ICDOCS 2024

Semiotics of the Home / Hsin-Yu Chen & Jessi Ali Lin

United States & Taiwan // 2023 // 0:07:55

Construction machines are cast as actors in a domestic space, completing daily tasks such as cooking, cleaning, eating, and resting. The gentle gestures enacted by large-scale machines subvert our notions of the domestic, imagining industrial equipment as bodies in a home rather than the machines that construct the spaces we inhabit daily.

Test Objects / Sam Drake

United States // 2023 // 0:09:07

Fragmented attempts to describe a sensation. Acts of hypnosis disturbing familiar spaces. …It’s like you’re underwater and alone and everybody else is on land and together, only we’re inhabiting the same space having to witness each other like idiots.

Hey Sweet Pea / Alee Peoples

United States // 2023 // 0:11:11

Parental aging and an existential wave collide together in funny ways. Hey Sweet Pea borrows scenes from the 1984 children’s sci-fi movie The Neverending Story to process our collective grief.

Exterior Turbulence / Sofia Theodore-Pierce

United States // 2023 // 0:11:07

Seizure dreams, horses, and long distance conversations from bed. Loose reenactments from Marguerite Duras Baxter, Vera Baxter. A year of stormy weather and temporal rupture recalled in fragments. Featuring my mother and other star crossed lovers.

The Tomato Girl / HSIN-YING KUO

Taiwan // 2022 // 0:26:12

The girl Nian has a secret: she can’t see herself, as everybody does! The portrait of her mother Mei-Hung is the only way for Nian to imagine her looking. However, Nian is still eager to see her own looking by herself. But, is it possible? The Tomato Girl represents Nian’s incredible identification journey through composite media.

Last Things / Deborah Stratman

United States // 2024 // 0:50:00

Last Things looks at evolution and extinction from the perspective of the rocks and minerals that came before humanity and will outlast us. With scientists and thinkers like Lynn Margulis and Marcia Bjørnerud as guides and quoting from the proto-Sci-fi texts of J.H.

Growing Up Absurd / Ben Balcom & Julie Niemi

United States // 2022 // 0:15:00

A provisional portrait of Tolstoy College, an anarchist educational community which operated within the University at Buffalo between 1969 and 1985.

Dream of Splendor / Getong Wang

United States & China // 2022 // 0:08:17

Dream of Splendor synthesizes footage from the 1962 Hong Kong film The Magnificent Concubine with footage of a souvenir shop located in Chicago’s Chinatown to create an eerie and at times melancholy exploration of the Chinatown chronotope.

Motor Motor Blue / Greg Jenkins

United States // 2023 // 0:14:59

“Motor Motor Blue” meditates on systems and possibility in Appalachia through the soft frames of family histories, phantom landscapes, and racecars. The film chases the sounds and rhythms of a community after grief, following a spirit as it rises from an old mine shaft up through the mountains.

The Enlightenment / Stephanie Barber

United States // 2023 // 0:12:09

Listing dangerously into poetry, philosophy and sound art, Barber’s new film (distributed by Video Data Bank) finds Yon and Payola in a Victorian conservatory. They are companionable, disoriented and petulant––they whip wildly through these disembodied states. Payola reads an excerpt of their experimental essay on the age of enlightenment. Payola’s research, and presentation of this research, is a purposeful affront to empirical data, the scientific method and other enlightenment ideals, while reveling in the desire for the revolution and intellectual expansion those thinkers championed. The concepts are undermined by the form and register of their delivery OR the concepts are strengthened by the poetry through which they are presented. The soundtrack for The Enlightenment was originally commissioned by the Diffusion Festival for multi-channel sound work, curated by M.C. Schmidt for High Zero.

ABURIDASHI Assortment: Video Letters written in invisible ink / Nonoho Suzuki

Japan // 2022 // 0:09:24

This work is an experimental documentary animation by the traditional Japanese technique of “ABURIDASHI”. And it’s consists of three parts: Beginning, Middle, and End. “Beginning” is a personal video made to celebrate my friend Hiratake-san. “Middle” is about Hiratake-san’s anger at the government responses to the Great East Japan earthquake. “End” is about the fear of war in which get involved individuals. This work depicts how my perspective changes from an individual to a nation over a period of 10 years.

Nearest Neighbor / Rebecca Baron

United States // 2023 // 0:20:00

Intertwining associated experiments in image and sound generation using AI, Nearest Neighbor focuses on language acquisition and mimicry between humans, birds and machines, asking fundamental questions about consciousness, learning and understanding. The film is a contemporary reflection on the state of technology in relation to the natural world. It asks us to think about what we want from inter-species communication and what we expect from technologies that aspire to substitute for living beings.The film calls into question our investment of resources in these technologies as the natural world falls into further decline.

