SHORT FILM SESSION: LSD FACTORY

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 echos 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.

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.

SHORT FILM SESSION

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.

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.

PULSATOR

Dir. Thor Sivertsen | 5 mins | Norway | Experimental | AUS Premiere | 2019 Pulsator is an abstract experimental art film. Organic and geometric shapes drifting and making constantly new pictures. Made with different painting techniques, stop motion and time-lapse – digitally manipulated and layered in the editing process. The music is made by the group Motorpsycho specially for the film.

SUSIE

Dir. Jordan Doig | 15 mins | USA/Australia | Thriller | AUS Premiere | 2020 Susie and Andy’s relationship has become toxic. In order to deal with Andy’s controlling and emotionally damaging actions, Susie begins to manifest a real and physical horror.

TERROR FERVOR

Dir. Phoebe Parsons | 6 mins | Canada | Animation | AUS Premiere | 2019 Informed by experimental films from the 1960s and 70s, Terror Fervor takes the viewer on a psychedelic non-linear journey through the vices of seven characters. By way of the timeless tropes of desire and malaise such as vanity, gluttony and fury, the wordless journey of Terror Fervor plunges the viewer into an experience that is hard to classify and hard to forget.

THERE WERE FOUR OF US

Dir. Cassie Shao | 7 mins | USA/China | Animation | AUS Premiere | 2019 An experimental film about non-linear dream experience that travels through a room where four characters are trapped, through moments in their lives and through the symbol of death

that connected them together.

VR FOOD

Dir. Malcolm Mills | 13 mins | USA | Experimental | AUS Premiere | 2020 Inventors struggle to create virtual food— infinite deliciousness, zero calories— when they mistake an obscure film, “VR Food,” as a

successful invention of virtual food.

WOOD CHILD AND HIDDEN FOREST MOTHER

Dir. Stephen Irwin | 10 mins | UK | Animation | AUS Premiere | 2020 Deep in the forest, a hunter encounters a strange creature he cannot kill.