The 23rd Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival Is Showing Over 50 films from 12 different countries at this year's event that is being held exclusively for the first time at Harrisburg's own Midtown Cinema!
Click here to download this years schedule of events (15MB PDF)
DATE: Friday May 13, 2022 Starts @ 7PM
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: $20
"What's in the basket? The debut gutter-trash symphony from Frank Henenlotter (BRAIN DAMAGE, FRANKENHOOKER), stealthily filmed in the toilet bowls of Times Square and chock-full of demented fury. Hilarious, disgusting, and over-the-top in every way possible, this movie plays out like Herschell Gordon Lewis directing FREAKS on the set of TAXI DRIVER. A true homemade classick.
Duane and his brother Belial are ex-siamese twins who arrive in New York with a purpose -- REVENGE! Against everyone! That's enough to propel any movie, but here the deal is even sweeter because Belial is a telepathic monstrosity who lives in a wicker basket. BASKET CASE features an incredibly grotesque monster puppet that will burn its essence on the surface of your brain until the day you die. It's also filled with real-life 42nd Street sleazers, stop-motion shocks and non-stop sicko fun."
"Shot in New York with a crew of four and a budget of $35,000, this independently produced horror comedy helped to develop the cult audience for cinematic gore that has since become a mainstream genre. Before the gritty eroticism of the city undoes them, Duane and his deformed twin brother Belial seek bloody revenge on the doctors who forcibly separated them as teenagers. Nurtured by fanzines like Sleazoid Express and Gore Gazette, the film previewed at Club 57 and went on to become an underground hit at the Waverly Theatre."
Restoration courtesy of Arrow Films and the American Genre Film Archive.
DATE: Friday May 13, 2022 Starts @ 9:15 PM
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: $12
Wally Chung (5min | USA | Animation)
A couple goes on a hike and run into some trouble.
Wally Chung (1min | USA | Animation)
Living in the big city, a man’s sleep is interrupted.
Thorsten Fleisch (16min | Germany | Digital)
Vilmos and his dad work as social media cleaners. During their work they are confronted with the worst of humanity, in picture form. When they try to build an AI to do their work for them the AI gets a taste of death and can't wait to try it out in the real world.
Kevin Vu (18min | USA | Super 16mm)
Inseparable sisters Henriette and Anais find their relationship and lives being torn apart under mysterious circumstances.
Theodore Knighton (15min | USA | 16mm)
Steven Lapcevic (5min | USA | Animation)
Time and Recollection Officer D51 patrols his route for irregular memories. Meanwhile, a disillusioned citizen demands egress from his station and is quickly punished for his disobedience.
Seth Gabrielsson (43min | Australia | MiniDV, 16mm)
In this re-imagining of a Greek myth, a young man drifts around a small rural area in the wake of something he believes he has done. His small, wordless encounters point to a larger world of ambiguous political realities, occult scenarios, and psychological trauma.
DATE: Saturday May 14, 2022 @11am
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: $8
An opportunity to expose younger viewers to alternative cinematic forms without graphic imagery.
Moviate Underground presents some excellent alternative shorts of varying types, which happen to not contain graphic imagery; a great opportunity to expose younger viewers to unconventional cinematic forms.
Kathleen Rugh (4min | USA | 16mm)
Escape into a natural world that stretches from the mountains of Colorado to the ocean’s edge in Oregon. Journey through fleeting moments when these distant landscapes become one through layered exposures on film.
Maureen Zent (5min | USA | Digital)
Order gives way to chaos. Chaos generates ferment. Ferment spurs fecundity. Whisper, Rustle is a product of the Covid-19 pandemic, born of long walks in the forest spent memorizing poems by W.B. Yeats.
Alexander Fingrutd (3min | USA | 16mm)
Nine equal parts reference the Pound Symbol on a telephone keypad. Here, it is used as a symbol for connection. We are connected to more than what is immediately around ourselves: to each other, the planet, and the farthest galaxies.
Anne-Marie Bouchard (8min | Canada | 16mm)
The long wail of a passing train slips into the heart of the ghosts and everything explodes into silence. An experimental animated film built around a single sound recording that evokes travel, the need to communicate, solitude, fragility, the desire for freedom, the arrival of fall, and our ephemeral existence.
Timothy David Orme (9 min | USA | Animation)
Rowing through space, self, and consciousness, the math of the universe unfolds.
Nate Dorr (7 min | USA | Digital)
A trip behind and beneath the street-level skin of the city on the hidden paths of industrial history and once-and-future transit.
