Isabel Sandoval
Recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as a “rarity among the young generation of Filipino filmmakers for her muted, serene aesthetic,” Isabel Sandoval has premiered her films at major festivals like Venice, Locarno, London, and Busan. Cahiers du cinéma profiled her in April 2020 upon the French release of Lingua Franca, which was then acquired in North America by Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY and premiered on Netflix. She is currently in development on her fourth feature, Tropical Gothic, a sixteenth-century colonial drama with surreal elements that riffs on Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
Curated film: Solar Noise
Directed by Pablo Hernando
A collection of stories about people who saw a glimpse of the future after an inexplicable cosmic event.
Pablo Hernando
Director of Solar Noise
Pablo Hernando is a filmmaker from Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. He has written and directed several short films and music videos selected and awarded at various international festivals. In 2015 he wrote and directed the feature film Berserker, which premiered at the Seville European Film Festival, where it won The New Waves Special Award. It was subsequently selected for the San Sebastián International Film Festival.
In 2016, he co-wrote and co-directed Esa sensación along with Juan Cavestany and Julián Génisson. It premiered at the Rotterdam Festival, was selected at BAFICI and won the Movistar+ Award at the Málaga Film Festival. That same year the Gijón Film Festival programmed a retrospective to his whole career.
He’s currently working on his next feature film, Una ballena, which will begin shooting in early 2022.
Curated film: Hoss
Directed by Ryan McGlade
In a small rural town after mass one Sunday, Hoss goes to the empty house of a recently deceased friend only to find an unexpected and unfamiliar visitor inside.
Ryan McGlade
Director of Hoss
Ryan McGlade is a writer, director, and editor.
His films have screened at festivals including Palm Springs International ShortFest, Montclair Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, and the Bushwick Film Festival, where his short HOSS was awarded the Programmer’s Choice Award for Narrative Short in 2020.
His work has also been featured online on NoBudge, Filmmaker Magazine, Talkhouse, and Bloody Disgusting.
Curated film: WORLD
Directed by Christine Haroutounian
It’s been two years since Claudette moved to a remote village in Armenia to take care of her bedridden mother. At this point, both facing and avoiding the inevitable loss has become her daily, messy routine. In World, Haroutounian skilfully takes us through the peculiarities and universality of grief.
Christine Haroutounian
Director of World
Christine Haroutounian is a director, writer, and producer from Los Angeles, California. Working between Armenia and diaspora, she has been named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. Her films have received Official Selection in International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Palm Springs International ShortFest, and more. Her short, World, won the Golden Apricot Stone Prize for Best Short Film at the Golden Apricot International Film Festival. She holds an MFA in Directing/Production from the UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television. Currently, Haroutounian is developing her debut feature.
Curated film: An Act Of Affection
Directed by Việt Vũ
While making a portrait of a single gay man in Lisbon, a filmmaker offers his character a little gift from the bottom of his heart.
Việt Vũ
Director of An Act Of Affection
Việt Vũ (Quang Trung, Phạm) has completed a series of audio-visual works on memories of various marginalised communities in different socio-political zones, including Vietnam, Portugal, Hungary and Belgium. They are shot in long takes with an intimate first-person camera. His works have been shown and won awards in different European and Asian film festivals – including Locarno, Rotterdam, Tampere, and Singapore one. Viet attained his Erasmus Doc Nomads Master Degree in Documentary Film Directing in 2021. He participated in Berlinale Talents as a director in the same year.
Curated film: The Inconceivable Mountain
Directed by Daniel Witkin
A musicologist and her dog climb a mountain in search of an indecipherable song hoping to understand its meaning.
Daniel Witkin
Director of The Inconceivable Mountain
Daniel Witkin is a filmmaker, editor, and writer based in Chicago, Illinois. He is the director of The Inconceivable Mountain, a NoBudge 2019 Film of the Year. With Albert Tholen, he edited The Chicken, directed by Neo Sora, a selection of the 2020 Locarno International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and AFI Fest, among others. His critical writing has appeared in Reverse Shot, Film Comment, Cinema Scope, and more.
