STUCK – Giselle Bonilla (Los Angeles, California)
A man gets stuck in a sex doll who has become attached to him romantically. 2023; 3 min.
Judy’s Garden – Evie Metz (Richmond, Virginia)
In Judy’s Garden, a woman is confronted by death and taken on a journey through her past. The garden is shown as a cosmic arena of continuous death and renewal, one which all living things, including the gardener herself, are a part of. The film is an ode to these cycles in the natural world and a meditation on what it means to be alive. 2024; 7 min.
Tennis, Oranges – Sean Pecknold (Los Angeles, California)
A robotic vacuum suffering from burnout quits its job at a hospital and sets out to find community and a greater purpose on a quiet street where two lonely rabbits are stuck in perpetual loops. 2023; 11 min.
Use Your Words – Michelle Tattenbaum (Maplewood, New Jersey)
A new friendship between two lonely mothers is plunged into jeopardy when they discover that a painful event from one's past lives on in the other’s present. Use Your Words is a story of the healing power of friendship. 2023; 14 min.
The Double Room – Martin Del Carpio (New York, New York)
Honor, both an artist and dreamer, finds himself in a dystopian reality of the corporate world. Having to face himself, his choice remains in whether to give in for the sake of survival or exist independently from what our culture has conditioned us to accept. 2024; 15 min.
Brain Freeze – Kelsey Comeau (Brooklyn, New York)
A snapshot of life long friends Carrie and Madison Hu as their relationship crumbles at the seams. In their safe bubble of Northern New Jersey, the friends have hit their breaking point on Rae’s eighteenth birthday. Crossing paths years later, in a queer abyss that is Fire Island Pines, the friends are no longer. Dealing with themes of adulthood, queer identity, female friendship and mortality, Brain Freeze tackles two formative moments in adolescence otherwise overlooked: the friends who fade away. 2024; 15 min.
Along The Rail – Jonathan Harkel (New Jersey)
After moving on from a career of shooting medium format film for celebrities and high-end clients, a photographer begins capturing graffiti with his cell phone from the window of a commuter train, then builds a device to develop cyanotype prints at home. "I found it fascinating that there were people out there in the middle of the night making art on the side of these train tracks," he says. "It became an experiment of documenting the graffiti. Since I had very little time to make my own art, placing my cell phone on the windows of these trains and trying to capture these pieces of graffiti felt like it was at least celebrating this form of art. On these incredible old walls along the Montclair-Boonton line, there are people making beautiful art along the rail." 2023; 21 min.
Tlaloc (Lines Drawn in Water) – Abinadi Meza (Austin, Texas)
Tlaloc (Lines Drawn in Water) is a hand-painted cameraless 16mm film - an enigmatic otherworld where hues of water evolve into prismatic blooms. Tlaloc is the deity of waters, rain, lightning, and growth in the Aztec pantheon; he is the lord of the drowned. This film explores the membrane of film itself - a moving skin marked by fluid, punctured by light. The soundtrack was entirely made with contact microphones to capture handmade surface markings and gestures. 2023; 5 min.
The Makin Waves Song of the Week is "ICE SS" by the Central Jersey punk act Sally Draper.
