INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM SHOWCASE

Griffin Conner and Forrest Sprague are pleased to announce the first two installments in an ongoing series showcasing young, international experimental filmmakers creating exciting contemporary work. These programs are not competitive, they are collaborative. Each of the works shown here are artist-driven, bringing experimental cinema back to its roots with the notion of one filmmaker, one camera. Representing the countries of Chile, India, Iraq, Italy, Poland, Russia, South Korea, and the United States of America, the films were diplomatically selected with an aim to highlight the truly independent young experimental filmmakers of today.

Program 1 (July 10th, 7pm) is primarily silent, and features preoccupations with the outside world. Natural and industrial elements are the focus, with each filmmaker turning the camera from themselves, to the external world around them. In contrast to program 2, the films featured here are impressionistic, and are studies of geography and geometry that define their respective countries. The first program begins obscured by light and color, until the naturalistic landscape eventually reveals itself.

A hybrid of film and digital, program 2 (July 11th, 7pm) is a mixture of sound films and silent films, with a transition from the aural to the purely visual midway through the program. The program is often diaristic, focusing on the respective filmmakers’ heritage, and the abstraction that lies within their personal world. Program 2 begins with the visible world, and works its way into intangible domesticity.

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Tears of Moonlight, 2026 [10 mins, Digital, Color, Mute] A weeping moon. A longing body of water. A non-dimensional work exploring the absence that forms. An ode to reflections.

- Baker Ahmed (b. 1997, Baghdad, Iraq) is an experimental artist mainly interested in the realm of ephemeral, unformed and unseen image-making. The practice of his style is concerned with alienating the eye and bringing back the state of object virginity in which everything is seen for what it is and every moment is but another memory.

Moonglade, 2024 [5 mins, 16mm-to-digital, Color, Sound] Abstract visions of water give way to a glistening dance of light hidden beneath the river’s surface

Ryzyup, 2026 [7 mins, 16mm-to-digital, Color, Sound] Ryzyup (pronounced rih-zee-up) presents a series of unstable, shifting images that resist clear recognition. Shapes appear briefly before dissolving back into motion and texture. The film invites a mode of attention where perception softens and the viewer begins to drift inward.

The Dithering Veil, 2024 [15 mins, Digital, Color, Mute] A silent evocation of perception and memory; an attempt to navigate the flotsam of elliptical impressions, earthly phenomena and dreamed images that linger and interpenetrate on the surface of thought.

Rushing Green, 2025 [12 mins, Digital, Color, Sound] The smudged and overlapping green hues sway back and forth, creating a visual rhythm.

- Kil Min-hyeong (b. 1997, South Korea) is a filmmaker based in South Korea. He is interested in abstracting and personalizing natural elements within the frame, their movements, and light, focusing on perception and rhythm rather than representation. His works have been screened at internationally including the Ribalta Experimental Film Festival, Beijing International Short Film Festival, the WNDX Moving Image Festival, and the New Horizons International Film Festival.

Forgetting, 2026 [3 mins, 16mm-to-digital, Color, Mute] Revisiting lost images and moments. Edited from unused footage shot between 2023-25.

Unedited, 2026 [16 mins, 8mm-to-digtital, 16mm-to-digital, Color, Mute] A film-performance that features all film footage shot by the author during 2024-2025 and is played at variable frame rates, from standard to minimal frames per second. One to three 8mm projectors and one 16mm projector can be used for the demonstration, so the runtime is variable. Trees and leaves, clouds and curtains, snow in the yard and water, hands and eyes, shadows and glare of light, days spent alone and meetings with friends. Light and darkness are the two poles between which this diary is flows, pulsates and shimmers. Raw diary of visual impressions captured with filmmaker’s camera.

Epiphany (III), 2024 [23 mins, Digital, Color, Mute] The images take on a pictorial flattening of their space to almost a collage or even decollage-esque effect. One that constructs upon itself with beams and wires but also one that excavates into itself by spraying away ground or simply digging. The workers are very much pieces of this space. So they may be read as material, as cost, like the sheet metal. As tools in a work and world. The material reality of what is filmed, labour, and the relevance of that to any history of collage in using found materials or repeated stacking and sticking and tearing of sheets of publications or signifiers to work.

River Nocturne (meditation on noise), 2025 [10 mins, Digital, Color, Mute] A study of the concept of noise intended not only as an unpleasant sound but also as a visual artifact. The so-called high sensitivity in digital cameras allows us to see in the dark by adding an artificial grain to the video, sacrificing its quality. In these night shots, noise is not avoided but rather enhanced, thus creating abstract, hypnotic images that pulsate slowly.