ouarda ouarda: yet another flower film (2026) by Samy Benammar 

Flowers flicker along a 16mm strip, just before or right after the flames. You can hear them weep, scream and resist. In response to this stridency, there is the burst of light from a black petal. Working from scientific audio recording, the film is designed as an act of appropriation and resistance, refusing to let flowers burn. (Samy Benammar)

XTENDED RELEASE (version 2.5) (2026) by Joshua Gen Solondz

A collage film on 16mm offloading found footage Solondz accumulated from specific people/points in time; collaged with tape, ink, skin, semen, and various corrosive chemicals. A fragmentary narrative? A private joke. An intermission? For Luther and Tomonari and my grandfather. (Joshua Gen Solondz)
bay area premiere

Plastic Aortas (2024) by Malic Amalya

Plastic Aortas is a portrait of the black plastic lining the Fells Reservoir in the unceded land of the Massachusett, Pawtucket and Naumkeag indigenous peoples. The lining was placed there by conservationists to mitigate the invasive Common Reed, which is killing native plants. However, the lining also interferes with wildlife and contaminates the water. The title references Roland Barthes’ 1957 essay, “Plastic,” in which he writes, “The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas.” 65 years later, in 2022, microplastic pollutants were found in human blood and, in 2023, in human heart tissue. In this film, tension rises between the benefits and hazards of plastic or, as Barthes describes, between life and plastic. (Malic Amalya)

Am I Mourning What I Never Lost? (2025) by R. James Edwards

The title Am I Mourning What I Never Lost? refers to the mundanities of living with a permanent hearing loss from birth, therefore never having technically “lost” anything. Artist R. James Edwards documents his experience with the medical system and the ways his disability is viewed and grieved for by outsiders through poetry. (Vtape)

Leather Graves (2025) by Malic Amalya

Leather Graves is an experimental 16mm film that explores the permeable boundaries between exile and ecstasy. Cruising amongst gravestones engraved with references to queer culture and sexuality, queers defy death by devouring candy-coated blossoms. The queer epitaphs in Leather Graves were created by double-exposing inscriptions on gravestones (largely last names), using an in-camera double exposure technique with a Bolex camera and a matte-box. The cast and crew are all trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming and/or femme queer people. (Malic Amalya)

semipermeable: syringe (2024) by Marcos Serafim

Generative AI inherits the same political and epistemological infrastructures that regulate bodies, borders and viral life. Working inside these systems, the piece confronts the inability of commercial image models to imagine the HIV epidemic unfolding across the US/Mexico borderlands, where the virus disproportionately affects Hispanic and Latino communities through overlapping regimes of migration, healthcare, surveillance and state violence. Their refusals, distortions and hallucinations become the material of the work. These synthetic images circulate through custom audiovisual software where recursive processing transforms computational failure into an unstable field of contamination, desire and sensation. (Marcos Serafim)
bay area premiere