SHORT FILM SESSION
BREAK THROUGH THE ABYSS
Dir. Giselle Chien | 6 mins | USA | Experimental | AUS Premiere | 2019 The phenomenon of digital media affecting the brains of my generation in the way we think, the way we view ourselves, morphing our desires to become the false perfections of others. The voices and echoes that lure in our heads, the wires running in monitors like the veins running through our body, we’ve allowed the abyss in our screens consume us, flesh, living, pulsing young minds. I felt the need to use as well as learn the essence of image-making as a result of this thought. There-fore used all analog methods to produce this film, from stop-motion animation to shooting to optical printing and processing.
A potent mix of the year’s best psychedelic shorts, this suite of films offers mindmelting experimentations in materialist structuralism, glitch aesthetics and speculative animation. Playing with form and function with gleeful ingenuity, who needs drug-induced highs when you have LSD FACTORY?
GHOULISH GALACTIC GRIEVANCES
Dir. Josh Owen | 14 mins | Canada | Experimental | AUS Premiere | 2019 A ghoul follows her dreams, leading her from a friend-filled swamp to the far reaches of outer space.
BROKEN RELATIONSHIP
Dir. Wrik Mead | 4 mins | Canada | Experimental | World Premiere | 2020 Broken Relationship moves through a kaleidoscope of colour and pixels to fragments of embraced bodies. Using glitched video footage from classic porn, the broken and distorted imagery speaks to the difficulty that the LBGTQ youth encounter when trying to navigate through their sexuality and relationships. The images mimic the broken messages that much of the porn industry communicates, certainly not the birds and the bee’s stories that most youth grow up with.
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OPTIC NERVE
Dir. Peter Hartsock | 15 mins | USA | Experimental | AUS Premiere | 2019 On a stormy night in a cramped decrepit apartment, 1973, a traumatized man seeking solace and structure through meditative drawing grapples with rabid anxieties as order and chaos collide and overtake him in this psychedelic trip of a film. Part narrative psycho-thriller, part audio-visual spectacle, one technicolor nightmare. Take the trip.