Vasilios Papaioannu (5 min | USA, Greece, Italy | Super 8 )
In this lonely contemplation of a past summer, the ancient promontory becomes a parenthetical projection of frantic lines and alternating impressions.
Alexander Bickford (8min | USA | 16mm)
The dizzying dreams of summertime.
DATE: Saturday May 14, 2022 Starts @ 12:25pm
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: $8
Seven short films ruminating on the role of bodies and their fragility in human society.
Brittany Gravely, Ken Linehan (10min | USA | Double-16mm Projection)
First Hypnotic Suggestion conjures telepathic transference, hypnosis and collective dream space. Through its spectral tele-cinematic waves, the analogue horror-film protagonists participate in paranormal and fringe scientific experiments, attempting to comprehend the immaterial and incomprehensible expanses of their perception—simultaneously aided and obstructed by the temporal interventions and technological mediations of their transitory parallel dimension.
Neil Ira Needleman (4min | USA | Digital)
This is a true story. All these decades later, I still have a hard time believing that this actually happened in 1997.
Malo Sutra Fish (8min | France | Super 8 )
This film answers the question: “How does it feel to have a seizure?” as well as asking the follow-up: “How do I get to be a filmmaker as a photosensitive epileptic?”. Shot in Super 8 and using the codes of experimental cinema, this short film evokes the 4 stages a person undergoes when having a tonic-clonic seizure, one of the most violent experiences the body inflicts on itself.
A. Moon (3min | USA | 35mm)
An elixir for health and well-being. A cameraless film, made using the "phytography" process, featuring the artist's prescribed dose of Chinese herbs.
Rachel Makana'aloha O Kauikeolani Nakawatase (6min | USA | Tape)
婦人 (Fujin) [foo-jeen] noun/plural noun, can be translated as a more formal or polite way to refer to a woman, such as “lady” or “madam” and in some contexts can mean “sisterhood” or “womenfolk.”
This footage of my great-grandmother and aunties getting ready for a night out is a glimpse into femininity and womanhood among aging Asian Indigenous women, free of the western ethnographic gaze that has haunted many portrayals of bodies of color.
Alexander Bickford (7min | USA | 16mm)
A rumination on the diagnosis of disease.
Kyle Whitehead, Ale Samaniego (Ecuador), Jeremy Moss (USA), John Porter (11min | Canada | Super 8 )
Interstices is an ongoing series of 'exquisite corpse' films with the potential to continue indefinitely. The films are all in-camera double exposures each made on a 15 metre reel of Super 8 film in collaboration with another artist or filmmaker; the second exposure is made with no prior knowledge of the first, resulting in vignettes that are aleatoric collisions of two discrete perspectives. Unstable and intransitive by nature, these resonant and dissonant image-sentences continuously ebb and flow in and around each other, vying for presence on screen and in the minds-eye.
DATE: Saturday May 14, 2022 Starts @ 1:50pm
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: $8
Eleven very personal films with a wide array of styles from extremely unique points of view.
Jiayi Chen, Cameron Worden (3min | USA | Super 8 )
An edited-in-camera, hand-processed super 8 film growing out of a conversation about Florida and Disney World. To one, it is unfamiliar terrain. To the other, it is impending homecoming. Part of an on-going experimental home movie series.
Ryan Betschart (3min | USA | Unknown)
An exploration into Astral Projection via my diagnosis of Exploding Head Syndrome.
Rainbow Timothy (5min | USA | Animation)
This film is a collection of sketches and ideas from my sketchbook between 2017-2020. It is art therapy. I make films in order to work-out how to exist in this world.
Dane Cree (3min | USA | Animation)
A dark take on the Student Loan Debt Crisis in the United States. Dancing with the weight of a life changing decision. The overwhelming feeling of ever-expanding student loan debt, resulting in suicidal ideation during the deer hunting season.
Tommy Heffron (2min | USA | Digital)
Hum an old spiritual as you cruise along the path of light to the flaming sky.
Geoffrey William Duncanson (4min | USA | Digital, 16mm, Super 8 )
How destructured can you go while still telling a story? The Cranberry Hour is an experimental film that succeeds in hybridizing narrative and freeform styles.
Kevin Ralston (5min | USA | Digital)
An intense dive into the world of one man and his quest.
Neil Ira Needleman (3min | USA | Digital)
Faux autobiography. Faux nostalgia. Real porn (a cropped clip from an old movie). Also real: the contrast between a seemingly long-lost time of innocent lasciviousness and today's vicious world of public shaming and online revenge. Makes you yearn for simpler days, doesn't it?
Emma Penaz Eisner (2min | USA | Digital)
Lairs, layers, liars: In this poetry film, hatred insidiously supplants a couple's love.
