Short Program #2: Gutter, Danceable, Circle, Balaena, The Sprayer, Light Leak, Circle – Online for 24 Hours and In-Person at 5PM

Sunday, June 04, 2023 @ 5:00pm

NJ Film Festival
71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

After this content becomes available June 4th at 12:00 am EDT, you'll have 23 hours 59 minutes to start watching. Once you begin, you'll have 24 hours to finish watching.

Gutter – Theodore Drusba (Montreal, Canada)

Mist. Dust. A bowling alley in the crosshair of a thunderstorm. A pregnant woman, a businessman and a widower find shelter in its midst. Pins are knocked down until gloomy moths kindle an outage. 2022; 22 min.

Circle - Phillip Kaminiak (Berlin, Germany)

Circle is an analogy between the modern human being, living in mass cities, and the phenomenon of the circle of death - observed in nature with ants who are separated from the main foraging party and lose the pheromone track. They begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle, commonly known as a "death spiral" because the ants might eventually die of exhaustion. Shot in Mexico City, this vibrant and impressive city is a protagonist, symbolizing a life in endless high-speed movement and the humans who are dedicating their lives to endless movement, self-exhaustion in a modern capitalistic-based world. 2022; 6 min.

Danceable - Kelsey McGee (Basking Ridge, New Jersey)

Three dancers with disabilities find freedom through movement. 2022; 22 min.

Light Leak – Nate Dorr (Brooklyn, New York)

Light is information, a signal more lasting than recollection. If there’s anyone out there to receive the message. Isolated in a sealed apartment, a lone observer regards an outside world outside become increasingly unreal or unreachable. Archaic illuminations, old slides and the pin-lights of the camera obscura, crawl across the walls. Connections fray. Time loses meaning. A science fictional essay film, or its inverse. A rumination on optics, memory, data, and endings.

(Possible strobe warning: mild-to-moderate flickering in a few scenes.) 2022; 8 min.

Balaena - Alessia Cecchet (Santa Cruz, California)

A whale lies stranded on the beach, and a woman seeks closure through a simulacrum while human interlopers observe, collect, dissect and take selfies. 2022; 8 min.

The Sprayer – Farnoosh Abedi (Tehran, Iran)

In the land occupied with the sprayers army, no one has the right to grow any kind of plants either in public or private. So many of the people and soldiers do not even know how a plant grows or what it looks like, until one day one of the soldiers finds a seed buried deep down in the dust and his curiosity is just the beginning of something extraordinary, something big, something revolutionary. 2022; 9 min.