Screening: aCinema Screening Series—Friday 7 PM

Join us for aCinema’s Annual Screening Series, featuring a weekend of six programs curated by Takahiro Suzuki and Janelle VanderKelen!

Join us for aCinema’s Annual Screening Series, featuring a weekend of six programs curated by Takahiro Suzuki and Janelle VanderKelen! We are thrilled to welcome them back to the gallery for this special, condensed presentation, which comprises aCinema’s Season 10.

The first two screenings will feature works selected from the aDifferent Program open call held this winter, which received over 300 submissions from around the globe. The weekend will then progress to four curated screenings featuring works by Curtis Chin, Clara Jost, Chester Toye, and many more!

Screenings will take place at 5 pm and 7 pm CDT on Fri. May 15, Sat. May 16, & Sun. May 17.

Friday 7 PM | PROGRAM TWO: a rose on the dark side of the moon

Gizem Tonbak | Afterwards

SYNOPSIS

Driven by curiosity about my roots, I returned to my father's birthplace two decades after his passing. In the attic of a house soon to be demolished, I discovered his youthful paintings, my grandfather's wooden suitcase, and video footage my father shot in the 90s. Printing these frames using the cyanotype technique allowed me to linger in each moment, tracing the changes in the house and seeing through my father's eyes. This project became a journey of discovery, reconciliation, and farewell-an exploration of how memory fades yet lingers, and how curiosity bridges past and present.

BIOGRAPHY

Gizem Tonbak (b. 1992) is a multidisciplinary filmmaker based between Istanbul and Offenbach. Her work embraces the analog world's tranquility, often incorporating experimental cyanotype, cyanolumen, and cyanotype animation techniques to explore themes of identity, roots, belonging, and memory.

Asuka Lin | distant bison

SYNOPSIS

There is a myth that bison are one of the only mammals immune to cancer, but this is false. A scientific journal from 2000 reports on one of the first instances found of cancer in bison: a mother who had to be euthanized. Excerpts of this finding are read as 16mm footage of bison (both painted and real) flicker on screen. Meanwhile, in digital, a mother lays in bed after her chemo treatment, surrounded by her paintings of animals.

BIOGRAPHY

Asuka Lin is a Japanese-Taiwanese writer/director known for their short films ‘Into the Emerald Sea’ (Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival), and ‘A.I. Mama’ (London Short Film Festival). Their directorial work travels from anarchic cyberpunk to meditative folktales, united by themes of yearning and conflicting realities informed by current socio-ecological phases. They earned their BFA at the California Institute of the Arts in film/video, currently based in Chicago.

Michelle Trujillo | Hurricane Season

SYNOPSIS

Hurricane anxiety takes a visceral form as the image searches for an escape route. Inspired by true events. Created on 16mm film and developed with comfrey, mint, yerba mate, and willow leaves.

BIOGRAPHY

Michelle Trujillo was born in Miami to Colombian and Costa Rican parents and grew up in South Florida. The focus of her practice is to question and explore representations of Latine culture, gender, and identity. She works in Spanish, English, and Spanglish as a mirroring of her lived experience. She works in various mediums such as eco and hand-processed 16mm film, digital video, 35mm still film, and cyanotypes. Her films have been exhibited in festivals, galleries, and conferences nationally and internationally, such as Alchemy Film Festival, RPM, Mimesis Documentary Festival, and have won awards such as the Lightpress Grant and the LEF Moving Image Grant.

Natalie Peracchio | The Story of the Cricket Queen

SYNOPSIS

The Story of the Cricket Queen explores how digital culture collapses the divide between spectator and subject in a space where users both create and consume their own images. Through acts of online voyeurism and performance, the film interrogates the ethics of looking by placing the filmmaker’s own image alongside strangers, celebrities, and artificially generated voices that blur the distinction between the real and the constructed. Through these synthetic narrators and mediated images, the film reflects on how digital culture reshapes the body and the self.

BIOGRAPHY

Natalie Peracchio is a filmmaker whose work combines performance, archival materials, and animation to reshape familiar narratives, forms, and images. Her films explore physical transformation through puppetry, costume, and experimental techniques on Super 8 and 16 mm film, examining how the body can be altered, exaggerated, or displaced. Her practice interrogates the manipulation and exploitation of physical forms as a means of exploring identity, authorship, and control.

