Program 5 | should gravity lose its hold
5:00 PM | Sunday May 17th 2026 | Woodland Pattern
720 E Locust St | Milwaukee, WI, 53212
Popo’s Pilgrimage, Cyrus Hung, 15min 45 sec
Synopsis |
A documentary film about the filmmaker's grandmother - Popo, and her yearly pilgrimage to Mount Putuo, a sacred Buddhist site in China. Led valiantly by Popo, moments of both heartwarming exchanges and tension between grandma and grandson are captured candidly.
Artist Bio |
Cyrus Hung (b.1996, Hong Kong) is an artist-filmmaker. His current work primarily explores the complexities of human relationships through documentary filmmaking. His approach often centers on individual subjects, focusing on their beliefs, humour and their personal connections. He holds an MFA from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford where he was awarded the prestigious Clarendon Fund Scholarship, and had previously studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL and Kuvataideakatemia (Academy of Fine Arts), Helsinki.
Selected past exhibitions include Only A Joke Can Save Us (2021), Current Plans (previously named Present Projects), Hong Kong; Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019, South London Gallery and Leeds Art Gallery; and The Sunset Club (2018), Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre. His latest film, Popo’s Pilgrimage (2025) has been awarded Best Documentary (Romford Short Film Festival 2025), Best Documentary Short (West London Film Festival 2025) and Best Experimental Documentary (Oregon Documentary Film Festival Winter 2026).
we breathe each other in and out of existence , Archer Boyette, 5.25
Synopsis |
A celebration of the magic of plant life. Originally presented as an installation with suspended 16mm film, environmental field recordings, digitized projections, and tree stumps. All plants harvested in Pisgah National Forest.
Artist Bio |
Archer Boyette (she/they) is a moving image artist from Western North Carolina. Her handmade, 16mm films and analog installations emerge from an embodied, ritualistic approach to process, playfully engaging the materiality of celluloid to illuminate the supernatural dimensions of human and more-than-human coexistence.
Archer received a BA in Art History from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University, where she currently works as an instructor. Her work has screened nationally and internationally at Labocine, Black Mountain College Museum, Dream Sequence London, and Ann Arbor Film Festival (2026).
No Matter What! Carolyn Lambert, 11min
Synopsis |
No Matter What (2024, 11 min.) is an essay film that begins with a simple misidentification: the Red-tailed Hawk's cry, ubiquitous in Hollywood cinema, almost never belongs to the bird on screen. This sonic sleight-of-hand—a substitution so normalized it escapes notice—shapes the film as both subject and formal strategy. The film weaves personal memory, cultural theory, and ecological observation to examine how media representation shapes and distorts our perceptual relationship to the natural world. No Matter What asks, “What does it mean to mishear the animals around us, even as those sounds grow quieter?”
Artist Bio |
Carolyn Lambert’s video and installation work explores affective responses to the living world in an era of ecological and social rupture. She has exhibited at institutions such as the Drawing Center, Picture Theory Gallery, SculptureCenter, Eyebeam, Proteus Gowanus and Exit Art. Her video work has screened at the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück (Germany), the Gjon Mili International Video Art Festival (Albania), Red Outline Festival (Mexico), Athens International Film and Video Festival (Ohio), Bomb Factory (UK), and MUMOK (Vienna, AU). She was a Urban Field Station Residency with the US Forest Service in 2024, and in 2025, she was a recipient of a Media Arts Assistance Grant from NYSCA and Wave Farm. She teaches Media Art at Kean University in NJ, and has a studio in the Hudson Valley, NY.
Confetti, Amanda Bonaiuto, 4min 15sec
Synopsis |
An unsettling journey through a fever dream.
Artist Bio |
Amanda Bonaiuto is an animation director, artist, and assistant professor of Illustration at Parsons School of Design. Her films have screened at film festivals and institutions globally, including Slamdance Film Festival, Annecy International Animation Festival, Ottawa International Animation Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, among others. Her work has been recognized by press outlets such as It’s Nice That, The New Yorker, Vimeo, and NPR. She holds an MFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She offers workshops, mentorship, and animation publications through a collaborative project called Magician Studio.
Amanda uses animation to experiment with choreographic movement, relational ruptures, and the ever present tension between bodies and space. Her work examines experiences of turmoil in mundane spaces; the bedroom, the funeral home, the emotional dance created through chains of physical association. She is fascinated by the porousness of lived experience. Her films consider how our environments exert influence as we reciprocally construct our own world.
Happiness in a Pot, Clara Jost, 19min 15sec
