BIFF X0 Program 2: Sky / Earth / Water

Birds' / Plants'/ Whales'-eye-views from the avant-garde and more!

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 72 minutes.

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“The Call”

Kelly Sears (Dir), 7 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere

Director Kelly Sears in attendance.

"The Call" is an eco-revenge film featuring unlikely instigators who were observed and filmed over three years at airports across the United States.

The rebellion has been building for decades.

This is a call to action.

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"The World Said No"

Jennie Thwing (Dir), 8 minutes, USA, World Premiere

Director Jennie Thwing in attendance.

"The World Said No" is an allegorical animation about ecological apathy and its consequences that poses the question – "what if nature decided to fight back?"

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"Landforms"

Laura Kraning (Dir), 11 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere

Director Laura Kraning in attendance.

"Landforms" unearths the physical remains of past and future geological strata. The film explores two landscapes, an industrial rock quarry turned recreational fossil hunting park, in which 380-million-year-old fossils were discovered beneath the rocks where once flowed a shallow sea, and a public waterway whose shore is dispersed with brightly colored fragments of consumer waste in the form of microplastics. Both landscapes reveal a process of digging and gathering, of collecting evidence of earth’s pre-historic past, or intervening in humanity’s toxic futures. The forms, of ancient sea creatures and broken plastic, mesh and intertwine into a meditation on deep time and a reflection on extinction.

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"Six Knots"

Ali Vanderkruyk (Dir), 30 minutes, Canada, Western New York Premiere

To reduce ambient noise when approaching a whale, a vessel should not exceed six knots. A long-standing symbol of the distance between human and animal and the mystery of the natural world, the whale is a site of disconnection, fascination and exploitation. Six Knots follows specialists in cetacean death and conservation on the west coast of Canada. The film tracks the grey space between language, sound and image, and the entanglement of colonization, industrialization, and science.

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"No Time of Deep Time"

Eric Souther (Dir), 8 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere

Director Eric Souther in attendance.

If we could witness the Earth across deep time, the ground beneath our feet would oscillate, revealing the dynamic nature of our planet—what feels permanent to us is actually in constant flux when viewed on the geological timescale.

"No Time of Deep Time" explores Michigan's Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in the Upper Peninsula as a site of geological deep time. Souther uses custom software to transform audio waves into complex patterns that weave and cut across vantage points of the site, exploring the aged relationships between water and rock. A contemplation of imperceptible movements that have shaped these iconic sandstone cliffs over 500 million years.

The images work as metaphors to visualize geological processes, that reveal hidden rhythms in what appears static. Patterns that seek to feel erosion, sedimentation, and metamorphosis—processes that continue unabated beyond human perception.

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"Retreat Into the Swamp"

Christine Banna (Dir), 6 minutes, USA, Buffalo Premiere

Director Christine Banna in attendance.

"Retreat Into the Swamp" indexes the entropy of a stump within a public nature preserve in Western New York. Over the course of a year, the stump topples and sinks into the swamp. By focusing on the undulating silhouette of the stump across multiple seasons, the film accelerates its transformation, offering an opportunity to witness its decay in minutes rather than months.

It animates the slow collapse of a stump into a swamp. By combining LiDAR scans of the stump taken over the course of a year with analog animation techniques, the film creates an assemblage of both documentary evidence and a translated, subjective experience of decay.

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