
Program 1 - PersonalEyes
69 minutes
Light Matter is Curated by James Hansen
Friday November 7, 5 PM
River Nocturne (meditation on noise)
Francesco Zanatta, Italy, 11 minutes
World Premiere
River Nocturne is a study of the concept of noise intended not only as an unpleasant sound but also as a visual artifact. The so-called high sensitivity in digital cameras allows us to see in the dark by adding an artificial grain to the video, sacrificing its quality. In these night shots, noise is not avoided but rather enhanced, thus creating abstract, hypnotic images that pulsate slowly.
The Chinese Room
Soham Bagchi & Sneha Bhattacharya, India, 8 minutes
North American Premiere
Inspired by Jean Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, this experimental film features discursive dialogue between two AI models and explores the ideas of the death of art and communication in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
The Dream Portal
Samuel Karow, USA, 4 minutes
New York Premiere
The Dream Portal is an experimental self-portrait exploring fetishism, body image, and identity through raw, analog visuals. Using vintage tech and no digital effects, the film evokes the nebulous intimacy of memory and dreams—where shame and desire blur into something hauntingly honest.
Language Decay
Zazie Ray-Trapido, USA, 3 minutes
US Premiere
A broken camera and three rolls of film, two daylight and one tungsten, capture days with my grandmother. The version of the woman on celluloid is more foreign to her than to me, and the version of herself speaking these languages is more foreign to me than to her, but both are not fully in our grasp and slip away and decay. They do not belong to either of us but to time—much like how languages are imperfect and adapt to the needs of those who speak them.
Time causes disintegration, wherein different variations and versions emerge. Because of physical separation, my grandmother slowly forgets her native tongue and the languages she spoke as a child, mirroring the movement and transformation of living languages. The act of remembering brings back these decomposing versions of past selves, selves that never were or briefly were, then hidden away but not discarded. The film intentionally chooses to leave all sequences unsubtitled.
fām II
Arash Akbari, Iran, 4 minutes
North American Premiere
Fām II is a visual music piece that explores the aesthetics of algorithmic processes. Generated from a
A single block of logic-based code, it simultaneously produces and manipulates both audio and visual
streams, forming a perceptual field of pulsation and uncertainty. Through computation and recursion,
the system creates an improvisational sensory phenomenon, detached from symbolic systems of
conceptualization and control.
The first iteration of the piece was presented at Orbit Festival in Utrecht and MAPP_MTL in
Montreal.
Toward a Fundamental Theory of Physics
Victor Van Rossem, Belgium, 13 minutes
Shot on 16mm film using a handcrafted Time-Slice camera with 293 lenses—a modern reinterpretation of the original device built by Tim Macmillan in the early 1980s—toward a fundamental theory of physics offers a unique, tactile exploration of time and light as the raw materials and fundamental paradoxes of cinema.