David Finkelstein (18min | USA | MiniDV)
A poetic examination of the collector’s impulse, the need to map out the world by identifying the objects, people, and works of art which define one’s sensibility.
Ryan Betschart (4min | USA | Unknown)
A rumination on the passive politics of whiteness. In 1997 the song Walkin' on the Sun was a major radio hit, and although the song was written as a response to the Rodney King beating and subsequent LA Uprisings, those ideas were lost to the tune's catchy beach party atmosphere. For the band Smash Mouth to have written such a political song (however problematic the thesis of it may be - why can't we all just get along?- ) and for it to be so widely misunderstood; the band and their fans moving on to greener pastures while the communities they made their hit song off of continue to battle for the soul of liberal politics (white boomers versus people of color) embodies the famous meme of a cartoon dog drinking coffee while he is surrounded by a building on fire, stating: "This is Fine" My character's own flippant attitude towards the mention of racial injustice is both a nod towards the ignorance of white youth and the begging of the question - if I had known, would I have cared beyond a shallow verbal support of the oppressed? A hard day at the pool and the call to dinner being my siren song - an invitation to wash my hands literally and figuratively - guilty thoughts running down the drain, making room for a never-ending beach party summer.
DATE: Saturday May 14, 2022 Starts @ 3:20pm
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: $8
Our take on the covid-film-block focuses mainly on the types of experiences missed by most of us over the last two years.
Sandy McLennan (4min | Canada | 8mm)
Moving out/moving in, emptying boxes one at a time
Kathleen Rugh (3min | USA | 16mm)
Before all magic was lost, the sun awoke to meet me on the surface of the river. The film captures an in-camera edit of this fleeting encounter.
Wenhua Shi (4min, USA, China | 16mm)
A short piece tributes to my hometown Wuhan, China. All source footage is from Wenhua's childhood friends' social media 15-second video feed. Muybridge captured the galloping horse one hundred forty years ago in a brief 12 frames. The duration of today's social media video clips is similar to Muybridge's breavity. Wenhua tries to reimagine what subject Muybridge would capture today.
Sébastien Berlendis (14min | France | Super 8)
Vercors presents itself as a documentary built like a daydream in three times, around a woman and different spaces and landscapes, filmed in super 8, in the mountainous region of Vercors.
Ivette Spradlin (1min | USA | 16mm)
Yuula Benivolski (11min | Canada, Mexico | Super 8)
Two sisters meet in a dream, and swim together for the first time since they were kids. Sound recordings from their childhood accompany this landscape: an orchestra of air raid sirens, barking dogs and tropical birds exist all at once, and indicate that we are within multiple realities.
Roger Horn (5min | Germany/Spain | Super 8)
Upon completion of his PhD and relocation to Germany all that filmmaker Roger Horn wanted was a relaxing family holiday in Spain, but he quickly became consumed with troubling emotions while swimming in the site of countless migrant deaths, the Mediterranean Sea. To make matters worse a trip into Barcelona with his wife revealed a city plastered in banners demanding Catalonian independence, cash machines covered in protest slogans, and African migrant vendors constantly under threat from local police.
Mark Street (30min | USA | Digital)
A pandemic diary filmed mostly in NYC. From the uncertain first months when every foray felt perilous to various re openings, outings are recorded and reflections shared. "Sorties" is a military term-- a mission launched from a defensive position. That's sort of what a walk felt like in March 2020 in NYC. Of course, the pandemic continues; but I had to limit myself in making the film; March 2020-August 2021.
DATE: Saturday May 14, 2022 Starts @ 5:10pm
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: $8
Seven loosely connected visions from or about LGBTQ+ perspectives.
Kymberly McDaniel (7min | USA | Super 8, Digital)
As I seek to connect with my partner about their queer and feminist research in bioarchaeology, a conversation emerges about what is left behind after death.
Hannah Saidiner (8min | USA | Animation)
An animated documentary reflecting on my parent coming out as transgender and how our relationship evolved, as told through domestic spaces, intimate objects, and our shared birthday.
Emily M Van Loan (3min | USA | 16mm)
Trans folks find comfort, joy, and a new level of intimacy in each other's arms.
Kristin Li (9min | Canada, USA | Digital)
Cat, a transgender woman in Tennessee who has been institutionalized since she was four years old, got off parole in 2020. Cat shares stories from her childhood and her life inside men's prisons, including her relationship with her husband and former cellmate Doc who remains incarcerated.
Hugo Ljungbäck (11min | Sweden | Digital)
High school can be rough when you fall in love.
