Kevin T. Allen

Nomotopowell explores the unnamed histories of lost settlements and human skulls around a village in Florida. Structured as a travelogue, and combining landscapes with abstracted archival texts and voices, the film summons the spirits that haunt a shape-shifting territory, reflecting a violent national residue without ever leaving the village.

After basketball practice one night, Genevieve reveals a dark secret about their coach to her teammates. Wielding strategy and grit off the court, Genevieve works together with her teammates to find a way to retaliate.

After basketball practice one night, Genevieve reveals a dark secret about their coach to her teammates. Wielding strategy and grit off the court, Genevieve works together with her teammates to find a way to retaliate.

Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle – clockwise – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.

A pair of estranged offspring visit their parents in an abandoned Mexican village.

A pair of estranged offspring visit their parents in an abandoned Mexican village.

In the Arctic, ice is both all around and constantly disappearing. “Utuqaq” explores climate change from the perspective of this beautiful and vital element, as four researchers embark on an expedition to drill ice cores in subzero temperatures.

From 1984 to 2019, Lynne Sachs shot film of her father, a bon vivant and pioneering businessman. This documentary is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.

Enigmatic and deceptively playful in tone, this film from Gabino Rodríguez, in collaboration with Nicolás Pereda, boldly transforms mundane, realist observations at a rural Mexican schoolhouse into fantasy and a sly comment on childhood, rituals, and race.

Devin is a young architect navigating dating in New York. His online exchange with a writer, Nico, increasingly turns to fixation. As their virtual conversation goes deeper, this film by directors Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew invites us into a dynamic state between sexual tension and eagerness to feel desired.

"CIVIL WAR SURVEILLANCE POEMS (Part 1)" is the first installment in a five-part project of experimental and hybrid-form short films contemplating a second American civil war via lyrical nonfiction, mixing call-in radio, twenty years of verité footage from the filmmaker's archive, and robots. Conceptually speculating from sixteen years in the future (and a protracted civil war), the project is partly nostalgic political travelogue, partly a quest to mine the archive for what went wrong, and part prewar surveillance records, the project deconstructs and builds to a clashing ideology, culminating in an installation of sound sculpture, four-walled video and artifacts.

"CIVIL WAR SURVEILLANCE POEMS (Part 1)" is the first installment in a five-part project of experimental and hybrid-form short films contemplating a second American civil war via lyrical nonfiction, mixing call-in radio, twenty years of verité footage from the filmmaker's archive, and robots. Conceptually speculating from sixteen years in the future (and a protracted civil war), the project is partly nostalgic political travelogue, partly a quest to mine the archive for what went wrong, and part prewar surveillance records, the project deconstructs and builds to a clashing ideology, culminating in an installation of sound sculpture, four-walled video and artifacts.

In the shadow of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano, a young girl, Manu, and her mother lovingly breed a colony of bees. Meanwhile, as Manu’s activist father protests the construction of a giant telescope on the mountain’s sacred ground, a group of scientists study the landscape in preparation for our inevitable relocation to Mars. Ambitiously linking the earthbound and the cosmic, the intimate and the expansive, director Sarah J. Christman tracks these existentially fraught narratives with an acute attention to time, scale, and historical consequence. As her monumental images gather force, Swarm Season takes on a potent allegorical dimension.

A cross-cultural camera roll of two desolate landscapes. One half shot in the Mojave Desert of Joshua Tree in California, the other half in the industrial ghost town of Industry City in Brooklyn, NY. An in-camera exquisite corpse.

For thousands of years, alchemists toiled to synthesize rare substances and universal cures, to manipulate the speed of natural processes. Today, a woman has her husband’s ashes transformed into a memorial diamond. Precious metals are extracted from obsolete electronics. What was once the world’s largest landfill– now also the final resting place of the World Trade Center’s remains– is being converted into a public park. The film intimately examines various transmutations, both microscopic and massive, that reshape matter and its meanings. What separates the permanent from the impermanent, the things we discard from those we preserve?

A portrait of life in Immokalee, Florida, the heart of industrial agriculture in the United States and home to its largest population of migrant farm workers. Ultimately, it is a tale of migration, immigration, and the persistent hope for a better life.