aDifferent Program 1 | Anadromes
7:00 PM | Friday, July 18th 2025 | Woodland Pattern
720 E Locust St | Milwaukee, WI, 53212
Mysterious Purple House, Josh Yates, 1 min
Synopsis |
A liminal sanctuary where the mundane warps into the mystical.
Artist Bio |
Joshua Lee Yates is a non-disciplinary artist, media educator, and film programmer. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Multimedia and Film Production at Georgia Southern University.
Enxofre / Sulfur, Karen Akerman and Miguel Seabra Lopes, 14 min 44 sec
Synopsis |
I am the dead. I am the living.
Artist Bio |
Karen Akerman and Miguel Seabra Lopes work together since 2010, with film and video, mixing fiction, documentary and experimental. Karen works mainly as a film editor [films and series], Miguel as a screenwriter and analog collage artist.
diario de Verano, anivides (Cristal Buemi and Francisca Duran), 3 min 39 sec
Synopsis |
diario de verano is an exploration of neighborhood flora in Tkaronto, focusing on Kensington Market, Parkdale and Wallace – Emmerson, areas we live and move through. Experimentation with abstract movement and the physical, compositional properties of foraged materials, strengthened our community/kinship to the land and each other. Artistic practices were explored and shared through gathering rituals, stop motion animation and phytograms, creating complex layers of ourselves intertwined through our latinx identities in this short film.
Artist Bio |
anivides is the interweaving experimental works of multidisciplinary artists Cristal Buemi and Francisca Duran focusing on analog and digital frame-by-frame approaches to showcase their abstract, study and practices. Exploring the idea of weight on our structures due to environments, experiences and their direct relations to trauma, healing and transformation. With a focus on collages of bodily works both in human and plant forms from a diasporic immigrant, bipoc, femme, queer and intergenerational perspective. anivides’ recent film diario de verano has screened at Playhouse Cinema and will show at Dawson City Film Fest and Les Sommet Du Cinema D’animation this spring.
Tan/Vatan (Body/Homeland), Meenakshi Garodia & Homa Sarabi, 7 min 34 sec
Synopsis |
Tan/Vatan -Body/Homeland- is a collaborative experimental film. It is a conversation between two women and their intimate experiences of love and life. The film embodies a symbolic form borrowed from the origin cultures of the artists, in India and Iran. Tan and Vatan are mutual words in Hindi and Persian language, sharing the same meaning and pronunciation. Artists utilize the language, the medium, and their bodies to connect and visualize their experiences while engaging with the mechanical and physical experience of 16mm and handmade film.
Artist Bio |
Meenakshi Garodia is a multidisciplinary artist, storyteller, ceramicist, writer/director, and experimental filmmaker working across digital, installation, and 16mm film. Her stories explore women’s agency, patriarchy, and the immigrant experience, often through elemental motifs like earth, water, and fire. Passionate about analog processes, she values the physicality of film and clay alike. Meenakshi teaches at Emerson College and serves on multiple nonprofit boards focused on media access and women’s rights. She holds an MFA in Film and an MBA from IIM Bangalore. Learn more at meenakshigarodiafilms.com and meenakshigarodia.com.
Homa Sarabi is an Iranian-born artist, educator, and curator, living in the U.S. Working across film, installation, and socially engaged practices, her work explores the intersection of personal and political, investigates collective memories, and researches contemporary histories. She teaches media and visual arts, and her curatorial practice spans from experimental cinema to international, independent, and documentary films. Her practice bridges the poetic and the political, often drawing from place-based research, collaborative processes, and her roots in Iranian culture and literature.
Jongsawat (The Announced Tragedy), Thanut Rujitanont, 10 min 20 sec
Synopsis |
A time-space conservation of a house in Bangkok, Thailand.
Artist Bio |
Thanut Rujitanont, born in 1993 in Bangkok, founded Graphy Animation in 2021, a company dedicated to fostering animation culture in Thailand.
Mother’s Letters, Sylvia Schedelbauer, 24 min 05 sec
Synopsis |
The filmmaker approximates her mother's perspective using material from the family archive- an artist.
Artist Bio |
Sylvia Schedelbauer's films negotiate the space between broader historical narratives and personal, psychological realms mainly through poetic manipulations of found and archival footage. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
summer school, Josh Weissbach, 2 min 45 sec
Synopsis |
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.