Bailey Plumley (3min | USA | Digital)
A living inventory of the body.
Ellery Bryan, Aidan Spann (8min | USA | 16mm, Super 8)
In response to grief following the suicide of a loved one, “Other Methods of Bearing Weight” is a collaborative performance practice that mediates the problem of absence as it pertains to creating visual documents, and the ceremonial study of transcending partnership without the body of the other. It focuses on relationships as translucent sensory cooperations and shared imaginary spaces, and on the invincible relativity of intimacy between two, something symbiotic and yielding captured without seeing--experimenting at togetherness. link to film page:
DATE: Saturday May 14, 2022 Starts @ 8PM
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: $12
This documentary features the artists from the improbable world of Noise and extreme music, who have decided to take transgression to new limits in ways that are diverse to say the least.
From the human voice to ordinary objects or instruments used in ways that are quite different to those for which they were designed, they develop their own language and shake up their listeners, plunging them into worlds of sound with unknown topographies.
Brought together behind closed doors for the purposes of the film, these 9 turbulent French, European and South American artists confront and question their practices. An opportunity for each of them to give us an unprecedented performance...
directed by JÉRÔME FLORENVILLE
DATE: Saturday May 14, 2022 Starts @ 10PM
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: $12
DATE: Sunday May 15, 2022 Starts @11:45am
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: $8
Nine meditations on the voyeurism of the inanimate, ranging from the colossal to the microscopic.
Todd Fraser (4min | Canada | 16mm)
In Florenceville-Bristol, New Brunswick there is a replica of Noah's Ark. This film has been sourced from vacation footage documenting the holy location. The film was rephotographed on a semi-functional optical printer with a mind of its own and processed in red wine and holy water with slight variations in temperature and recipe.
Britany Gunderson (4min | USA | 35mm)
Seeking out the edges of a landscape you've never been to, we keep finding ourselves at the center of something.
Lorenzo Gattorna (7min | USA, India | Super 8, 16mm, 35mm)
'Death in Kashi is "liberation"'. – "Death in Banaras", Jonathan P. Parry, 1994
Malte Bartels (3min | Germany | 8mm, 35mm Slides)
Traffic scenes combined with distorted images of a building. Made from about 150 Adox Scala slides and 8.5 m of Cine8 Regular 8 film hand-developed in "Chromaflex" process inspired by Richard Tuohy and Kathryn Ramey.
Jason Younkman (11min | USA | Digital)
Summer(s) in New York City reassembled as a scrolling (de)collage.
Miles Sprietsma (5min | USA | Super 8 )
The streets of Portland become a physical adventure through the collapse of cinematic time and space.
Christopher Gorski (7min | Germany | 16mm)
A film without a camera, a re-assemblage of images and memory
Michael Lyons, Haruka Mitani (4min | Japan | Super 8 )
This is a stop motion animation of antique kimono textiles from the Nishijin district in Kyoto. The soundtrack was created by Michael Lyons and Palle Dahlstedt using the Octopus analogue audio-visual interface. The synthesizer follows visual input from the film, so that the textile motifs may act as a visual score for the sounds. The film is the outcome of our desire to listen to the kimono patterns.
A. Moon (3min | US | 16mm)
Direct-on-film (cameraless) tea leaf divination made using the "phytography" process.
DATE: Sunday May 15, 2022 Starts @ 1:10pm
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: $8
Four strong narratives exploring various types of relationships.
Dimitri Lurie (21min | Norway, Russia | Digital, Super 8 )
"Hermit” is a creative artistic documentary with an emphasis on visual expression, atmospheric imagery and simplicity of form. Shot on the Valamo archipelago on Lake Ladoga in the North-West of Russia, it portrays an ascetic meteorologist who for many years lives and works on a distant meteorological station in a sort of a voluntary exile from the society he once belonged to.
Jane Malei (15min | Israel | Digital)
Bilal is a child in an adult's world who understands that his big brother's toy horse can earn them money. Jihad is an adult caught in a child's world and loves his toy horse dearly. A business offer forces them to choose the world they will live in.
Gloria Mercer (8min | Canada | Digital)
In the aftermath of a murder, two women lost in the woods make their way back home.
Patrick David, Isaac Green Diebboll (19min | USA | Digital)
Prep. Cook. Clean. Repeat. In the daily wash-cycle of the restaurant kitchen, two Baltimore cooks push each other’s buttons, polarize friends, and wrestle with an unspoken bond.
DATE: Sunday May 15, 2022 Starts @ 2:50pm
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: $8
Meditations on human achievement and our prospects for survival.
