Block A – 54 mins

Humdrum Ecstasy (Haoshu Sascha Deng, 13 mins)

A young girl stuck in a monotonous job. A friendship that seems strained. A dream about whale songs.

2025-12-14 (izzy film) (Jake Panek, 12 mins)

An experiment with images I recorded and didn’t record. An attempt at making a film about a film I didn’t make.

WORLD WIDE WORRY (Lela Rosa, 7 mins)

A girl, an apartment, cameras.

Chicken Tuesdays (Brandon Daley, 10 mins)

Will Gillman attempts to woo a first date by taking her to a chicken photography competition at a local bar.

Trip to the Edge (Christian Mendoza, 11 mins)

After his friend pressures him into eating mushroom-laced chocolate during a game of chess, a young guy finds himself alone, unprepared for the trip that’s about to follow – a full-on plunge into the deep end. As the night unfolds, his senses start bending, time stretches, and his grip on reality loosens. Hallucinations swirl. Paranoia creeps in. The outside world? Way too loud. His safe space? A plush sloth and a solo dance party. Trip to the Edge is a wild, trippy ride – chaotic and gut-punch existential. It’s about what happens when you go looking for escape and find yourself at the edge.

Block B – 64 mins

LOVE (breaking images, 4 mins)

a young couple tries their best to fix each other

The Whisper Kills It (Greg Scott, 15 mins)

The Whisper Kills It is a short experimental film that uses a layered discontinuous narrative structure to present an allegorical meditation on the ways that violent metaphors in the English language, derived principally from religious and economic discourses, shape notions and expressions of success. The film opens in a movie theater and is presented as a promotional advertisement. An audience of misfits is transfixed and growing increasingly agitated by what they are watching. On the screen, a homebound, self-made televangelist delivers a fiery sermon about the perils and pleasures of material and moral success while in the background his wife performs a Javanese dance and his off-screen congregants engage in an aggressive dialectic of call-and-response. As the sermon and the audience reaction crescendo together into the orgiastic ecstasy of violent metaphor, The Whisper begins maniacally destroying the camera, causing the audience to explode in sublime transcendence.

Elder Abuse (Drew Durepos. 9 mins)

A man and his grandmother argue about sharing cigarettes—until something bad happens.

Water Diary (Justin Senkbile, 11 mins)

In June of 2025, I took my 16mm camera to the shore of Lake Michigan every day in an attempt to capture a handful of its many moods.

Spanked by a Ghost (Katelyn Douglass, 12 mins)

Alone in her home, a woman is spanked by an unseen entity, awakening a force she cannot control.

Dad’s Sick (Ian Scott, 13 mins)

A daughter visits her dad amidst a challenging divorce only to realize he’s grappling with a mysterious illness. Together they are challenged to maintain their relationship and resolve whatever is ailing him.