Artist Bio |
Josh Weissbach is an experimental filmmaker. His 16mm films and digital videos have been shown worldwide in such venues as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Light Field, Courtisane Festival, European Media Art Festival, 25 FPS Festival, First Look at Museum of the Moving Image, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Festival dei Popoli, and Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris. He has won jury prizes at Ithaca Experimental, Montreal Underground, Videoex, ICDOCS, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, and Berlin Revolution Film Festival. He is the recipient of a 2021 Artistic Excellence Award from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, a 2020 Moving Image Fund Early Development Grant from the LEF Foundation, a 2018 LightPress Grant from the Interbay Cinema Society, a 2015 LEF Fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, a 2013 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Emerging Artists from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and a 2008 Cary Grant Film Award from the Princess Grace Foundation-USA. A selection of Josh’s films is in distribution at Light Cone in Paris, France.
Fissures, Mike Rollo, 5 min 3 sec
Synopsis |
An abandoned brick-making factory rests at the edge of the badlands in southern Saskatchewan, where clay hills slowly shift over time, burying the past. Fusing high-contrast black-and-white photography with a poem written and read by poet Amber Goodwyn and a textured soundtrack by composer Andrea-Jane Cornell, Fissures is a lyrical examination of an impermanent landscape.
Artist Bio |
Mike Rollo's photochemical practice explores alternative approaches to non-fiction cinema. His films are place-based, focusing on landscapes, rural industries, and communication cultures, incorporating ecological thinking and mindfulness regarding shifts, conflicts, and negotiations related to themes of obsolescence, age, and decay. He is a founding member of Montreal's experimental film collective, Double Negative, as well as Independent Visions and Lanterna in Regina, SK. He has also curated film programs for national and international festivals. His works have screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Cucalorus Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, International Festival of Documentary and Short Film of Bilbao, International Film Festival Oberhausen, Los Angeles Film Forum, San Francisco Cinematheque, and Rotterdam International Film Festival. Mike teaches film production at the University of Regina
Beirut won’t be, Clara Abi Nader, 2 min 29 sec
Synopsis |
“Beirut Won’t Be” is both a farewell and an unresolved love letter.
This work stems from a deeply personal rupture, the kind that lingers in the body and the soundscape of
memory. I return to Beirut whenever I can, physically or in thought, and each time I am met with contradiction: a city soaked in beauty and trauma, unbearable noise and sacred silence. In the film, my voice carries the weight of disillusionment, longing, and quiet rebellion.
I explore what it means to not belong, to a place, to a story, to a version of oneself. The film is not about Beirut as a location, but as a wound that never truly closes. It speaks of fatigue, of imposed and chosen separations, of the heartbreak that comes with watching something you once loved decay before your eyes.
“Beirut Won’t Be” is a gesture of resistance, of not choosing between darkness and noise, of reclaiming the right to drift, like a bird between skies, without settling, without forgetting.
Artist Bio |
Clara Abi Nader is a photographer and multidisciplinary artist whose work traces the emotional topographies of exile, memory, and belonging. Born in Lebanon and based in Paris, her practice emerges from lived experience, the sensation of being suspended between geographies, identities, and emotional states. Through photography, moving images, and writing, she navigates the often-invisible fractures between home and exile, love and detachment, memory and the present.
Clara’s work is deeply personal yet broadly resonant, rooted in the poetics of departure and the politics of displacement. Her visual language is intimate, atmospheric, and quietly defiant, capturing moments of fragility and resistance in the midst of rupture. Whether documenting the residue of a place once called home, or meditating on the dissonance between physical presence and emotional absence, Clara invites viewers to sit with discomfort, to feel the ache of distance, the ghost of memory, and the longing for anchorage.
Help Desk, Edwin Rostron, 3 min 10 sec
Synopsis |
A mysterious transmission communicates playful geometric possibilities. Help Desk is a hypnotic drawn animation, providing a meditative and contemplative space, oscillating between flatness and depth, control and instability. The film was made using an improvisational process of ‘straight ahead’ animation, and was primarily an attempt to regain some much needed focus after the fragmented years of the pandemic.
Artist Bio |
Edwin Rostron has been making animated films for over 25 years. His work is rooted in drawing,, and also encompasses painting, collage, and photography. He has frequently collaborated with musicians including Apartment House, Dean Honer, and Supreme Vagabond Craftsman. Edwin has exhibited at galleries and film festivals internationally, including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Eyeworls, BFL Southbank, The Royal Academy of Arts, Imperial War Museum, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Edwin also runs Edge of Frame, a blog and screening series focusing on experimental animation, and has taught at the Royal College of Art, CalArts, and Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. He loves and works in London.
...but i’ll be BACK before you’re DONE, Federico Montaresi aka Trasparente, 5 min 45 sec
