artist performs a walk through inaccessible, rocky terrain, leaving behind a turquoise fabric as a line/river in the landscape – a trace of her passage and a symbol of invisible bonds.
