The Hill Between (2025)
Jackson Kroopf | 7' 44" | USA | World Premiere
First loves Jordan and Aliezah are parting ways for college. Between their homes in Culver City and Inglewood sits the largest urban oil field in America, a landscape that evokes deep time and quiet rupture. Over two days, we shared the camera and microphone in these hills, considering the borderland's parallel to the threshold their relationship faces. Co-written and co-shot with the couple, the film meditates on how parks amidst large cities mirror our emotional states. Part time capsule for a young couple, part visual ode to a South Los Angeles landscape that has provided solace and inspiration for years.

Penny, Here (2025)
Jackson Kroopf | 18' 44" | USA | San Diego Premiere
For 50 years in Big Sur, Penny has survived storms inside and out, turning to music and poetry for guidance. A musical prodigy, gestalt therapist, and Red Cross coordinator, she has adapted for over nine decades as her eyesight and hearing have declined. As one-third of The Overlapping Halos, Penny shares the poetry of Hafiz with her community, who find humor and wisdom in the pursuit of union with the divine. Shot over a year in Big Sur, the film bears witness to Penny reflecting on aging, communing with friends and family, improvising on the keys, and meditating on death.

Bloomed in the Water (2024)
Joanne Mony Park | 14' 07" | USA | San Diego Premiere
Bloomed in the Water portrays a Korean immigrant single mother who misinterprets school picture day, resulting in surprise when her son’s appearance differs from his classmates’. With her sisters by her side, Min navigates the aftermath, exploring themes of making mistakes and self-acceptance.

Your Touch Makes Others Invisible (2025) +  A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth (2025)
Rajee Samarasinghe | 78 min | Sri Lanka
+ More info

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This special combined program celebrates the remarkable filmmaking talent within UC San Diego's Cinematic Arts faculty, bringing together three distinct and accomplished voices for the 11th San Diego Underground Film Festival.

Jackson Kroopf is a filmmaker working across fiction, documentary, and hybrid forms whose films have screened at BFI London, Clermont-Ferrand, Outfest, and SFFILM. His short film NASIR won the Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC and was distributed by the Los Angeles Times. A Sundance Institute/NEH Fellow, Kroopf has created performance-centered nonfiction work collaborating with elders to explore memory and intergenerational storytelling.

Joanne Mony Park is a UCSD alumna of the Visual Arts media program who has come full circle, now teaching cinematography to the next generation of filmmakers. Inspired by feminist, experimental, and radical filmmakers she studied with at UCSD, Park believes everyone has a story to tell — and that finding one's own voice and style is essential to the art. Her films include Fish Bones, Mamihlapinatapai, and Bloomed in the Water.

Rajee Samarasinghe is a native Sri Lankan filmmaker whose work tackles contemporary sociopolitical conditions in Sri Lanka through the lens of his own identity and the deconstruction of ethnographic practices. In 2025, his debut feature Your Touch Makes Others Invisible was featured in the Bright Future section of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film." 

Together, these three filmmakers embody the adventurous, interdisciplinary spirit of UCSD's Cinematic Arts program — from hybrid documentary to experimental cinema to deeply personal nonfiction — and represent some of the most exciting work being made in independent film today.

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