Every Contact Leaves a Trace (2025) - 82 minutes Presented by filmmaker Lynne Sachs
$12 - 8PM at the Midtown Cinema
Contact—so tactile, so evocative of the touch of one person on another, physically and emotionally. Trace—a way to get back to an earlier point and a reckoning with the remains of that initial encounter. Filmmaker Lynne Sachs has saved every business card anyone has ever given her. After 40 years of collecting, she recognizes their mnemonic powers. With 600 cards in her grasp, Sachs contemplates the impact of these haptic exchanges. In both real and imagined ways, her essay teases apart their vivid resonances, entwining personal memory with geopolitical history through visual abstraction, music, and a poet’s sense of introspection.
Showing with: "Berlin Theater of the Streets” - A film by Mark Street - 10 minutes Presented in person by filmmaker Mark Street
A walk through Berlin; eyes open, camera ready. Countless vignettes unfold around me, and I imagine storylines for each set piece.
Join us for a special Closing Night Program with both filmmakers in-person! As part of the 27th Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival.
BARBARA FOREVER (2026) - a documentary by Brydie O’Connor
$12 - 3PM at the Midtown Cinema
Co-Presented by the Central PA LGBT Center Introduced by filmmakers Lynne Sachs & Mark Street
For the final day of the 27th Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival, we are honored and thrilled to screen "BARBARA FOREVER"!!! An archive-driven exploration of the life, work, and legacy of iconic, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer.
Turning the lens on a celebrated filmmaker is no easy task, particularly one whose work is as groundbreaking, sensual, and life-affirming as Barbara Hammer’s. Yet, director Brydie O’Connor does her justice. Weaving a kinetic tapestry of archival footage guided by Hammer’s own voice, the film offers an intimate front-row seat into the mind of a visual poet.
Barbara Hammer was deeply concerned with who makes history and who is left out, which motivated her to record her life, her body, her lovers, and the joy found in her lesbian identity. O’Connor’s portrait is an inspiring tribute and candid document of artistic process, capturing the persistence, unabashed ambition, and inevitable tensions such drive creates. Barbara Hammer’s work opened the door for so many artists, and her legacy, so deftly captured here, reminds us why. — SO
This film contains strobe effects.
This film contains mature content and may not be appropriate for all ages.
plus a special additional film: "So Many Ideas Impossible To Do All." 2019. USA. Directed by Mark Street. 11 min. “A year before her death, Barbara Hammer asked me to work on a project she’d envisioned based on her correspondence (1973-85) with Jane Brakhage. She also gave me outtakes from her 1974 film, Jane Brakhage, and told me to let the project take me wherever it led. What emerges is a portrait of Barbara as a brave and vibrant artist and a complex and nuanced long distance friendship.” – Mark Street
-Co-presented by the LGBT Center: The LGBT Center of Central PA fosters inclusive communities and holistic well-being for LGBTQ+ people through social, educational, and cultural engagement. Established in 2006 and based in Harrisburg, the LGBT Center serves over 4,000 people each year across Dauphin, Cumberland, York, and Lancaster counties. Please consider donating to support its important work by visiting centralpalgbtcenter.org
Shorts block #6 - FRESH PLACES - 8 SHORT FILMS from Canada, UK, Poland, USA
1PM at the Midtown Cinema
Shorts block #6 - FRESH PLACES (1PM: 76min)
"Something Went Click" by Caryn Cline/16mm/USA/4min ---The origin story of my mother's struggle with manic-depression (aka bipolar disorder): the rural prairie in the 1950s, an old boys’ club of “deciders,” a puzzling disease about which little was known. I interviewed my mother in 2000, using a DV camera, but never managed to complete a piece I was satisfied with. After her death, I rephotographed a singular gesture from that video interview, then developed cyanotypes from and optically-printed (including direct bi-packing with leaves) those sequences.
