BIFF X0: POEMS, SONGS, SPACES, PLACES

Lyrical, place + space-based experimental film. Runtime is 89 minutes.

The BIFF X0 series focuses on cinematic poetry in pixels and on celluloid; and works that experiment with the form, function and structure of film, analog media, digital video, and film and media ecosystems.

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GRAZING ON IMAGES

Mark Street (Dir), 17 minutes, USA, New York State Premiere

Director Mark Street in attendance.

Shot on 35mm analog, still film, and Super 8; this diaristic film travels from Dublin to LA to Oklahoma City to Beloit WI and explores the filmmaker’s home base of Brooklyn, NY to consider a life lived in the presence of rhapsodic quotidian images.

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THE ACCUMULATION OF MEANING OVER TIME

Kyla Kegler (Dir), 23 minutes, USA, World Premiere (Final Cut)

Director Kyla Kegler in attendance.

A lyrical exploration shot on 16mm film about how understanding of the self deepens with age, and how collective meaning gathers across generations, bodies, and images. It is an ode to the treasure hunt of growing older—to the gradual realization that what moved us as children was not fleeting naïveté, but the first glimmer of lifelong motifs that orient how we move through the world. Drawing from personal narration, Jungian theory, and the history of experimental media art in Buffalo, NY, the film weaves these threads into a meditation on memory, inheritance, and becoming.

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SRS (SILK ROAD SONGBOOK)

Millie Chen + Arzu Ozkal (Dir), 23 minutes, USA, World Premiere

Co-Directors Millie Chen + Arzu Ozkal in attendance.

SRS weaves songs of resistance, sorrow and grace into the land, broadcasting women’s distinct, unruly voices on an ancient Eurasian migration route between Istanbul, Tehran, Tashkent, Bishkek, and Xi’an. The 5 songs were generated by collaborators from communities along the route; it is they who chose the landscapes, musical genres, and lyrical content. For each place, women’s voices are the dynamic driving force, and land is the visual anchor. The film is part of a larger, multi-media art project.

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NOLI ME TANGERE

Mahda Purmehdi (Dir), 4 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere

Director Mahda Purmehdi in attendance.

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.

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ENERGY IS ENTITY

Elia Vargas (Dir), 10 minutes, USA, World Premiere

Director Elia Vargas in attendance.

It takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds for Sun light to touch the Earth. This single shot experimental videe explores the metaphysics of this phenomenon through a single zoom that lasts the duration it takes for lightwaves from the sun to reach the camera/Earth. Accompanying the zoom shot is a low frequency modulation analog synthesis sound-score. Subtitles narrate a stark poetics of these conditions and an examination of Michael Snow’s zoom-film, Wavelength. 'Energy is Entity' was captured on the one-year anniversary of an electromagnetic storm that caused aurora borealis in Buffalo, NY, during which my second child was born. She arrived so quickly that my spouse unexpectedly birthed her in our home, and I delivered her. All that electromagnetic energy comes to us from the Sun. Did you ever think, it could be different? The Sun could be different. As a result, we could be different. The Sun enacts the Earth. This rare Earth.

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OSCILLATIONS

David Colagiovanni + Mark Franz (Dir), 8 minutes, USA, New York State Premiere

'Oscillations' is an experimental animated short constructed from a filmed live oscilloscope performance combining synthesized sampling, live guitar, and analog signal imagery. Continuing the tradition of visual music explored by pioneers such as Oskar Fischinger, the work transforms sound into shifting geometric forms and rhythmic electronic landscapes. Utilizing William S. Burroughs’ cut-up method, fragments of text derived from the “Pale Blue Dot” passage in Cosmos are recombined into evolving poetic structures. Through repetition, fragmentation, and oscillation, the piece gradually shifts from cosmic reflection toward an inquiry into memory, place, and the unstable idea of home.

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SQUEEZED BETWEEN DIMENSIONS

Barbara Lattanzi (Dir), 5 minutes, USA, World Premiere

Director Barbara Lattanzi in attendance.

This formal experiment presents two-dimensional planes extracted from the simple one-dimensional lines of an old black and white cartoon. However, between those dimensions - of line and plane - we encounter a tangled mass that squirms, squats, tumbles and stretches within its heavily "curtained" confines. The constant contortions transform the old cartoon's forward-in-time narrative dimension into something more closely resembling the oscillations of a cellular metabolism.

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