Hosted by digital art and animation studies in the School of Art and Design, this year’s edition will showcase nearly 100 professionally crafted videos, animations, and digital media artworks from regional and global creators, and WVU students beginning tomorrow (April 10) through Sunday (April 13).
With events in the WVU Canady Creative Arts Center and the WVU Planetarium, the film festival immerses viewers in a weekend of creativity and ideas through independent filmmaking, experimental video and new media art.
In addition to film screenings, attendees can participate in lively Q&A sessions with participating artists and filmmakers and view exciting examples of contemporary new media art such as a virtual reality presentation — a series of two-channel video installation pieces and a unique collaboration between the festival and the Planetarium with live 360 degree video projections and performance works.
All festival events are free and open to the public.
Find a full schedule of events.
Centering on this year's festival theme — space — the lineup includes fascinating, dome-oriented video artworks by national and international artists from the United States, Germany and China, including a spectacular work by Shanghai-born artist LEOW (Dian Wang) titled “White Birds Worship the Phoenix.” Drawing inspiration from an ancient Chinese fable in which 100 birds sacrifice their colorful wings to a great Phoenix, LOEW’s work is a dazzling display of colors and textures symbolizing this allegorical offering of respect, renewal and harmony. The evening culminates with a live audio-visual performance piece titled “Aeon” by Colorado-based guest artists Debora and Jason Bernagozzi, founders of Signal Culture, a nonprofit residency program for experimental media artists.
The four-day extravaganza kicks off at 6 p.m. Thursday (April 10) at the WVU Planetarium with a unique and exciting selection of works by guest artists and students studying digital art and animation, and electronic music composition. These works are all designed to be viewed in the Planetarium’s 360 degree projection setting.
The festival moves to the Canady Creative Arts Center from Friday (April 11) to Sunday (April 13) for its three-day competitive film and video screening series, with most films and animations presented in Bloch Hall Theater.
Starting things off at 7:30 p.m. on Friday is an eclectic showcase of 10 spectacular works from both regional and international artists working in multiple genres. The screening opens with “Somber Tides,” a spectacularly cinematic experimental dance film by Canadian filmmaker Chantal Caron. Set against the backdrop of a windswept Arctic landscape and featuring panoramic vistas in every direction, this work features two dancers clothed in long black robes, seemingly attached to the ice floes. Through tightly coordinated movements, their choreographed dance evokes a mythic enactment of survival in the face of the climate change crisis, or as the artist writes “a cry from the species, startled into survival against the elements.”
Another standout work from this opening set is the meticulously hand-drawn animation “Next Show in 90 Minutes” by Alabama-based animator John Hill. Depicting the daily routine of a mysterious nomadic figure in a post-apocalyptic American landscape, this incredible, award-winning animation took nearly three years to produce. Following the opening film showcase and running late into the evening is the annual student show, which presents works in film, video and animation by University students and students from around the region and abroad.
The festival continues on Saturday with a full day of thematically curated screenings and discussions from 10 a.m. until 10:30 p.m. in Bloch Hall. There will also be a selection of two-channel video installation works and a virtual reality experience on display in the Slab, Room 2021, adjacent to the theater. Among these is the captivating video work “Infinite Infants” by Hong Kong native and recent Duke University MFA graduate Tianming Zhou. Based on Buddhist mythology this work explores themes of memory, reincarnation, identity and gender.
The day begins with short films and animations about puppets — both live-action and animated — and the idea of bringing materials to life. This set features “The Last Puppet Show,” a beautifully crafted documentary by filmmaker Lonnie Frazier and producer Kyle Frazier, about the WVU puppetry program, which, after 40 years, faced potential closure during the University’s recent restructuring. Told through personal accounts and anecdotes by current and past faculty and students, the film reveals the creatively rich learning experience this program affords its students and the critical role it plays as one of the very few such programs in existence.
Throughout the day, the festival presents seven carefully curated screenings, spanning multiple genres — including documentary, environmental and narrative — while exploring themes that emerged through the curatorial process, such as personal relationships, bonds and separations, and mysticism. One selection, “Visions, Insights & Reveries,” showcases short works that explore themes of imagination, revelations and inspirations, including the poetic short film “Sunflower Shadows” by Iranian filmmaker Roya Zanbagh, which follows a young boy who is inspired by a local band of artists to pursue his dreams, but is challenged the concerns of his protective mother.