"Alpine Tundra" by Kathleen Rugh/16mm/USA/6min ---At an elevation of 14,264 feet above sea level, the peak of Mount Blue Sky is too harsh for trees and common vegetation. Instead, the ground is covered with fragile tundra grass, weak soil, and rock. In this harsh climate exists the highest paved road in North America, that allows visitors traveling by car to partake in striking views and a sense of awe in the extremes of nature.
"I Was There" by Kamila Kuc/Super 8/Poland, UK, USA/12min ---A haunting exploration of familial bonds, intergenerational memory, and the enduring impact of shared narratives. The filmmaker steps into the emotional stream of inherited family history as the lines between documentary, testimony, and fiction blur. She performs acts of bearing witness not just for herself but also on behalf of her grandmother. Together, they testify to their experiences and the reverberations these stories have over time. Past and present intertwine in the intimate process of activating memory and vulnerability as forms of resistance.
"Tuktuit : Caribou" by Lindsay Aksarniq McIntyre/16mm/Canada/15min ---An experimental documentary created with handmade and manufactured emulsions exploring the close and enduring connections between Inuit, caribou, lichens, and land use. Lichen developers help bring the images to life, while caribou hide is processed into gelatin to make handmade emulsion. Filmed primarily on the land in Nunavut where caribou struggle to maintain their lifeways amidst burn events, habitat disruption and changing conditions. "Hiding Places" by Magdalena Bermudez/16mm/USA/12min ---Women pretend to be rocks. Military operations masquerade as art education. One woman deserts to pursue a more radical act of unselfing.
"All of This Must Be Paid For" by Gabi Rudin/16mm/USA/12min ---The wellness universe evaluates the spiritual mechanics of the pain-body as it searches for answers. TW: needle injection
"Hurricane Season" by Michelle Trujillo/16mm/USA/6min ---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.
"Fresh Values" by Drew Durepos, Isaac Brooks/16mm/USA/12min ---In the near future, a struggling urban food co-op adopts AR technology to save their store. The strategy proves too successful.
Shorts Block #5 - AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS - FOUR SHORT FILMS from THE USA
11AM at the Midtown Cinema
Shorts Block #5 - AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS (11AM: 78min)
"甜腻腻 Thick & Sweet" by Yinan Wang/Digital/USA/15min ---The uprooted, the American dreams, the thick and sweet sauce, and an empty dining hall—too much for one to face and survive. It is far easier to demolish a closed restaurant. Composed of cutouts, reenactments, found footage, and fragments of earlier films, the work attempts to rebuild personal and collective memory while reflecting on the immigrant experience through the Americanization of food.
"Same Water" by Martine Granby/Super 8, 16mm, MiniDV/USA/22min ---Drawing from institutional and personal archives, this film revisits a colored-only riverside recreation space that existed alongside a celebrated white-only water park, exposing the layered histories of segregation and unequal access to nature and leisure in Jim Crow America.
"Marratein, Marratein" by Julia Yezbick/Super 8, 16mm/Lebanon, USA/25min ---Letters to a maternal ancestor reflect on identity connected to ethnic heritage, while also embracing a broader notion of family beyond bloodlines. Weaving images and sounds from the filmmaker’s personal ties to two cities—Detroit and Beirut—the film poses the central question: How do we belong to each other?
"Learning from Learning from Las Vegas" by Gillian Waldo, Sam Taffel/16mm/USA/18min ---An experimental adaptation of the seminal architectural text Learning from Las Vegas (1972) by architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. The film details the evolution of their relationship, explores the motels, neon signage, and wedding chapels described in the book, and asks what lessons can we glean from the contemporary landscape of Vegas.
Shorts Block #4 - PARADISE AND ITS REVERSE - 9 SHORT FILMS from Ecuador, Japan, USA
8PM at the Midtown Cinema
Shorts Block #4 - PARADISE AND ITS REVERSE (8PM: 77min)
"Leather Graves" by Malic Amalya/16mm/USA/12min ---Explores the permeable boundaries between exile and ecstasy. Cruising amongst gravestones engraved with references to queer culture and sexuality, queers defy death by devouring candy-coated blossoms. The cast and crew are all trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and/or femme queer people.