Black Hole Space Debt, or A Basic Guide to Syncing Sound and Image / Stephen Wardell

United States // 2022 // 0:14:00

An instructional document about making a handmade optical soundtrack becomes a speculative sci-fi narrative about going to Mars. As the film progresses, the nature of the soundtrack comes to speak for the way space exploration is one part of a larger, systemic repetition of colonialism and debt peonage.

When We Encounter the World / Leonardo Pirondi & Zazie Ray-Trapido

Portugal // 2023 // 0:11:00

In 1934 an experiment by an amateur-scientist couple began. Named after a genus of moths, the Automeris Project placed a group of young children in an enclosed forest, leaving them to fend for themselves. On return visits, the couple presented self-made films, accompanied by live music, depicting the outside world. For them, these images were the perfect replica of reality seen in their expeditions. Nevertheless, the films were carefully framed, edited, and manipulated to induce a transformation and provoke the development of a new society.

Parallel Botany / Magdalena Bermudez

United States // 2023 // 0:11:08

Still lives of real fruit meet botanical illustrations of plant galls to expose the paradox of dissection: each time we cut something in two, we merely create a new exterior.

Language Unknown / Janelle VanderKelen

United States // 2022 // 0:06:10

This film embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans (who are far more sensorially limited). Leaves, mycelia, and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world, and the (supposedly) silent watchers consider what language those swift blurs of human might possibly understand.

Datura’s Aubade / Jean-Jacques Martinod & Bretta C. Walker

United States-Mexico // 2021 // 0:15:00

A farmer discovers a fallen meteorite in the high Chihuahuan deserts. The Alien Earth and the Earth Alien commingle under the spell of a deadly nightshade.

Brittany Gravely Short Compilation / Brittany Gravely

cosponsored by UIowa Cinematic Arts Student Organization (CASO)

Compilation of shorts by Brittany Gravely and Ken Linehan including Dreaming Water Chapter 1, Dreaming Water Chapter 2, Astrology, Telekinesis: Lesson 6, Glenna, Willa, Faith, Torbz, Blood of the Earthworm.

reliéf Relief / Johannes Gierlinger & Mira Klug

Austria // 2023 // 0:09:16

Beginning with the historical painting of an idyllic Morava landscape, stored in an art depot, the film moves along the border river Morava, which, with its Austrian-Slovakian section, defines one of Austria’s oldest national borders. The film ‘relièf Relief’ meanders downstream along the seasons, posing questions about image memory, nature and the reverberations of historical circumstances. In doing so, it refers not least to the notion of contaminated landscape.

Spoils / Luciana Decker Orozco

United States & Bolivia // 2023 // 0:07:30

“Here between us, I want you to know the truth. There is in my sad loneliness desire to scream, run away, and ask what has happened to your life tuturururu.” A collection of spring colors, food spoils, spoils of war, emptied creatures, and fossils. In-camera edit, a diary-like rhythm of first impressions of the US without wanting to waste film.

Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke / Tomonari Nishikawa

Japan // 2023 // 0:06:00

The visual shows the alternation of the shots of fireworks filmed at a summer festival in Japan, producing a distinctive yet organic rhythm, as well as a gap in time between the visual and sound, both of which are produced by the photographic images on the 16mm filmstrip.

cloud film / Tristen Ives

United States // 2024 // 0:10:00

In response to climate change and anxiety, cloud film meditates on the calming effects of clouds.

As clouds float on screen, fluctuating between different frame rates, this film calls attention to it’s handmade form through the use camera-less techniques such as rayogramming, optically printing, and hand processing.

The Hollow / Jean-Jacques Martinod & Bretta C. Walker

United States // 2022 // 0:14:37

A reclusive glass artist lives in solitude within the dense, misty forests of Southern Appalachia and the infernal fires of a foundry. A cinematic study on mountain alchemy and its relationship to fire.

Ingresso Animali Vivi / Igor Grubic

Croatia // 2023 // 0:14:33

Animals from Eastern Europe for the Italian food/meat industry used to be transported to the towns along the state border in Northeast Italy. From those conveyor-belt spaces of death, only one animal managed to come in and out alive.

The Living Wardrobe (L’armari vivent) / Marti Madaula Esquirol

Spain // 2023 // 0:18:17

Martí arrives in Bilbao for an artistic residency. His clothes take up only a small part of the huge wardrobe in his new room. When he meets someone, the wardrobe gradually begins to fill up. But where did the emptiness go, the free space, the little corner of his own? Did the wardrobe swallow it all, or was it love?

