3STIGIA (2024)

Now They Experience It All the Time...

The newest film by SamHel

I Should Call Her

An overly anxious man mysteriously finds himself unable to leave a bathroom.

Vide-Uhhh!

Produced using a VHS VCR and a digital camcorder, Vide-Uhhh! is an experimental piece, showcasing the VCR recording itself as Jesse England takes it apart, messes with key components and even attempts to break it.

Woman Is My Last Name

This visual poetry is a celebration of the full spectrum of womanhood, from the complex vulnerability to the hidden power.

Skagit

Four friends leave Seattle for a weekend in a remote, rain-soaked corner of Washington State's rustic Skagit Valley. The foreboding October landscape begins to warp their minds, plunging each of them into alternate realities where they must grapple with personal demons, sexual tensions, and a sinister natural world as they claw their way back to sanity.

Lost Footage

How would a found footage film look if the footage was never found? This conceptual art experiment questions the very nature of film and cinema while serving as an ironic tribute to the found footage horror pop culture. The found footage format provides the narrative justification for such a film to exist: the non-existence exists because the footage existed yet it was lost and never found.

Ray's World

A guy named Ray tries to go to sleep and a sasquatch gets into funky business.

One Minute Reharsal

Actors Isabella Lafin and Rafael Grendene reharsing a scene from the movie Marriage Story (2019).

Some precious things

During an audio message sent to his daughter, a father reflects on how the recent discovery of dusty reels and scratchy VHS tapes capturing childhood moments has propelled him on a journey of ancient memories and forgotten dreams . Using a blend of personal, public domain, and freely available footage, the film deconstructs reality and reimagines the past, questioning where memory ends and imagination begins.

Feet in Water, Head on Fire

Date palms imported and cultivated decades ago flourish in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. A cacophony of voices from across generations reflect on the shifting landscape of the region; some remember the first few acres that were planted, while others enjoy the luxuries of new golf courses. Feet in Water, Head on Fire is a sensorially vibrant 16mm experience that takes us on a journey of past, present, and future. Director Terra Long hand-processed the footage utilizing leftover dates and native plants intertwining the environment into the fabric of the film. Through complex and nuanced scenes, non-sync interviews blossom into a wonderfully gentle but memorable portrait of a community in flux.

Coma

Amidst a period of unprecedented world events, an eighteen-year-old girl’s life is placed on hold. Isolated in her bedroom, she falls under the spell of the mysterious vlogger Patricia Coma. As time carries on, the lines between her dreams, fears, hopes, and reality begin to blur into one another.

IMÁGENES CAPITALES

Two friends dreaming

The Sounds of 7am

This short film follows an intoxicated character's journey through the mystery, beauty and eeriness of his environment.

Purgatorium

After his death, a young man stuck in purgatory attempts to cope with the afterlife.

The Image Book

In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.

Barbara

Previously lost exploitation film which chronicles the sexual journey of a teenager who introduces her own family to the liberated ways of the free love rebellion.

Borealis

After the mysterious death of his father, Aaron O'Donnell, a ruthless capitalist, decides to take the reins as the leader of Borealis. However, his brother Andrew sets out to hijack his dictatorship and warn not only the residents of Borealis, but all future visitors of the danger Aaron poses.

Lurker

A voyeuristic night photographer discovers that she has become the subject of some thing's lens.

Lake

Lake gazes down at a still body of water from a birds-eye view, while a group of artists peacefully float in and out of the frame or work to stay at the surface. As they glide farther away and draw closer together, they reach out in collective queer and desirous exchanges — holding hands, drifting over and under their neighbors, making space, taking care of each other with a casual, gentle intimacy while they come together as individual parts of a whole. The video reflects on notions of togetherness and feminist theorist Silvia Federici’s call to “reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and our bodies.”

An Asian Ghost Story

A cinematic and conceptually inventive film that explores the haunting memories of Asia’s late 20th-century modernization through the large-scale export of wigs during the Cold War. Yet, in every wig resides a ghost from the imperial past.

