Currents Program 5: Fields of Vision

FELT
Blake Williams, 2025, Canada/U.S./Spain, 3D, 15m
U.S. Premiere

FELT. Courtesy of BlueMagenta Films

Blake Williams’s (Something Horizontal, NYFF53) 3D travelogue of the American Southwest is a literal adventure in stereoscopy and retrospection, capturing the textured desert landscapes, snaking powerlines, streaming atmospheres, and hazy roadsides in fractured glimpses and headlong motion. Gesturing toward cinema’s roots in 19th-century phantom rides and panoramas, FELT finds a dynamic new form for the sensory experience of space and movement.

Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love
Jodie Mack, 2025, U.S., 16mm, 15m
New York Premiere

Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love

Vivid floral specimens slosh exuberantly in a water tank, elegantly pirouette in superimposition, pulse and mutate in dizzying stroboscopic single-frame edits. Continuing Jodie Mack’s (The Grand Bizarre, NYFF56) long-term project of animating alternative materials, Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love is an ecstatic and visceral reflection on temporality, both human and botanical, an amorous affirmation of death and life.

Keyhole Conversation
Peter Larsson, 2025, Sweden, 6m
North American Premiere

Keyhole Conversation

With dazzling abstractions and jerky stop-motion, Keyhole Conversation deploys a barrage of flickering cut-outs and chaotic pencil scratchings in its headlong exploration of color and line. Recalling the deconstructed handmade animations of Robert Breer, Peter Larsson’s film pits riotous, jagged formalism against a haphazard soundtrack of bloops and pings and ramshackle percussion.

toward a fundamental theory of physics
Victor Van Rossem, 2025, Belgium, 3D, 13m
U.S. Premiere

toward a fundamental theory of physics

Dizzying, otherworldly, and truly experimental, toward a fundamental theory of physics deploys a reconstruction of the Time-Slice camera, a circular rig invented by cinematographer Tim MacMillan, that uses 293 lenses shooting simultaneously to capture different points of view in 16mm. Recalling Eadweard Muybridge’s protocinematic experiments in capturing movement, as well as the abstract lichtspiel of intermedia artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, Thomas Wilfred, and Jim Davis, Victor Van Rossem’s 3D film captures three-dimensional light-objects that are at once spectral and tangibly present, a ballet of abstract radiance and undulant color.

As a Tree Walks to Its Forest
Jiayi Chen, 2025, U.S., 16mm, 18m
World Premiere

As a Tree Walks to Its Forest

A lush, transporting triple-projection, As a Tree Walks to Its Forest loops both double 8 and 16mm hand-processed film to immerse us in a dreamlike journey through wooded landscapes. A mosaic of superimposed fragments and textures, Jiayi Chen’s expanded film work rearranges the spectator’s perception of forest ecology and other natural phenomena—wind, water, bark, grass, overstory—reimagining its topography as a continually shifting woodland reverie.