Currents Program 2: Afterimages

As Told by a Corpse
Yace Sula, 2025, U.S., 5m
New York Premiere

As Told by a Corpse. Courtesy of Yace Sula.

Deliriously hybridizing fuzzy video, warm analog film grain, and the busy static of digital glitch, Yace Sula’s As Told by a Corpse subjects a home movie of a naming ceremony for a newborn infant to a series of raucous mutations, offering glimpses of bodies and identities in flux, unruly and ungovernable.

As Told by a Corpse is presented with open captions at EBM screenings. 

Time Life Volume 15. Monument to a Period of Time in Which I Lived
Mungo Thomson, 2025, U.S., 2m
New York Premiere

Time Life Volume 15. Monument to a Period of Time in Which I Lived. Mungo Thomson. Courtesy the artist and Karma.

More than one thousand single-frame images of candles, each a photograph excerpted from reference encyclopedias, production manuals, and how-to guides, mark time’s passage in Monument to a Period of Time in Which I Lived. A solemn and hallucinatory memento mori, Mungo Thomson’s meticulous reanimation of ephemeral photographs evokes a unique experience of duration, a tension between the moving and the still.

A Metamorphosis
Lin Htet Aung, 2025, Myanmar, 17m
Burmese with English subtitles
New York Premiere

A Metamorphosis

Haunted chambers and liminal spaces provide the settings for Lin Htet Aung’s film, which mimics the affective impressions and woozy video textures of a state television broadcast. With the AI-simulated voice of General Min Aung Hlaing, the Prime Minister of Myanmar’s military dictatorship, singing lullabies on the soundtrack, A Metamorphosis surfaces the buried structures of feeling of state propaganda, rendering its subliminal symbolism as an oneiric journey through sinister, jittery tableaux.

09/05/1982
Jorge Caballero, Camilo Restrepo, 2025, Spain/Mexico, 11m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

09/05/1982. Courtesy of Jorge Caballero and Camilo Restrepo.

Uncovered home movies from 1982, scratched and grainy, of an unidentified Latin American city reveal quotidian scenes as well as faint traces of political violence: streets packed with crowds and armed police, burning tires and smashed windows, and graffiti that commemorates the May 9th Massacre. Jorge Caballero and Camilo Restrepo’s 09/05/1982 explores the occulted processes by which memory, technology, and propaganda rewrite the past, blurring distinctions between the real and the synthetic.

Slet 1988
Marta Popivoda, 2025, Germany/France/Serbia, 22m
Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles
North American Premiere

A swarm of bodies and lights clashes with the orderly grids of modernist architecture in Slet 1988, which takes its title from Yugoslavia’s final mass performance-celebration of socialism’s achievements. Through the body of 74-year-old dancer Sonja Vukićević and the late-1980s diaries of a teenage girl, Marta Popivoda’s incisive film contrasts the collective gatherings of the Socialist Federal Republic’s decline with the rise of nationalism and isolation in the present.

Water Sports
Whammy Alcazaren, 2024, Philippines, 20m
Filipino with English subtitles
New York Premiere

Water Sports. Courtesy of Square Eyes.

Sweaty bodies and drought-wracked landscapes collide in Whammy Alcazaren’s (Bold Eagle, NYFF61) frenzied sci-fi fantasy, a tale of love and basketball, earthquakes and tsunamis, treasured pasts and dismal futures. As extreme heat burns the planet and surviving a waterless Philippines becomes increasingly impossible, Jelson and Ipe try to live, laugh, and love their way through a climate catastrophe rendered in addled digital collage and cartoon hysteria. Don’t cry, or you die.