"(another) Perfect Film" by Justin Clifford Rhody/16mm/USA/5min - Silent ---"A lot of film is perfect left alone, perfectly revealing in its un- or semi-conscious form. I wish more stuff was available in its raw state, as primary source material for anyone to consider, and to leave for others in just that way, the evidence uncontaminated by compulsive proprietary misapplied artistry, 'editing', the purposeful 'pointing things out' that cuts a road straight and narrow through the cine-jungle; we barrel through thinking we're going somewhere and miss it all. Better to just be pointed to the territory, to put in time exploring, roughing it, on our own.” - Ken Jacobs
"Break All The Vases, Steal All The Flowers" by Michael Alexander Morris/16mm/USA/4min ---Oh rascal children of Gaza, You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window, You who filled every morning with rush and chaos, You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony, “Come back – And scream as you want, And break all the vases, Steal all the flowers, Come back, Just come back…” -- Khalid Juma
"A Telephone for God" by Nicky Tavares/16mm/USA/11min ----Breathe in to receive. Exhale in a sharp burst through the nostrils to send. Quartz is the medium—amplifier, transducer, archive. Inspired by the research of Marcel Vogel—IBM senior research chemist turned spiritual scientist—A Telephone for God oscillates between past and present, tuning into frequencies of human–plant communication and energetic healing. The film follows Drew Tousley, one of the few crystal cutters personally trained by Vogel before his passing in 1991, as he creates a four-sided Vogel crystal modeled after the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Alongside him, energy healer and Reiki master Carly Tousley reflects on the use of crystals in healing. Award-winning artist Merik Goma stars as Vogel’s present-day assistant.
"BETTER LIGHTING" by Kathryn Ramey/16mm/USA/2min ---An agitprop made from two 30-second GE adverts from the 1970s repurposed to rebuke the role white women voters in the US have chosen to uphold white supremacy and the patriarchy instead of supporting the interests of women and anyone who loves them.
"Garúa" by Javier Andrade/16mm/Ecuador/20min ---Numbed by her grief, Lucía wanders through a small fishing town in the middle of nowhere. She is in a place where she doesn’t belong, but it is all she has left. A hollow version of herself, she silently floats from distraction to distraction; having meaningless sex, wandering through town, and nursing a hangover. Facing her new reality, Lucia takes a fishing boat to a rocky island. She digs up the cremated remains of her loved ones. The constant, misty rain (“garúa” in Spanish) and grey skies are the same color as the ashes. As much as she wants to look away from death, she confronts it head-on.
"The Escape" by Erica Schreiner/VHS/USA/6min ---Filmed on VHS, The Escape takes us into the intimate walls of Erica’s New York City apartment where she brews a potion of butterfly wings, flowers, a key, an old pocket watch, glitter, and a raw egg—and drinks it, slipping into a series of dreamlike inner realms. A butterfly world, flower world and sensual dance world: each offering the hope of escape. However, even in the alluring world of flowers, there is no perfect escape. Original score by Toby Goodshank (The Moldy Peaches, The Pizza Underground).
"The Story of The Cricket Queen" by Natalie Peracchio/Super 8 and 16mm/USA/4min ---Recreates digital media tropes, trends, and aesthetics with analog film techniques.
"Hyodo's Paradise" by Jacque Rabie/Digital/Japan, USA/22min ---Hyodo lives near Tokyo in a vibrant house filled with hundreds of sex dolls. An unconventional character living amidst the normalcy and conformity of Japan, his life blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. Hyodo’s hedonistic, imaginative world is explored unflinchingly in an affectionate portrait of a deeply complex man.
Shorts Block #3 - COSMIC SPARKS -12 SHORT FILMS from Canada, Mexico, Latvia, Indonesia, USA
3PM at the Midtown Cinema
Shorts Block #3 - COSMIC SPARKS (73min)
"solar wave" by Christina C Nguyen/16mm/USA/3min ---sun light, sun set, sun rise, sun ray. a hand processed in camera roll shot on Kodak 3383 color print stock.