Curated film: Limestone
Directed by Paula Andrea Gonzalez-Nasser
A young woman goes home with an ex-lover in Miami and decides to cut the night short in an unconventional way.
Paula Andrea Gonzalez-Nasser
Director of Limestone
Paula Andrea Gonzalez-Nasser is a Colombian-Palestinian writer, director, and producer based in NYC. She has assisted directors Antonio Mendez-Esparza on his Spirit Award-winning film, Life and Nothing More as well as Sofia Coppola on On the Rocks. She was also an assistant to producers Adele Romanski and Sara Murphy on If Beale Street Could Talk. Paula has worked as a location scout on numerous films and television shows such as Russian Doll, High Maintenance, Search Party, and Eliza Hittman’s Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always. Currently, she is an assistant at Public Record, a NY-based production company founded by Jeremiah Zagar and Jeremy Yaches. Paula also co-founded 5th Floor Pictures, a NY & FL-based film collective, in hopes of championing up-and-coming artists and helping them find community and support for their projects.
Curated film: Nadia’s Songs
Directed by Nick White
“Nadia’s Songs” follows a teenage boy who finds a collection of CDs that used to belong to a stranger known only as Nadia. In their shared taste in music he imagines her life story while in turn reflecting on his own.
Nick White
Director of Nadia’s Songs
Born in Orangeville, Ontario, Canada, Nick White began making short films in his teenage years before moving to Toronto to pursue filmmaking and study at York University’s film production program. His films often explore the passage of time, processes of memory, and the ways in which we frame the past as we reflect on it in the present. His projects have straddled various different styles including essay films, documentaries, and experimental, and have screened at festivals all across North America. In addition to his own directorial practice, he often works as an editor and sound designer for other projects.
Curated film: Grantham Overgrown
Directed by Thomas Watchorn
A near-dead town, an encroaching overgrowth, a mysterious tower, a camera, a voice. Across 299 photographs a man who may be the filmmaker, and yet might not be real, relays a story that may not have happened, about a place that almost definitely exists.
Thomas Watchorn
Director of Grantham Overgrown (Infinite Regression)
Thomas Watchorn is a filmworker from England. He accidentally made his first short film, Grantham Overgrown (Infinite Regression), after returning to his hometown and finding it and himself stagnating.
He is working on a number of short and long-form projects interested in place, time, memory and reality, as well as the nature and mechanics of storytelling. With his regular creative partner Wahab Iqbal (who contributed in no small part to Infinite Regression,) he is currently completing a mid-length ambient documentary echo of a landmark British film.
Curated film: goodbye, ghost
Directed by Evan Schwartz
A film made during psychosis; in retrospect, an unconscious ode to schizoaffective disorder.
Evan Schwartz
Director of goodbye, ghost
Evan Schwartz is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker. He is working on an alternative method of making films, by pre-recording dialogue and crafting the soundscape first, so that it can play out loud as the camera navigates the space. Performers and crew are cued to perform their tasks through a beep in the soundtrack, and actors lip-sync their dialogue, so the process becomes like automated live theatre. Goodbye, Ghost was a prototype for this method, and he’s currently working on expanding it into a larger scale version.
Curated film: time
Directed by Ben Creech
every instance of the word "time" from gilles deleuze's cinema 2: the time-image madlib's episode xvi from medicine show #5 the history of the loop digga, 1990-2000
Ben Creech
Director of time
Ben Creech is an experimental human, whose work often abandons discipline in hopes of capturing the movement of thought. Originally from Louisville, now in Chicago, his films have a tendency to explore difference and repetition, tracing the lines that connect the particular to the infinite. He’s also interested in forms of ricochet, where the past repeats itself and the image returns, often engaged as sampling. Ben also designs and produces esoteric cinephile merch, and is finishing work on his debut book Kentucky Wild, about the films of Louisville born amateur auteur William Girdler.
Curated film: TBD