Leda + Swans

“Leda + Swans” depicts an infernal, mythic birth of cinema, dredging the violence and horror from Wallace McCutcheon’s comic short film “Photographing a Female Crook” (1904). Leda, who may or may not be a falsely accused young woman, is brought in for a mugshot by two officers. She first attempts to avoid the camera’s gaze, and, when overpowered and manhandled, contorts her face to ruin the photograph. However, her small rebellion proves futile; she was already being recorded, objectified, mapped, and co-opted by the Godhead of the director. As her body and image are repurposed and transmuted ad infinitum, the filmic universe also explodes into a supernova. What is born out of this suffering and manipulation is another example of our sublime medium and modern muse. She will not be last the Leda, and she may not even be the first. Who is the guilty party here? Is beauty a chimera in traditional cinema? Has the ephemeral cinema of the attractions and distractions era gone anywhere?

Woolgathering

A collection of interwoven images are threaded together by a string of unspecified women who roam their dreamscape which they are unable to escape. They are displaced, belonging to no particular point in time or place, and a disoriented sense of self pervades. Together, the film becomes a quietly throbbing organism of reality and unreality, and the gaps between an impending present and a perpetual past are frail.

Tourist;Drifter

An experimental coming-of-age odyssey through someone's troubled mind, going from country to country, landscape to landscape, growing up in the process. A documentary, travelogue, vlog, dream and self-portrait. A reflection on life, death and history.

A Field of Sheep

A field full of sheep is observed through the camera, preserving that moment in time forever.

Logistics

Logistics or Logistics Art Project is an experimental art film. At 51,420 minutes (857 hours or 35 days and 17 hours), it is the longest movie ever made. A 37 day-long road movie in the true sense of the meaning. The work is about Time and Consumption. It brings to the fore what is often forgotten in our digital, ostensibly fast-paced world: the slow, physical freight transportation that underpins our economic reality.

Hong Kong Mixtape

Political engagement spawned the wildest of wonderlands for Hong Kong’s creativity – but as a new law annihilates freedom of expression overnight, underground artists and creatives find themselves targets, and their works disappeared. Together we race to preserve the creative uprising amid China’s crackdown.

Death in Vegas

The life, death, and resurrection of Elvis Presley, as he is transformed from man into product. Composed primarily of an illustrated biography filmed with a microscope camera.

Caterpillar

A half-hour experimental film that shows Fukui moving towards cyberpunk imagery in a manner similar to Tsukamoto, featuring industrial locations, a malfunctioning cyborg/android and a hulking metallic ‘caterpillar’ that stalks characters.

Salem's Flames

A chauvinistic young man pays a visit to a new nightclub named "Salem's Flames", unaware that he is about to meet his comeuppance at the hands of a coven of witches.

For You

Flowers, Animals, Grass, Sky, Loved ones, Like, Follow, Comment. View the forgotten and ruined memories that have been tainted by earworms, bad comedy and the far-right pipeline. Gaze upon the endless landscape, or gaze upon the endless thirst traps.

ZAPPER!

In a surreal universe where bananas fire laser beams and soup cans are used as grenades, a wacky cast of gangsters are thrown into a deadly game to battle it out over a mystical longboard in this trippy take on the Tarantino crime genre.

The Scary Movie

Martina and Sonja, cross-dress in vampire capes and werewolf claws, re-enacting familiar horror tropes. A corresponding soundtrack of stock screams and "scary" music suggests that the girls' toying with gender roles and power dynamics may have dire consequences.

Twin City Twist

A silent dance documenting a brief visit to Minneapolis in the fall of 2022. A reflection on the sleeping city's tumultuous recent history through a recollected interaction and a plea for continued disturbance. An entry in an ongoing video and film series, Twin City Twist was shot on Kodak Tri-X reversal super 8 film with kaleidoscopic lenses. The film was scanned and edited digitally.

Inland Empire

An actress’s perception of reality becomes increasingly distorted as she finds herself falling for her co-star in a remake of an unfinished Polish production that was supposedly cursed.

Tomatoes

Across the installation's multiple channels, the camera circles a group of artists as they sit together in a field eating, licking, and squeezing ripe tomatoes. Throughout the ever-changing scene, kisses, whispers, and caresses are shared with a casual, gentle intimacy that reflects interconnectivity and abundance. These queer and desirous exchanges constitute a portrait of collectivity wherein individuals come together as distinct parts of a whole.