"TRANSFORMATION BY FIRE" by Jake Parker Scott/16mm/Indonesia, Canada/21min ---This film explores 'transformation by fire' as a process central to Javanese bronze gong smithing and the volcanic origins of the Indonesian islands. It was made in collaboration with Indonesian experimentalists Senyawa, and is a composite of film shot on a bolex in Java, 16mm found footage collage, direct animation, and optically printed material.
"leavings" by Lindsay McIntyre/16mm/Canada/1min ---Lindsay McIntyre is a film artist from Edmonton of Inuk/European descent.
"Aeon" by Dominic Angerame/16mm/USA/12min ---Reflections of images past. New perspectives on the urban areas, superimposed over cosmic energies. A spiritual path emerges, journey into an unknown universe. The search for new meanings, new revelations, new visions for the future.
"Manifesto of Feeble and Bitter Love" by Abinadi Meza/16mm/Mexico, USA/6min ---The screen is a wound. A lamentation field. A camera-less direct animation. Worked through staining, layering, and physical distress, the film generates a haunted field: an environment of deeply saturated, glowing color and chromatic rupture. Its score is constructed from two seconds of air from a Gaza news clip: the negative space between cries of anguish. Like a shadow, that charged air is summoned to retain the outline of what cast it. Air inscribed with lives dismissed and abandoned by imperial power. From these two seconds, a six-minute polyphonic sound mass is conjured. Bypassing the photographic window and the documentary gaze, the film refuses the spectacular image economy that circulates atrocity without feeling.
"Cross" Sandy McLennan/16mm/Canada/1min ---What makes you cross?
"Summer School" Josh Weissbach/16mm/Latvia, USA/3min Along the banks of the Salaca River in rural Latvia, a haven emerges where analog film wizards and aspiring apprentices unite. At this pop-up school, the art of filmmaking intertwines with botany, folklore, and magic, weaving a tapestry of creativity and tradition.
"Wetland Impulse" by Jimmy Schaus/16mm/USA/2min ---Single frame exposures were taken while walking through wetlands surrounding my home, alternating between image and no image at a rate of two frames each on black and white reversal film. In the unexposed black frames, I made quick observational etchings from the preceding images directly into the emulsion. Projected, the photographic images and my subsequent renderings appear superimposed rather than sequential, unifying the indexical and interpretive.
"Midsummer" by Masha Vlasova/16mm/USA/2min ---Midsummer is a cyanotype, sun-printed film. The film was conceived during Juhannus, the celebration of the longest day of the year in Finland, when the sun doesn’t set for 24 hours. The light of the sun is both material and collaborator in creating this film-poem.
"In Paintings, All Emotions" by Will VanKoughnett/16mm/USA/9min ---A reenactment of the birth of color photography, within the birth of landscape as a site of recreation: a conversation between technologies at the dawn of imagery. If the sun gives consent, places exchange their distances in phrases of forgetfulness, through wormholes of iteration. The skies are dark, smooth without many people. Photographs erase other photographs, the clouds depart the truth, I sharpen my pencil; a lot of things happen.
"we always wanted to move to the country" by Billy Tucker/8mm, 16mm/USA/3min ---This is a film where a single mother and child process their experiences during the year 1990.
"Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air" by Sam Drake/16mm/USA/9min ---Fragmented records reveal a concealed history of Cold War–era human radiation experiments, surfacing through a haze of manipulation and embedded studies. Desert dust settles into teeth, inscribing a residual record. Contaminated images conjure the unseen.
LANGUAGE NATIVES -Shorts Block #2 - 9 short films from India, Germany, Spain, USA, HARRISBURG!
