Groundwork – 2026
Tuesday, April 14, 1:00 PM
Break All The Vases, Steal All The Flowers
Director: Michael Alexander Morris, Experimental, USA, 4 min
Oh rascal children of Gaza,
You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,
You who filled every morning with rush and chaos,
You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony,
Come back –
And scream as you want,
And break all the vases,
Steal all the flowers,
Come back,
Just come back…
— Khalid Juma
Motorcycle Moment
Director: Les Blank, Documentary, USA, 6 min
Les Blank’s vintage footage crafted into a moment that captures the vastness of the American West at a time when the motorcycle was the ultimate in highway adventure.
The Call
Director: Kelly Sears, Experimental, USA, 7 min
A rebellion has been building for decades. An eco-revenge film featuring unlikely instigators who were observed and filmed over three years at airports across the USA. This is a call to action.
Florence is for Lovers
Directors: Lily Ekimian Ragheb, Ahmed T. Ragheb Experimental, Italy, 5 min
A fragmented encounter on a Tuscan train leads to an unsettling meditation on intimacy, violence, and communication in this part-travelogue, part-city symphony.
Highways Take Me Anywhere I Want
Director: Maria Luisa Santos, Documentary, USA, 8 min
California highways become a portal for a recent immigrant, as she and her father share stories across distance, hoping to find or make home where they’ve ended up.
Melencolia 2: Destitution Signs
Director: M Woods, Experimental, USA, 8 min
A nostalgic retread through the 4th plateau of New York City followed by a short polemic against ethnography and hipsters.
Early Spring
Director: Dani Wasserman, Experimental, USA, 4 min
A poem film on the changing of the seasons.
Away from Things
Director: Leighton Pierce, Experimental, Iceland, USA, 6 min
Pierce continues his explorations into enacted cognition. He uses video and sound to transform our sense of time and space, and certainly challenges us to look directly at our processes of perception, leading us toward a pre-verbal understanding of proto-narrative.
Injured?
Director: Eislow Johnson, Experimental, USA, 14 min
Need help? Crashouts, manifestation influencers and injury lawyers collide in this breakneck ride through the Midwest.
Document With No End
Director: Kym McDaniel, Experimental, USA, 10 min
A hybrid speculative fiction and personal film that moves across past, present, and future timelines refusing to erase the disabled body and insists upon making illness visible and posing questions regarding grief, loss, and Queer/Crip time.
Panic in Nowhere
Director: Adrian Flury, Experimental, USA, 28 min
Drifting through videoclips online easily leaves you distracted, lost, and back on square one. Imagine, you found a series clips organized by a sense of inchoate feeling of eclipse of time and end of the world, evoking a shared sense of fate.