Sasha Waters | Ghost Protists

SYNOPSIS

A protist is an organism that is neither animal, vegetable, nor fungi. Plant-like protists are called algae – such as those “flowers of the sea” cyanotypes created by Anna Atkins and published in a landmark book in 1843. In a mesmerizing frenzy of images and text, Ghost Protists transforms her images into a protest of the colonial violence that enabled their creation.

BIOGRAPHY

Sasha Waters is a moving image artist and Professor of Film at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her latest documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, premiered at True/False in 2026 and will air nationally on public television. Her films have screened at the Telluride Film Festival, IFF Rotterdam, Kassel Dokfest, Microscope Gallery, the Tribeca, Ann Arbor, Woodstock, Chicago Underground, Big Sky Documentary Film Festivals, and the Museum of the Moving Image, among other international venues.

Rankin Renwick | The Swirl Of The Shine Pierced

SYNOPSIS

A radical whirlwind of a punk invocation for revolution

BIOGRAPHY

Rankin Renwick has been a singular voice in experimental cinema for over 40 years. Eschewing an allegiance to any one medium or form, Renwick builds authentic works revealing an insatiable curiosity and unflinching engagement with the world around them. Often focusing their lens on nature, freedom, and the locales of their adopted home, the Pacific Northwest, Renwick uses avant-garde formal elements to explore radical politics and environmental issues. An artist who often self-distributes, their screening history reads as a map of independent cinema worldwide. They have screened work in hundreds of venues internationally, institutional and not, including The Museum of Modern Art, Light Industry, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Basel, The Smithsonian, Oberhausen, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Centre Pompidou, Bread and Puppet Theater, and True/False Film Festival, among many others.

Sara Wylie | Resistance Meditation

SYNOPSIS

A meditation on crip time and resistance by a chronically ill filmmaker, shot on Super 8 and (mostly) eco-processed by hand. The short film addresses conventional narratives around the nature of illness and instead posits disability and crip time as natural sites of resistance against capitalism.

BIOGRAPHY

Sara Wylie (she/they) is a filmmaker, producer, and researcher from the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations (aka Vancouver, BC). Her work focuses on archives and counter-archives, radical histories, embodied methodologies, disabled ecologies, and crip intimacies.

As a director/producer, Sara’s award-winning short documentary and experimental films have screened at film festivals around the world. She graduated with distinction from Toronto Metropolitan University’s Documentary Media MFA Program in 2019, and her projects have been supported by Field of Vision’s IF/THEN Shorts, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, and SSHRC.

As a producer and associate producer, Sara has worked on award-winning short non-fiction films (like Handsome & Majestic, 2016) and a feature (Wizard Mode, 2016) that have screened at Hot Docs Film Festival, BFI Flare, Inside Out LGBTQ+ Festival, Vancouver Queer Film Festival, and more. They have also worked as a story producer and field producer for several documentary series produced by Vice, The Travel Channel, and Telus. Sara is currently producing Sophy Romvari’s upcoming feature film, Blue Heron, a Canadian-Hungarian co-production in association with MEMORY.

Natasha Cantwell | The Teachers’ Sauna

SYNOPSIS

On the boundary of the Haukijärvi school grounds, a teachers’ sauna was built in the early twentieth century. In rural Finland, the sauna marked the edges of a life. Before modern hospitals, it served as a site for childbirth and for washing the dead, preparing them for burial. This film considers the sauna as a vessel for accumulated gestures, rituals, and time. It asks how spaces absorb human presence, and what remains when those bodies are gone - when absence itself becomes an active force.

