It Felt Like Night (2024)
Dir. James Hollenbaugh | 1' 47" | USA | California Premiere
The Great North American Eclipse occurred on April 8, 2024. Some things went according to plan. Some did not.

Resurrect Me as a Parasite (2025)
Dir. Gabi Dao & Lou Lou Sainsbury | 9' 52" | UK, Canada, Netherlands | U.S.A. Premiere
A vampiric trio facilitates the transition of a new host across a former limestone quarry and the sacred mountain grotto of Mary Magdalene, troubling binaries of life, death, gender and parasitism. Monuments to female saints become poses of living queer memory, as skeletal remains are transformed with embellishments. A mosquito draws blood with its proboscis and hormones are drawn using a syringe, as the remnants of an extracted zone is now overgrown with lifeforms.

A Nipple's Journey (2025)
Dir. Damian Kiernan | 3' 54" | USA | California Premiere
Damian's left nipple fell off and the rest is history...

Urine Trouble (2025)
Dir. Ella Berke | 4' 35" | USA | California Premiere
An archaic action film. Dancing while undressing on the way to go pee, all to the rhythm of a soundtrack as disjointed as its images.

Beach Day (2025)
Dir. Damian Gong | 2' 16" | USA | U.S.A. Premiere
Fish, bodybuilders, and soccer games re-materialize in a boy's mind. Inspired by childhood videos and transitioning, "Beach Day" is a collage of past and present, digital and analog, and imagined and real. Digitized camcorder video, rotoscoped animations, and narrated anecdotes merge with ambient noises to create an unraveling of time.

LIL GIBBOS | Hot Drop
Dir. Arius Ziaee | 5' 03" | USA | San Diego Premiere
Gibby tries out Hot Yoga & the Gibbos experience the microscopic marvels of sweat!

My Structuralist Film (2026)
Dir. Angelo Madsen | 6' 15" | USA | California Premiere
How shall I cater best to your desire for me to be visible? Set up as a confessional-cum-guided meditation, My Structuralist Film uses performance artist Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performance (“Time Clock Piece”) as a framework to illustrate the filmmaker's (presumable) insides. How thoroughly should a trans body want or need to be visible? On what terms is the filmmaker obligated to narrativize, perform, or even fabricate visibility for the sake of an audience? Considering the limits and limitations of disclosure, this project positions the act of looking not as an offering or an exchange, but as an unyielding neoliberal, capitalist thirst to both consume and be inside the trans body.

Busy Bodies
Dir. Kate Renshaw-Lewis | 5' 42" | USA | San Diego Premiere
Busy Bodies is a hand-drawn animation that combines inkjet and screen printing. Inspired by Rube Goldberg machines, the film explores the undisclosed production journey of easily disposable objects. The images of the film cycle and deteriorate, visualizing the repetition, speed, and destructive nature of the factory method supply chain.

The Body (2025)
Dir. Jackie Turpin, Davy Walker | 4' 08" | USA, Canada | World Premiere
Intimacy on display. My skin pressed. Pooling between plates of touch screen glass, video blue with anticipation. The body surveilled, the body yearned for, the body paid for. Endless loops of films of tapes of the endless present of the endless scroll. Our endless role flayed agape for all to see in 4k's and traced rays.

Foreign Bodies (2025)
Dir. Lysander Wong | 3' 30" | UK | California Premiere
A simple itch descends into an outbreak with many legs.

Embodied (2025)
Dir. Samuel Wright Smith | 13' 09" | USA, Canada | California Premiere
A collective oil pastel-animated reflection on death, as shared by individuals facing the end of life aided by psychedelic-assisted care.


*Please note that some of the films in this program contain explicit imagery and/or topics. Viewer discretion is advised.

---