KAFFNY 2024: Immersive Electric Dream + closing party

Come join us at Sugarmouse for a cinematic experience like no other! Our Immersive Electric Dream screening event will showcase a diverse selection of short films that will leave you inspired and entertained. Get ready to immerse yourself in a world of creativity and storytelling with filmmakers from around the globe. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to connect with fellow film enthusiasts and celebrate the art of short filmmaking.

The unique venue has projection walls all around the room, and there are pool and games table around the bar. I will be a fun place for the screening and network with fellow film lovers. See you there!

Misericorde

Directed by Nataša Prosenc Stearns (9:25)

In the Middle Ages a misericorde was a weapon used to put a wounded knight out of his misery. As a theological term, it refers to forgiveness and compassion. In French it has been used as an invocation, notably in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: “Christ have mercy on us!” That there may be no one listening (or arriving) remains a central anguish, felt in the depression, addiction and other disorders, that are normal responses to increasingly abnormal culture.

This film strikes the chord of even deeper anxiety, moving through a dreamscape of distorted mirrors, fluctuating boundaries, and uncertain identity. A man fractured in narcissistic multiplications, a woman overtaken by sorrow and grief, are lost both to themselves and to each other.

Yet there is a beauty to their shared ordeal, a nature pulsing with possibilities as near and intimate as they seem out of reach. It suggests the accord that comes with awareness, the passion that springs from despair.

New York Minute

Directed by Lynn Bianchi (4:37)

This work continues Lynn Bianchi’s relationship with New York City and its inhabitants – her home and inspiration since 1968. New York Minute was developed and created during lockdown – the year of loneliness and isolation – yet Lynn never felt lonely because the city was right outside her window – still alive and forever hopeful. A love letter to New York, this work is an abstraction of one day in the city – from dawn till dusk – moments that last a minute, or maybe a lifetime.

‘Situation’ – DudeGhetto Soundz Playz feat Danger

Directed by Rocky Hylton, Marcus Ebanks (4:14)

Situation is a superb hypnotic adaptation of Keith Rowes ‘Groovy Situation’. The rhythm track Dude Step is an original composition from producer Don Gen and blends nicely with the lyrical arrangement. In addition to the track the video that accompanies it is an atmospheric black and white classic of the UK Jamaican Shu’ been/Blues parties of the 70s & 80s.

Cascade

Directed by Jonathon Stearns (5:00)

NY Premiere

Cascade is visceral document of the surrender of Self to Nature. Through a freefall of meticulously collaged, mirrored, and refracted natural images, filmmaker Jonathon Stearns
offers a visual counterpart for an improvised track by esteemed South Korean musicians – guitarist Jean Oh, vocalist Minyoung Kim, and flutist Aram Lee, and American Stearns (on trumpet and piano) . Recorded at Coyote Run Studio in Joshua Tree, CA in January 2024. Recorded live without overdubs, the
music is an offering to the natural majesty of the desert environs and the Quadrantids meteor shower occurring at the time. Constructed from original video footage without the use of
animation or AI, Cascade floods and redistributes the concept of identity through a non-linear narrative in which the spectator’s imagination is invited to flow in and out of symmetry as the
barriers between sound-image and human-environment give way and ultimately erode.

In C, Too

Directed by Dean Winkler, John Sanborn (4:35)

“In C, Too” illuminates how close our dreams are to a common reality. Through structured visual improvisational techniques, the work explores how humanity survives because of our imagination and desire to transcend. “In C, Too” is also an origin story, operating in renunciation to mortality, focused on life’s essentials – existence, exploration and how entropy ignites evolution.

Beginning with landscapes of perception, a quartet of dancers metamorphose, fluidly flowing from surface, to density, to a higher state of being; surrounded by synapses firing, and concentric shapes, suggesting the unceasing nature of forces greater us. Viewers are left with the impression that chaos and order coexist, they are not opposites but two views of the energy of the universe.

“In C, Too” is the sequel to “ACT III,” which Winkler and Sanborn created with the music of Philip Glass in 1983. In that seminal piece the artists reimagined the world as composed of contours, symbols and analog video-inspired transformations to visualize Glass’ score. Defiantly abstract, yet filled with human touches and multiple artistic references, the work functioned as a cry of liberation and operated as an original work of media art (named one of the 100 Masterworks of Media Art by Dr. Peter Weibel and the ZKM), and a music/video for the avant-garde. And, yes, it played on MTV.

Separated by 40 years, both pieces use the language of virtuosic video-making to celebrate the power and freedom of transformation, leaning into apophenia, the human tendency to seek patterns for sense-making.

Elena Ruehr wrote “In C, Too” in honor of the 80th birthday of the legendary composer Terry Riley. She describes the work as “a playful romp that explores the pitch C in various tonal guises, and some ragtime.”

Created by Dean Winkler and John Sanborn
Music composed by Elena Ruehr
Performed by Sarah Cahill
From the album “Eighty Trips Around the Sun”

Circle

Directed by Minkyou Yoo1(5:20)

USA Premiere

A dream that leads to a dream again even after waking up.
Someone speaks to me in a new way, in a new place.
We go around like the circle and meet again.
This is a film that lets you feel the situations and emotions in a dream through a first-person view camera.

Using a recurring dream as a motif, I filmed the spaces around different place and the movements of body in them from the point of view of an observer.