BIFF X0 Program 1: Echoes + Exchanges

Experimental shorts that inhabit spaces between performance and sincerity, the personal and the political, presence and absence – interviews, correspondences, and other exchanges.

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.

Total runtime is 76 minutes.

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“ESP”

Laura Kraning (Dir), 4 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere

Director Laura Kraning in attendance.

A brutalist monument to the Empire State as manifested by a malfunctioning inkjet printer. Chroma and luminance are made audible as architectural and printed lines converge and dissolve into pattern and noise. Photographed in the Capitol City of Albany, New York.

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"The Phalanx"

Ben Balcom (Dir), 14 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere

Director Ben Balcom in attendance.

Filmed on the former site of Ceresco, a 19th-century agrarian commune in Ripon, Wisconsin, this lyrical, experimental film revisits the utopian aspirations of a community striving to live "in association," guided by principles of harmony and shared ownership. Founded in 1844 and disbanded in 1851, Ceresco was one of several communes across North America inspired by the writings of French philosopher Charles Fourier. These fleeting but potent attempts to imagine alternative ways of living now serve as a lens to explore the fragility of collective ideals.

Weaving together archival materials, literary adaptation, and a performative collaboration with students, the film lingers in the echoes of this brief, failed experiment in communal living. Against this historical backdrop, it reflects on the quiet fractures of contemporary community and the lingering melancholy for spaces once brimming with possibility. Situated in Wisconsin, the film contemplates the resonance of place, inviting viewers to consider the enduring relevance of utopian thinking in a fractured world.

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"Manal Issa, 2024"

Elisabeth Subrin (Dir), 11 minutes, USA/Lebanon, Western New York Premiere

Filmed in Beirut on September 22, 2024, just hours before bombing escalated throughout the country, "Manal Issa, 2024" presents a haunting interview with the acclaimed Lebanese French actress Manal Issa. Distilled from hours of long-distance conversations between Elisabeth in the U.S. and Manal in Lebanon over the past year, the film intimately considers the role of the actor during the unfolding global conflict. Refusing to be seen on camera, Issa reflects on questions once posed to the late French actress Maria Schneider (best known for her traumatic experience in the 1972 film "Last Tango In Paris”), who was a prescient critic of sexism in the film industry. In "Manal Issa, 2024," an apparitional Issa takes the critique much further.

Many thanks to Manifest Pictures + Film Fatales .

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"There's a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be"

Mariam Ghani (Dir), 16 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere

"There's a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be" is a short film about memory and mourning. It departs from the premise that both grief and black holes are so dense and intense that they bend space and time around their specific gravity - each absence both a wound in the heart and a hole in the world.

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"All These Empty Rooms"

Joshua Seftel (Dir), 30 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere

A visual meditation on absence, memory, and the unseen ripples of America's gun violence epidemic. "All These Empty Rooms" follows veteran CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp as they embark on a seven-year-long project to document the empty bedrooms of children killed in school shootings. Tired of whitewashing tragedy with obligatory uplift, Hartman steps away from his heartwarming human interest stories to pursue a project his network never approved. As gun violence claims more young lives than any other cause in America, these quiet bedrooms reveal truths more powerful than statistics ever could.

Many thanks to The Film Collaborative.

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