Currents Program 4: Model Behaviors

Acetone Reality
Sara Magenheimer, Michael Bell-Smith, 2025, U.S., 12m
World Premiere

Acetone Reality. Courtesy of Sara Magenheimer and Michael Bell-Smith.

Images cascade and collide in Acetone Reality, as animation, found images, and the artists’ own video recordings crash against a dialogue between computer-generated voices exploring the wonders of acetone and the nature of meaning. Across Sara Magenheimer (Art and Theft, NYFF55) and Michael Bell-Smith’s (Rabbit Season, Duck Season, NYFF53) teetering montage, blocky pixels, smeared colors, and cryptic iconography constitute an “insane, yet validated reality.”

Their Eyes
Nicolas Gourault, 2025, France, 23m
English and Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere

Their Eyes. Courtesy of Square Eyes.

“We need to annotate everything.” Images of bodies, vegetation, and police vehicles flood the frames of Nicolas Gourault’s film with fields of blocky pixellation, as off-screen voices offer testimony about the work of visual data analysis. Contending with the unknowably vast world of contemporary image production, Their Eyes discloses the human labor—outsourced, remote, poorly paid, and usually invisible—beneath the digital surfaces of visual data.

And If the Body
Toby Lee, 2025, U.S., 27m
World Premiere

And If the Body. Courtesy of Thom Neal.

Gamespace becomes a therapeutic alternate reality in And If the Body, which examines the clinical uses of VR and other imaging technologies to treat patients with severe spinal cord injuries and other neuromuscular disorders. Toby Lee’s film explores the interface between the physical and the technological, a zone in which the real and the virtual body blurs into one. 

Fiction Contract
Carolyn Lazard, 2025, U.S., 10m
U.S. Premiere

Fiction Contract

A simulation center inside the maternity ward of Elmhurst Hospital provides the setting for Carolyn Lazard’s astutely observational video, which documents an all-Black obstetrics team of doctors, nurses, and midwives as they rehearse a complex childbirth scenario with a ventriloquized mannequin for a patient. Deriving its title from the shared agreement among participants in a training simulation, Fiction Contract lingers on the careful staging and surreal performance of care during an exercise designed to reduce racial disparities in maternal mortality.

Fiction Contract is presented with open captions at EBM screenings.