BIOGRAPHY

Natasha Cantwell is a Melbourne-based experimental filmmaker whose work explores the tension between inner and outer selves. Drawing on performance art and horror cinema, her 16mm films balance humour with unease. Her work has screened internationally, including at Experiments in Cinema in the United States, as well as Stuttgart Filmwinter and EMAF in Germany. In 2025, she undertook an artist residency at Arteles Creative Center in Finland.

antimemoria_____ | bby influencer / síntesis del rosa

SYNOPSIS

bby influencer / síntesis del rosa is an audiovisual piece developed through deepfake, AI, real-time 3D modification, and generative art. The work explores the deployment of the operative image in two of its gradients:

On one hand, the operative image emerges as a hyperstitional baby —stripped of any aesthetic interdiction—acting in a strictly functional manner, embedded within the social fabric through spectacle and the "trend economy," with military, strategic, and oppressive intelligence purposes that model the technosingular future. On the other, it manifests through the "becoming -cute": a plane where the technological image operates as a device of marketing and seduction, shaping human experience by means of supernormal, artificial, and unnatural hypersimulation that drives the species toward an annihilating addiction to the cute.

Through audiovisual speculation, this short film exposes the most embittered and delirious extremes of late capitalism, where pleasure and warfare merge within a single interface.

BIOGRAPHY

antimemoria_____ is a research center and curatorial platform led by a Mexican multidisciplinary artist and Social Anthropologist. Their work focuses on post -internet art, developing experimental projects through artificial intelligence, generative art, sound production, and writing. Their practice is based on the use of newtechs, critically addressing the relationship between technology and society.

Drawing from the philosophy of technology and intelligence, as well as posthuman frameworks, they analyze how images and emerging technologies transform cultural dynamics under the influence of late capitalism. They are exploring the contemporary mutation of the image and its inevitable drift toward alien rhythms like the yotta-internet or technocomercial realism. They have collaborated with the open.secret festival, organized screenings in New York, and worked with the Berlin -based publisher Becoming.press. Their work has been exhibited internationally in venues across Vienna, Lisbon, Bangalore, and South Korea.

Intizor Otaniyozova | Uyghur Christmas song

SYNOPSIS

I've always loved Christmas songs, and it seems so unfair that they are only listened to for a short time of the year, and then kind of abandoned and ignored. I play them all year round and love them so much that I decided to try to write an Uyghur Christmas song.

BIOGRAPHY

Intizor Otaniyozova is an artist based in Central Asia. Themes of her research are identity, ecology, feminism, and Beyoncé. Participated in exhibitions all over the world. Also was published in literature volumes. Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Side Chicks is her debut feature-length documentary film in development.

Natasha Mabille | Chance

SYNOPSIS

A portrait of a woman and her encounters with chance. Vocal utterances, murmurs, and hums are heard out of sync with the image and its gestures, in a layered choreography of joy and solitude.

BIOGRAPHY

Natasha Mabille is a filmmaker and artist in Paris and Vienna. She is currently studying at the Schule Friedl Kubelka for Independent Film. She examines the analogue medium of film alongside the creation of props, sets, and photographic works.

Krista Leigh Steinke, Meg Cook, Courtney Starrett | Komboloi (worry beads)

SYNOPSIS

Komboloi (worry beads) is a collaborative video poem that merges experimental film and animation techniques to explore anxiety in the era of climate change.

Central to the film is the symbolic use of worry beads—a cross-cultural object used to calm anxiety. Crafted from ice formed from local water sites, these beads embody the fragility of our planet and serve as a visual and thematic focal point. The project weaves together 16mm analogue footage, stop motion, cyanotype on film, and other processes to embrace chance and echo the unpredictable consequences of climate change.

Guided by a Fluxus-inspired procedural poem and an original musical score, Komboloi invites reflection on ecological grief, impermanence, and the urgent need for both individual and collective action.

Film by Krista Steinke, Meg Cook, and Courtney Starrett. Voice Performance by Riti Sachdeva. Original music by Lynn Vartan

BIOGRAPHIES

Krista Leigh Steinke is a lens-based artist and filmmaker known for her experimental approach to photo media. Her work draws from art and photographic history, science, current events, the female perspective, and individual experience to explore how the physical, social, and personal intertwine.

Meg Cook is a multidisciplinary artist and stop motion animator. Through the creation of animations, soft sculptures, and illustrations, she explores the paradoxical relationships that exist within the aesthetics of cuteness.

Courtney Starrett is an artist working at the intersection of art, craft, and technology.

All three artists are professors in PVFA at Texas A&M.