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SHORT FILM PROGRAM No 005
The Phalanx (2025)
Ben Balcom | 13' 30" | USA | California Premiere
Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association, the frictions that give way to fracture. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time.
Local Sensations (2025) / โลคอลเซนเซชันส์
Tulapop Saenjaroen | 25' 29" | Thailand | California Premiere
Shot on black-and-white 16mm film, Local Sensations opens a loose, playful dialogue with Chatri Prakitnonthakan’s essay, How to Design a Modern Monument That Won’t Become a Shrine. Rather than illustrating the text, the film generates pluralities—unraveling the dichotomy of object and subject—and gestures toward a kind of topological politics.
Though it circles around ideas of monuments, monumentality, and sanctification in Thai society, no statues or literal monuments ever appear. Instead, the film drifts through an arborist’s walking tour, a glassblowing workshop, a drawing game among architecture students, a multi-instrument improviser, a recreation center with its non-human inhabitants, and a snow town in a theme park.
These fragments, only obliquely connected, are woven into an evolving, gently destabilizing field of sensation. Together, they form an ecological and metaphysical nexus—an invitation to reconsider what “locality” and “monumentality” might mean, and how close they are to us.
Half Halt (2025)
Sofia Theodore-Pierce | 11' 29" | USA | San Diego Premiere
“pause spewing pause/ to learn the grammatical fact/ there is no going forward alone"–Rosie Stockton
In horsemanship a half halt is a pulse on the rein to say, hey I’m still here, holding you. It indicates something around the bend, a warning and a reassurance. Here, a series of interruptions are held together by those who catch me when I'm falling. Rosie reads their poem. Grace and I brave the dark. Camera breaks. Record skips. Lovers reunite through a viewfinder. We’re all filming each other on horseback. A meditation on intimacy in times of offscreen emergency, both personal and political. Seizures as elevators.
Now, Hear Me Good (2025)
Dwayne LeBlanc | 15' 16" | USA | San Diego Premiere
Booker is far from home but close to friends and mentors as he hosts an exuberant party, but when the noise of the party dies down and the last guests go home a listlessness returns to him. Only the next morning, while playing his trumpet, does he find his place in the stillness of the soft early light.
Ben Balcom | 13' 30" | USA | California Premiere
Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association, the frictions that give way to fracture. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time.
Local Sensations (2025) / โลคอลเซนเซชันส์
Tulapop Saenjaroen | 25' 29" | Thailand | California Premiere
Shot on black-and-white 16mm film, Local Sensations opens a loose, playful dialogue with Chatri Prakitnonthakan’s essay, How to Design a Modern Monument That Won’t Become a Shrine. Rather than illustrating the text, the film generates pluralities—unraveling the dichotomy of object and subject—and gestures toward a kind of topological politics.
Though it circles around ideas of monuments, monumentality, and sanctification in Thai society, no statues or literal monuments ever appear. Instead, the film drifts through an arborist’s walking tour, a glassblowing workshop, a drawing game among architecture students, a multi-instrument improviser, a recreation center with its non-human inhabitants, and a snow town in a theme park.
These fragments, only obliquely connected, are woven into an evolving, gently destabilizing field of sensation. Together, they form an ecological and metaphysical nexus—an invitation to reconsider what “locality” and “monumentality” might mean, and how close they are to us.
Half Halt (2025)
Sofia Theodore-Pierce | 11' 29" | USA | San Diego Premiere
“pause spewing pause/ to learn the grammatical fact/ there is no going forward alone"–Rosie Stockton
In horsemanship a half halt is a pulse on the rein to say, hey I’m still here, holding you. It indicates something around the bend, a warning and a reassurance. Here, a series of interruptions are held together by those who catch me when I'm falling. Rosie reads their poem. Grace and I brave the dark. Camera breaks. Record skips. Lovers reunite through a viewfinder. We’re all filming each other on horseback. A meditation on intimacy in times of offscreen emergency, both personal and political. Seizures as elevators.
Now, Hear Me Good (2025)
Dwayne LeBlanc | 15' 16" | USA | San Diego Premiere
Booker is far from home but close to friends and mentors as he hosts an exuberant party, but when the noise of the party dies down and the last guests go home a listlessness returns to him. Only the next morning, while playing his trumpet, does he find his place in the stillness of the soft early light.
Sunday, May 3 @ 5:00 PM
52 min + Q&A w/ attending artists
Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Art
@ UC San Diego
Free Admission
52 min + Q&A w/ attending artists
Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Art
@ UC San Diego
Free Admission