Application To Be Lars Von Trier’s “Female Girlfriend/Muse” / Tomi Faison

United States // 2024 // 0:15:21

August 11th, 2023 filmmaker and Dogma95 founder Lars Von Trier posted a video on instagram seeking applications for a, “female girlfriend/muse.” Later that week I visited Rose, my 75 year old best friend, neighbor, and muse, to film an application. Lars has yet to respond.

Goddess of Speed / Frédéric Moffet

United States // 2023 // 0:08:05

A film titled Dance Movie (aka Rollerskate) appears in many Warhol filmographies, but no work with this title can be found in the Collection. The lost film, starring dancer Fred Herko gliding on a single roller skate, was shot in 1963. Herko was a talented dancer and choreographer who co-founded and performed with the Judson Dance Theater. Herko was also associated with the Mole People, a group of queer men and women who came together to get high on speed and listen to opera. In October 1964, unhoused and strung out on drugs, Herko leapt out of an open window while dancing naked to Mozart’s Coronation Mass in C Major. Inspired by descriptions of the missing film, Goddess of Speed poetically re-imagines the last days of the performer.

you are a thing which even angels desire to look into / Morisha Moodley

United States // 2024 // 0:12:00

you are a thing which even angels desire to look into is a love letter to transition, queer becoming and a fading friendship. In this stop-motion animation, queerness is not just the central theme; it is instilled in the film’s formal properties. Animation itself is reinscribed as a trans medium – its need to change in order to be perceived, to even exist, becomes aligned with the flux of queer identities and queer becoming. The film posits collage as an act of self-definition. We watch as incisions into the film’s very material reform paper into shape, image and content.

Deliverance (Descarrego) / Joana Claude

Brazil // 2023 // 0:10:00

Searching to purge a bad memory, Joana decides to return to the place where she suffered an act of violence in 2013 to free herself of the last trigger that bounds her to this incident from the past – a wardrobe. In this self-portrait, the director appropriates the essayist traits of the documentary as a process to deal with inner ghosts. Through a ritual established by a recollection of facts, she confronts her own expectations facing the charges she endures as a woman.

Dada’s Daughter / Sara Sowell

Dada’s Daughter is an ongoing expanded-cinema performance with 16mm film projections and a live score using objects of illusionary optics and industrial scrap. Abstractions of light and pattern reintroduce photographic practices of early 20th century Dada films by way of darkroom techniques and improvisation. Spliced in between photograms and negative images, sections of clear film leader cue a live performance activating the remote objects photographed on celluloid through the immediacy of the film projector’s beam. When placed in front of the projector these objects create tactile optical images; impressions of form, shape and pattern that reenact the process of capturing images on celluloid.

Jews Harp or: Harpaud / Sam Taffel

United States // 2023 // 0:06:29

“If I held you any closer, I’d be on the other side of you” – Groucho Marx

An examination of identity seen through the lens of the Marx Brothers and Antonin Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty.” Appropriating sounds, images and thoughts from The Marx Brothers, Wayne Koestenbaum, Elaine May, Susan Sontag and Artaud, “Jews Harp or: Harpaud” reflects on impersonation, doppelgängers, and the nature of Vaudeville as a shared art form / cultural practice. Gesturing towards performance as a form of survival, the effect of mirroring becomes a means of finding wholeness.

Another Rapid Event / Daniel Murphy

2023

in 1859, two telegraph operators communicate using the radiant energy from a massive solar storm as their sole power source. In 2012, radiation from a comparable solar storm narrowly misses the earth.

이것은 보이는 것과 다르다: This Isn’t What It Appears / Heehyun Choi

2022

Among everything obscure in an image, there is always the camera. This Isn’t What It Appears reconstructs and radicalizes the ways to see and interpret archival photographs of Korean women taken in the 1950s by American soldiers stationed in South Korea. This film attempts to reveal the camera within the frame, not as an omniscient eye but as a reciprocal medium that subverts the hierarchy in an image.

Ardent Other / Alice Brygo

France // 2022 // 0:16:13

A stunned crowd faces a fire. The threat has no name, a diffuse anguish spreads. Fear needs to be conjured, fire must be turned into a sign.

Public Surfaces / Gillian Waldo

United States // 2023 // 0:11:56

In 1964, Baltimore became the second city in the country to pass a 1% for Art law, allocating one percent of the construction budget for any public building to commissioning a new piece of art. Most of the buildings were public schools, and by 2016, it was revealed that many of the pieces had gone missing. Through landscapes of the city and depictions of the sculptures, the film explores the history of the program, the failures of modernism, the neglect of the school system, and asks who public art can really serve.