The documentary selection was curated by Virginia-based filmmaker Laura Iancu, assistant professor of film production at Virginia Tech, School of Performing Arts. This lineup features “Marble Madness,” an incredibly charming story about the last industrial marble manufacturer in the United States, told, in part, through the inspired words of elementary school students in Boone County.
Also included is “DIN 18035” by Austrian filmmaker Simona Obholzer, a remarkable experimental documentary that examines, in intimate detail, the seemingly ordinary yet surprisingly fascinating process of constructing a soccer field.
Later in the evening, the festival presents its annual selection of narrative shorts, including “Above the Salt” by West Virginia native and Los Angeles-based filmmaker Phillip Crum. Set near the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the film follows one of the telescope’s radio frequency interference detection officers in a mysterious “extraterrestrial” encounter. This selection also features the hilarious animated short film “Danger Zone” by Washington, D.C.-based filmmaker David Malone with animation by Earl Holden C. Bueno, about a family vacation gone awry, to put it mildly. Rounding out the selection is the equally comical short murder mystery film “Ted Gold Did It” by filmmaker Lucas Lara Esteves of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The film features four oddball suspects, a bit of artful violence, and one half-eaten tray of tiramisu as one of the principal clues to this witty and side splitting whodunit.
Saturday’s final presentation, “Surrealities: Almost Lynchian,” is a unique collection of short films and animations that share a common surrealistic thread, almost as if to invoke the late great filmmaker and animator David Lynch.
The festival continues on Sunday with another daylong series of film screenings, beginning with two short documentary works by students, including the ambitious “As the Sunflower Whispers” by undergraduate student Samuel Felinton. This is followed by a unique selection of experimental documentaries. Among them is the profound and powerful short film “The Gun Felt Good In My Hand,” an exploration of fear, masculinity and American gun culture by Daniel Robin, a Georgia State University professor teaching alternative approaches to documentary and fiction filmmaking.
Ideas about nature, the earth, and our relationship to the environment were another theme that emerged from this year’s selection. Some works expressed a yearning to get back to nature while questioning how nature is defined; others explored our interactions with the natural world and how it shapes us as much as we shape it. These themes are captured in the hour-long afternoon screening titled “Ecologies and Terrains.” Among these works is the mesmerizing and meditative film “Underneath It Flickers” by the Belgian-based filmmaker Lau Persijn, a work that closely examines an abandoned urban site called La Friche Josaphat in Brussels that has naturally rewilded and regenerated. Through extreme close-up views and audio recordings, the artist probes this spontaneously generated ecosystem as an expression of a new way of relating to and understanding the non-human environment.
The scheduled screenings conclude with a selection of works centered on this year’s thematic category “space.” Organizers invited artists and filmmakers to submit creative interpretations of this term in any context — physical, social, psychological, conceptual, philosophical or cosmological. Not surprisingly, artists answered with a wide-ranging set of responses and creations.
Some of the remarkable submissions selected and presented here include “Waiting Up to Meet the Wolf” by the Canadian-based British filmmaker Anthony Carr, a lyrical short film about the moon, and a meditation on the loss of moonlight and its emotional implications in highly developed modern civilization. The final work in this year’s presentation is the poetic essay film “No Matter What” by Carolyn Lambert. This deeply introspective, timely and insightful film points towards the current ongoing mass extinction event through thoughtful observations of contemporary culture and personal experience.
The festival concludes with an award ceremony at 5 p.m. Sunday in the Canady Creative Arts Center, Bloch Learning and Performance Hall.
This year the festival received over 250 submissions from North America and 33 different countries across the globe. These submissions were reviewed and scored by a 10 member jury of WVU College of Creative Arts and Media faculty and MFA candidates along with guest artists Laura Iancu, Sylvia Toy and Pittsburgh-based animator Michael Schwab.
Out of this process, 89 works were chosen to be shown across four days, along with WVU student works. As an international competitive film screening series, organizers will award over $1,300 in prizes to the top-scoring films.