1PM at the Midtown Cinema
Shorts Block #2 --- LANGUAGE NATIVES (75min)
"Dance Film" by Kelly Gallagher/Digital/USA/1min ---This animated film playfully upends the traditional focus of most avant-garde choreography films by turning its attention on the spectator of a dance instead of the dancer herself. This film is about the act of watching, and what it means to look at someone with love, tenderness and openness. "There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.” - Nelson Mandela
"scrape" by Sierra Grove/Super 8, 16mm/USA10min ---I relish in the position of amateur filmmaker and skateboarder, and I explore the overlap of both practices in their shared tactile and responsive gesture. There is synergy between my hand with a knife carving into the surface of the film strip, and my skateboard grinding against a ramp’s edge.
"Fragments of a Journal in Hell" by Rebecca Barten/16mm/USA/8min ---A narrated found footage collage film bringing together fragments of writing by the French Surrealist poet, essayist and philosopher, Antonin Artaud. A look at and exemplification of a self under siege, undergoing agonizing psycho-physical states. At the same time, the film celebrates an improbably alive artistic practice struggling to still create personal metaphors during a wartime of the self and the world.
"TRIP-tych!" by Brian Lonano, Kevin Daniel Lonano/Super 8,16mm/USA/9min ---A home movie-experimental souvenir shot over the course of 7 years
"Leaf Peeper" by Vito A. Rowlands/Super 8/USA/3min ---A frantic frolic in Fall foliage. A stop-motion autumn adventure. A symphony in blaze orange.
"there's no static on television anymore" by Eric Dietrick/Digital/Harrisburg/PA/USA/11min ---A city symphony.
"Language Decay" by Zazie Ray-Trapido/16mm/USA/3min ---Time causes disintegration, wherein different variations and versions emerge. Because of physical separation, my grandmother slowly forgets her native tongue and the languages she spoke as a child, mirroring the movement and transformation of living languages. The act of remembering brings back these decomposing versions of past selves, selves that never were or briefly were, then hidden away but not discarded. The film intentionally chooses to leave all sequences unsubtitled.
"Language Unknown" by Janelle VanderKelen/16mm/Spain, USA/6min ---This film embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans (who are far more sensorially limited). Leaves, mycelium, and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world, and the (supposedly) silent watchers consider what language those swift blurs of human might possibly understand.
"Analogue Natives" by Bernd Lützeler/35mm, 16mm, Digital/India, Germany/26min. ---This experimental documentary circulates around interviews with four veterans who worked all their lives in analogue film labs and animation studios in Mumbai, and who all lost their businesses and jobs around 2012–14, when the Hindi film industry went through a drastic shift to digital production. They reflect on the loss of their craftsmanship, but also on the philosophies of their handmade film practice. We learn about the art of living and working under precarious conditions in India. Finally, everything results in a futile collage of nostalgia and memories, mashed up with the absurd aesthetics of AI slop.
"MORICHALES" by Chris Gude, documentary on COLUMBIA GOLD MINING co-presented by ELEMENTARY COFFEE!
Chris Gude/16mm/Columbia/83min
MIDTOWN CINEMA, 11AM, Saturday May 30th, 2026
In Venezuelan Guayana, large gold reserves lie beneath “moriche” palms, attracting miners from across the region. A narrator travels from far-flung mines in the jungle to the banks of the Orinoco River, trying to understand the uncertain fortune of the miner. His reflections combine illustrations and photochemical paintings to draw a map of the mining and commercialization of gold in Venezuela while also questioning humankind’s extractivist relationship with nature.
Filmed over the course of thirteen years, ‘Morichales’ is a journey deep into the most disputed territory of the country, immersed in the anxious quest for gold.
Kicking off DAY THREE of the 27th Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival! Co-presented with ELEMENTARY COFFEE, who source most of their beans from a direct trade source in Columbia!
"Adam Disturbed a Bird" by David Colagiovanni/Digital/USA/4min ---A band, a bus, some friends, a few birds and a bunch of kids dance and wiggle to a song from the album "In the Ferns" by The Peel in this cut-out animated music video.
"STALL" by Lindsay McIntyre/16mm/Canada/2min ---Lindsay McIntyre is a film artist from Edmonton of Inuk/European descent.
