2026 United States Super 8 Film & Digital Video Festival Day 1– Program 1
View the winning films and digital videos of the International United States Super 8 Film & Digital Video Festival, selected by a jury of filmmakers, Rutgers University student interns, and media professionals. The festival--now in its 38th year—will feature finalist works by independent filmmakers from the United States and around the world. Co-sponsored by Pro 8mm!
Gilbert & George Daytripping Forever - follows the artists Gilbert and George as they embark on another adventure to Southend-on-Sea and explore the meaning of their art and their lives.
Speculations - The images in this film are a visual essay on the concept of portrait: the portrait of a young woman and the portrait of a city. The voice of a barely audible woman interprets a flow of images from a distant, timeless reality. Slowly, the viewer realizes that someone is taking a journey. We are in a large world capital, we are in Tokyo, the crowd moves frenetically, cars pass by, someone pauses for a moment in front of the lens. The film "Speculations" does not tell a specific story. Its purpose is to investigate the concept of subjectivity "in relation to the whole".Tokyo and Florence, two completely different cities, are enlivened by the voice of a woman who connects seemingly irreconcilable realities.
Can the subject exist without a relationship with things? Can the subject exist without a relationship with the community as a whole, with the "polis"?
This film was shot on Super8mm film in 2006 in Florence and Tokyo. The film was found and edited in 2024, and original music by Elisabetta Porcinai was added.
The Light of Eons - In the future you never have to sleep. But a discovery at Jupiter makes Jeffery question his life.
Broken Token - A single female voice sings a folk ballad, inspired by a song found in a Victorian song collector’s manuscript in a Plymouth, UK, museum archive. She sings of waiting, in her summer garden, for the return home of her love from the war. As she waits, three veterans pass, and she asks them: “When you were fighting in distant lands, did you think of the home you had left?” In reply to this, the veterans tell of their experiences of connecting with home during the conflicts in The Falklands, The Gulf and Afghanistan. These words are taken from interviews with UK ex-servicemen and their family members.
Accompanying the singing voice on two screens are Super 8mm shots of Plymouth summertime front garden gates, thresholds to the archetypal English plot, revealing through their repetition the quiet unpredictability of the ordinary. Each shot is split in two like the ‘broken token’ mentioned in the song (a gimmel ring split between the lovers before he left for war, to be re-united when, or if, he returns). The garden shots (and the voiceover) are disrupted by references to these interviews being recorded, and to the other means that have been used to construct the piece, means by which the past has been made to return anew: searching internet archives; attempting to decipher a manuscript in a museum collection; note taking by a Victorian song collector.
The garden images represent ‘home’, but they also stand in for a more general possibility of redemption, of the potential of the past to return, changed, to renew the present: “Each moment of time is a garden gate,” the song goes, “Through it my love may walk.” The ‘past’ that the veterans experienced, and it’s return to the present in a new form – the veterans’ recollections – are two different things: like the real and its representation, like home and elsewhere, like the two parts of a broken ring. There is a distance between our past and our memories of it now, but knowledge of this allows us to move between them, making the past active in the present, transforming both: “The shining, strange, veiled and broken past/Will upset our world any second now.”
Kway La Soul: Poetry in Chicago - In his debut music video, Kway La Soul expresses his raw emotions about breaking into the music industry and his true feelings for the city he grew up in.
The Empty Frame - A young woman finds an old Polaroid camera in her new home only to have it reveal secrets about her future. Shot entirely on Super 8 film!
they're taking my house - A woman finds herself trapped in an abyss, taunted by a malevolent telephone.
Not Alone - an experimental 2D animated film about a cat that absorbs their twin sister during fetal development, a medical phenomenon known as chimerism. The story follows the cat’s battle with mental health and processing a vivid fantasy world. Through the waves of pain, the sisters reunited. In the end, they both turned into stars.
“Not Alone” is based on Momo’s personal experience and aims to remind viewers that they are not the only ones who bear the emotional pain.
DuPhomf's Passing - Existential horror comes from outside and within for the drifter Jacques DuPhomf, lost in the vastness of the American West. In this super8mm tall tale.
Les Amateurs - They Didn't Plan This! Shot straight on a single 50' reel of Kodak Tri-X Super 8 film stock with no editing.
Track - Shot on black and white super 8 film in a stop motion fashion and layered digitally, "Track" is a ballet of lights. Chandler takes us on a trip around the Astoria Park jogging track at night in one of her signature Quicktrips.
Video on Demand for 24 hours beginning at 12 Midnight Eastern USA. In-Person screening at 7PM in Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901.
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