Untitled (LAPD) / Jane Claxton

United States // 2022 // 0:08:10

A study of the aesthetic violence of two surveillance software systems employed by the Los Angeles Police Department

The (Other) 700 Club / Juan Blanco Garcia

United States // 2022 // 0:10:00

At the intersection of Broadway and Thornton St in Brooklyn, a loose community of delivery workers gathers every day to hang out and share their experiences while waiting for their next job. The (Other) 700 Club opens the door to a microcosm of street philosophers who discuss about their own beliefs, goals, and motivations. A poetic reflection on the reality of the high-speed capitalist system in which we are trapped, but at the same time keeps us moving in order to survive.

Radio Jammer / Jacob Kessler

United States // 2023 // 0:21:08

A fragmentary 16mm portrait of the lonely lives that haunt Chicago’s underground rap scene. Alienated youth seek transcendence amid chaotic crowds, deafening noise, and the allure of occult aesthetics. The gaze of surveillance, both real and imagined, affirms their indignation.

The Rooster / Katarina Bugarin

Serbia // 2024 // 0:06:22

Grandpa Jonel and Grandma Kornelija invited me to capture some photos of the final moments of their beloved rooster, affectionately named “The Singer,” before he is taken to the slaughterhouse. By chance, I started filming and unintentionally documented the daring escape attempt and the attempt to change the fate of a chicken in the countryside.

71 / Paige Taul

United States // 2022 // 0:18:52

71 is about the sensibilities of the black middle class as observed by Jessica Taul and Pamela Patterson, the filmmaker’s mother and aunt, respectively. They discuss their differing tastes, definitions of class, frogs, and other qualifiers they consider in their evaluation of the space that they live in: a suburban-like outcropping of identical housing units. Through direct quotation and phenomenological relation to Bill Greaves’ seminal film, Still A Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class (1968), 71 navigates the temporal gaps in conformity and respectability politics between 1968 and 2022.

Бабушка Галя и Дедушка Аркадий (Grandma Galya and Grandpa Arkadiy) / Anna Kipervaser

Ukraine // 2023 // 0:04:24

A jovial and dreamy rumination on love. On time passing. On what we collect, what we hold on to, and how we maintain a connection to homeplace, to ourselves.

Some Sweet Day / Rasheed Peters

United States, Jamaica // 2023 // 0:19:36

This short film delves into the themes of death, grief, and the enduring power of memory. Shot with an intimate one-person crew, the narrative focuses on Camille Peters, the filmmaker’s mother. She is grappling with the adjustments required to navigate life without her husband, whose sudden and protracted illness ultimately led to his passing. The heart of the film lies in a bare-bones interview, an intensely personal conversation, between the filmmaker and Camille, both reclining in the comfort of her Florida apartment. Some Sweet Day reminds us of the connection between love, loss, and the cherished memories that bridge the gap between them.

Spiros Beach / Antonis Pouliasis

Cyprus // 2023 // 0:10:00

Stuck in place and time, a self-sustaining community of holidaymakers share their love for the sun and sea. An observational documentary offering an intimate glimpse into Cyprus’s last remaining caravan park. 

When the Seeds Say Enough / Dominick Rivers

United States // 2023 // 0:09:03

When the Seeds Say Enough is an act of eulogy, an open letter to the artist’s late brother, with the thematic centerpiece being what remains of their childhood home. Shot with Super 8 film and presented as a diptych, the film evokes the fragmentary and unstable nature of memory through its employment of alternative photographic processes such as mordançage and cyanotype.

still/here/ Christopher Harris

United States // 2001 // 0:73:00

With his MFA thesis film from the School of Art Institute of Chicago, experimental filmmaker Christopher Harris reflects on the slow, inexorable decay of a once tight-knit African American neighborhood on the north side of St. Louis through government indifference, neglect, and corruption; White suburban flight; the collapse of manufacturing; and the chronic systemic racism of redlining, redistricting, and perverted currents of sociological thought and urban planning. His polyphonic voice of spoken words, dreams retold, and the sounds of telephones and doorbells is not so much elegiac as searching, in the way that, as he describes, Miles Davis or Roscoe Mitchell find meaning and infinite variation in musical notes and in the silences and spaces between them, or what he calls, “a post-industrial city symphony in a minor key.” His black-and-white images, shot with a 16mm Bolex camera, capture a ghostly palimpsest of working-class Victorian homes long since abandoned, and once successful African American businesses, including the Criterion movie palace, now shuttered and in ruins. A vibrant cosmopolitan culture, a life of bustling commerce, domestic comforts and hardships, of movies and music and food made by Blacks and for Blacks, once thrived behind these broken windows and crumbling walls. (Note courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art)

TWENTY-FOUR DOLLAR ISLAND / Robert Flaherty

1927 // 0:13:00

With an obsession with the telephoto lens and the skyscrapers of New York City, pioneering documentarian Robert J. Flaherty creates a city symphony that engages with 300 years of history