"2nd Day & the End of the World" by Sara Koppel/Hand-Drawn/Denmark/12min --A hand-and-paper-drawn, Hyper-Family-Drama about processes of secession, post-traumatic attacks, tempting body conditions & powerless loneliness in a climate-catastrophic universe.
"Hansel and Gretel Get Kicked Out" by Mille Feuille/Digital/Canada/12min --A found-footage détournement of retail-theft surveillance, in which the criminalizing gaze of the surveillance footage is subverted by recasting capitalism as an abusive, carceral parent. Quotes transcribed from YouTube creators, who were kicked out of their homes as teens, are repurposed to ‘speak back’, buttressed by ‘poor’ low-resolution videos of stealing. Music from Flowers of Romance by Michel Henritzi.
"Melencolia 2: Destitution Signs" by M Woods/Super 8/USA/8min ---A nostalgic retread through the 4th plateau of New York City followed by a short polemic against ethnography and hipsters. Shot between 2006 and 2025.
"Injured?" by Eislow Johnson/16mm/USA/13min ---Need help? Crashouts, manifestation influencers and injury lawyers collide in this breakneck ride through the Midwest. 50 years after attorney ads were first legalized in the U.S., their ubiquitous self-portraits (allegedly) invoke a churn-and-burn economy of volume, velocity, fears and veneers.
"Color Separation" by Diane Nerwen/Digital/USA/5min ---My father, David Nerwen, was a visual artist and graphic designer. He worked in the printing industry where he applied his keen sense of color to offset lithography and color separation processes. Color Separation weaves together found and shot footage to reflect on my father’s creative work, his decline in health and the disorientation of losing a parent.
"Augmented" by Raymond Rea/16mm/USA/8min ---AUGMENTED is an experimental non-fiction short, shot completely on 16mm, that analyzes the commonalities between medical augmentation and Transgender alignment. At a time when we are under attack, we realize that we're frightening because we're the future. "Exhumation (Dirt: Part Four)" by David Finkelstein/MiniDV/USA/20min ---Exhumation is an extended poetic meditation on our relation to the soil, and the energies buried within it. Centuries of history, of conquering and re-conquering, lie beneath our feet, and the return of the vanquished is inevitable. There has also always been an alternative possibility, within the American landscape, of a more peaceful relationship with the soil, the resting place of our ancestors.
"Happy Birthday, America!" by Neil Ira Needleman/Digital/USA/3min ---On Independence Day, America's birthday, I was thinking about an immigrant friend of mine who had to self-deport because Trump's ICE stormtroopers had become a living nightmare. (This version of the video was revised in 2026.)
Moviate and Tattoo Punks welcome Director JEFF KRULIK to the Midtown Cinema. Jeff will present a 40th Anniversary program for "HEAVY METAL PARKING LOT"! Lot of rare footage and fun facts about the cult classic documentary witih Jeff Krulik IN-PERSON!
This is such a classic film, made in 1986 in the parking lot of a Judas Priest concert. If you haven't seen it, this will be the perfect way to experience it. If you have, then you know this will be a special event!
Guitarists Glenn Jones and Liam Grant perform live original scores to "The River" and "The Plow That Broke The Plains" (both on 16mm), with a post performance screening of "VOICE OF THE EAGLE: The Enigma of Robbie Basho" (plus a post screening Q&A with Glenn Jones)
KICK OFF THE 27th ANNUAL MOVIATE UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL WITH A SPECIAL LIVE PERFORMANCE BY MUSICIANS GLENN JONES and LIAM GRANT, playing Original Scores to TWO 16mm Film Prints; "THE RIVER" and "THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS" 7PM, Thursday May 28th. 7PM
PLUS a special screening of "VOICE of the EAGLE: The Enigma of Robbie Basho" afterwards with a post screening Q&A.
Glenn Jones playing to "The River"
"Moviate is a volunteer operated, not for profit organization, dedicated to bringing independent, underground, and avant-garde Cinema and Sound events to the Harrisburg, PA area."
Every Contact Leaves a Trace (2025) - 82 minutes