Mark Street (2min | USA | 35mm)
A New Year's card that looks backwards to consider what might be to come. A collage made up of outtakes from "The Quick and the Dead" and educational filmstrips. (Footage courtesy Craig Baldwin)
Georg Koszulinski (12min | USA | 16mm, Digital)
Three narrators converge in the deserts of New Mexico, each with a separate story to tell. One narrator is J. Robert Oppenheimer, another is an extraterrestrial being, and the other is me.
Leonardo Pirondi (15min | USA/Portugal | 16mm)
Following the discovery of a mysterious metal structure in the desert, this film documents the encased objects found within the structure, and is made up of speculative recreations of the study conducted, analysis of the found objects, and surrounding landscapes. Set in the landscapes of Los Angeles, this hybrid documentary seeks to explore harmful cyclical occurrences that exploit natural resources and bring us closer to extinction.
Josh Weissbach (12min | USA, Greece, Ireland | Super 8, 16mm, 35mm)
Other than the ocean, the rest of the planet was bathed in purple, which was due to the color of the vegetation. The change in the sun's radiation had probably caused the plants to evolve as they adapted to the new light.
Daniel Murphy (7min | USA | 16mm)
For centuries, people have reported seeing flaming ships off the coast of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Scientific explanations of the sightings tend to revolve around one atmospheric phenomenon or another, most commonly St. Elmo’s Fire.
Georg Koszulinski (15min | USA, Iceland | Digital)
The 3rd film in my Anthropocene cycle, folding Norse mythology with the 6th mass extinction event currently underway. Deep time, historical time, and mythological time converge into a single filmic thread.
DATE: Sunday May 15, 2022 Starts @ 4:30pm
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: $8
We end shorts programming for the Moviate Underground Film Festival with seven stellar documentary portraits.
Todd Fraser (6min | Canada | Super 8 )
My grandfather Willie Francis Fraser reflects on the long-form storytelling he heard in his youth on Cape Breton Island, his relationship to the Gaelic language, and his extraordinary experience of learning to dance in a series of dreams he had as a boy.
James Hollenbaugh (7min | USA | Super 8 )
Brent Brown is a self-taught artist with lifelong mental health challenges. Intuitive and deeply talented, in recent years he has started building complex, highly fanciful "puppets" constructed from dozens of cardboard elements with fully moveable joints. "The Sticklet Weaver" explores Brent's process and celebrates his unique artistic journey.
Sammy Lamb (14min | USA | 16mm, VHS)
Donnie Rose retells the vibrant, short, and tragic life of runaway fourteen-year-old Donnie; the film explores the queer origins of the nascent Los Angeles punk scene, and how Donnie found family among the outcast teens living on the streets of Los Angeles in 1978.
Roger Neira (6min | Peru | Super 8, 16mm)
An experimental poetic work. Two viewpoints, two Super-8 cameras are showing us the house, the humanity and the passion for cinema of one of the masters of Peruvian cinema: Gianfranco Annichini. A diptych that finally becomes an open work in 16mm.
Inna Dmitrieva (7min | USA | 16mm)
Landays is both a celebration of the landay, a traditional form of Afghan poetry, and an exploration of women’s life in contemporary Afghanistan. Centered around an interview with a young woman from Kabul, the piece juxtaposes rephotographed images of Afghan life with performances of several landay couplets.
Kelly Gallagher (15min | USA, Ireland | 16mm, 8mm, Digital)
Sisterhood and solidarity nourished the thirty-two Irish Republican women POWs at Armagh Gaol (Jail) in 1980, as they embarked on a transgressive, challenging, and oft-overlooked No-Wash protest against British Colonialism.
Jacob Koestler, Michael McDermit (25min | USA | Digital)
Fifty years ago, Tim McDermit fell 40 feet from his college dorm roof. He suffered a traumatic brain injury and was diagnosed with aphasia, a language disorder which left him unable to speak. Though 2 million others in the U.S. suffer from aphasia, few have even heard of it. Over the past five decades, Tim has struggled with relearning how to communicate all over again, navigating the social stigmas that come with broken speech, and finally letting go of the life that was snatched away from him.
TE: Sunday May 15, 2022 Starts @ 8PM
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: $12
"SOUND MECHANIC" is a feature length documentary about Neil Feather, an artist/musician/performer/sound mechanic who invents new musical instruments and sound making devices, frequently incorporating bicycle parts, bowling balls and sex toys. His inventions are then used in live performances and installations.
Director Skizz Cyzyk ("Icepick To the Moon", "Freaks In Love" "Hit and Stay") and Producer Jen Talbert, In-Person. Including a post-screening Q&A.
