BIFF Shorts: Experimental

BIFF Shorts: Experimental

Art and language, poetry and prose – hand-drawn, in pixels, and on celluloid. 85 minutes.

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The Crow

Ahura Shahbazi (Dir), 9 minutes, Iran, US Premiere

A crow that has grown weary of living among other crows decides to leave them, when they see an eagle fliying high in the sky.

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Frequencies of Deep Time

Eric Souther (Dir), 7 minutes, USA, World Premiere

Filmmaker Eric Souther in attendance.

An experimental exploration of geological time in Western New York, including changes that form strata in the rock formations of gorges like Watkins Glen State Park. Director Eric Souther converts sound waves into an audio-visual metaphor charting changes across an incomprehensible span of time.

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Such Complexity/Air & Wood

Pamela Falkenberg + Jack Cochran (Dir), 5 minutes, USA, New York State Premiere

Filmmakers Pamela Falkenberg + Jack Cochran in attendance.

Sweeping landscapes, dialogical still and moving images, and text extracted from an erasure poem sourced by "The Secret Wisdom of Nature" by Peter Wohlleben, creates an uncanny synesthesia both metaphoric and concrete, A visual poem for the forest.

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The Tenement

Claire Fleming (Dir), 2 minutes, UK, North East Premiere

A rainy spring evening catching a glimpse inside the red sandstone of a Glasgow Tenement.

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Cage Match Refractions

Barbara Lattanzi (Dir), 5 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere

A MMA cage fight – Connor McGregor’s famed 13-second knockout is recasted and reframed into a maelstrom of violent maneuvers.

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I Had A Strange Dream Last Night

Mira Steuer (Dir), 3 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere

Filmmaker Mira Steuer in attendance.

An adult reflects on her time battling a childhood illness in this hand-drawn short.

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Identity Karma

Olivia Ong Evans (Dir), 12 minutes, World Premiere

Filmmaker Olivia Ong Evans in attendance.

A reflection on migration, cultural loss, and identity construction; through the interplay of glitch and text (in English, Bahasa Indonesia, Simplified Chinese, Hokkien). This film explores the intergenerational connection to Hokkien and Chinese Indonesian cultural heritage, especially as shaped by the policies and political context of the “New Order” era in Indonesia, racialization in U.S. society, and participation in U.S. settler colonialism.

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River Fork

Vuk LK (Dir), 11 minutes, USA, New York State Premiere

A trans man recuperating from top surgery spots a painting in his hotel bathroom which takes him back to a different time.

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En Tren

Vav R Vavrek (Dir), 2 minutes, USA, World Premiere

Filmmaker Vav R Vavrek in attendance.

An animation composited from sequences of images created by some out of work e-waste computers, using a generative adversarial network that was parsing the lines of the poem into images.

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Last Days of August

Rodrigo Ojega-Beck + Robert Machoian (Dir), 13 minutes, USA, New York State Premiere

Does a town still exist if nearly everyone has died or left? Meditating on the blurred lines between still photography and cinema, this film employs a photobook aesthetic to explore the landscapes of the near-abandoned prairie towns of Nebraska.

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Maya at 24

Lynne Sachs (Dir), 5 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere

Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, filmmaker Lynne Sachs explores her daughter’s coming of age - capturing her in perpetual motion at ages 6, 16, and 24.

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Total Disaster

Keil Orion Troisi + Molly Gore (Dir), 12 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere

Trickster environmental activists pretending to be oil behemoth Total stage a satirical press conference to introduce "RéHabitat," a plan to rescue animals from the East African Oil Pipeline by relocating them to “more sustainable” habitats in France. Using humor and mischief, they expose a deadly ecological and humanitarian disaster in a zany effort to help #StopEACOP.