GILDA!

Almost 100 years of life culminate in a funny portrait of a grandmother passing down a brisket recipe.

Director: Riede Dervay

Riede Dervay is an award winning cinematographer from Virginia Beach, VA. Now based in New York City, she strives to create the art she wishes to see in the world.

[THE WHO - BABA OREILLY]

People wait for the intro of Baba O'Riley by The Who to end so they can sing the song at karaoke.

Director: Eric Schuman

Eric Schuman is a director and editor.

His work has won an Emmy, been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and screened at Venice, Cannes, Sundance, and TIFF — among other festivals.

Altar Piece

The Holy Mary amidst ongoing traffic. A basement of deities with the light on 24/7. A collection of trash, or so it seems. “Altar Piece” walks through the neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens, montaging intentional and seemingly unintentional altars in collective shrine.

Director: Kiana Fernandez

Kiana Fernandez is a Filipina-American interdisciplinary artist focusing on the scavenging of hypersignification and hope in our physical and digital existence. Working across the boundaries of video, photomontage, crowdsourcing, and objects, she attempts to recompose everyday experiences with divine importance. Her work has been showcased at the MOMA, The Museum of Moving Image, Anthology Film Archives, UnionDocs, Nguyen Wahed, and UsagiNY.

Uncanny Monsters: Abjection and the Monstrous-Feminine in Blade Runner

"Uncanny Monsters: Abjection and the Monstrous-Feminine in Blade Runner" is a video essay illustrating how Rachael and Pris, two female replicant characters in the film Blade Runner, simultaneously perform and complicate real-world ideals of femininity in uncanny ways. I created it for Prof. Margaret Rhee's Spring 2026 Media Theory course as part of the Media Studies master's degree program at Parsons School of Design, The New School.
I edited the project in Adobe Premiere and used Adobe Firefly, Adobe Express, Anthropic's Claude, and Mac's text-to-speech voice Samantha to make elements of it. This was my first time experimenting with AI for a video project: I prompted Firefly and Express to make the feminized cyborg in the opening, used Claude to adapt my final paper into a voice over script, and used text-to-speech technology for the voice over.
This project includes clips from Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, The Brood, and Rosemary's Baby, as well as quotes from Jack Halberstam's "Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine," Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, Alan Turing's “Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Abby Wilkerson's “Embodiment," and Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, used for educational purposes only. All rights remain with the respective copyright holders.

Director: Cat Tassini

I am a filmmaker, artist, and multimedia designer based in New York City. The focus of my artistic practice is creating music- and documentary-based videos from an intersectional queer eco-feminist perspective. My films have been screened at the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, Bushwick Film Festival, South by Southwest Film, and Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. In 2020, I won the Queering the Quarantine Challenge at OUTStream Film Festival. Currently, I am developing my first long form film project, experimental hybrid documentary Echo’s Answer. The short film version of this project won the Outstanding Sound award at the 2022 Art of Brooklyn Film Festival. Echo’s Answer is fiscally sponsored by the International Documentary Association.

The Optimum Aquarium

The Optimum Aquarium is a film that interrogates who controls where people live in 21st-century Bushwick and Ridgewood: two neighborhoods on the border of Brooklyn and Queens that are experiencing the churn and change of gentrification.

The Optimum Aquarium invites its viewers into the inner worlds of fish tanks, their inhabitants, and their owners, and puts fish tank care in dialogue with cultural and historical ideas around containment, ownership, and human/animal life cycles. The film takes us into the mindset of commercial developers seeking to transform the neighborhood, and it focuses on Myrtle Point/Ridgewood Towers — a new development where an immigrant construction worker fell to his death in 2022. This site reflects the cold calculations of capital and our limited ability to control the built environments around us.

Interspersed with shots of the neighborhood and fish tanks are screen grabs from The Sims 4: City Living, a game where an ideology of ownership and unattainable utopia emerges. By juxtaposing gameplay with real-life images and sounds of a neighborhood in flux, The Optimum Aquarium examines how mythologies about landlordism persist around us — and asks how we might create alternate futures.

Directors: Mia Warren, Jesse Allain-Marcus

Mia (미아) Warren (she/her) is an award-winning audio producer, journalist, documentarian and former fish tank owner living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, NY. She is the Managing Director of Feet in 2 Worlds, an organization that trains and mentors immigrant journalists. As a former audio producer for StoryCorps, Mia created segments for NPR's Morning Edition, contributed to a 2019 Peabody-nominated podcast season, and collaborated on Un(re)solved, an Emmy Award-winning civil rights series with Frontline.

Jesse Allain-Marcus (he/him) is a filmmaker, documentary editor, researcher, and science-fiction enthusiast living in Brooklyn, NY. Recently, he worked as associate editor on Natchez, a Tribeca-winning documentary on history and memory in the American South. In 2023, he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for nonfiction editing for his work on the “Justice” episode of the 1619 Project Documentary Series.

Breath of the Mountain

Writer-director Gareth Stack explores the intersections of gender, geography, and ritual in Breath of the Mountain, an ethnographic short, filmed in the remote Racha-Lechkhumi region of rural Georgia. The film documents an arduous expedition to a sacred summit near the town of Oni, a place which is exclusively the domain of boys and men.

Stack uses this climb to map the contours of his own familial lineage, drawing parallels between inherited intergenerational trauma and the physical trials of the mountain. Set against a landscape layered with both Orthodox Christian and pre-Christian animist traditions, the film functions as a sensory interrogation of masculinity, endurance, and the shared, labored breath of men.

Director: Gareth Stack

Gareth Stack is a writer, film director and radio producer based in Dublin. His narrative work has been screened internationally including Healdsburg International film festival.

His debut feature documentary ‘Sightless Cinema’ screened in 2025 on Irish television.

Gareth created Sound & Vision funded radio dramas and documentaries for a decade for broadcasters like Newstalk, RTE Lyric and numerous local stations in Ireland. Including the six part mystery series ‘The Wall in the Mind’ and the award winning documentary series ‘Mad Scientists of Music’.

He has created new work on site at the Offaly film festival, Caucuses Cinema Residency and as part of Dublin’s Kino Kabaret.

He has devised and directed narrative music videos for artists like Powerful Creative Minds (feat Jazzy), Shy Mascot, David Turpin and Chris Wilson.

His publications include Hobart’s Modern Love, The Runt, Albedo One, Cassandra Voices, and Analogue Music Magazine. His work has been staged as part of the New Irish Playbook and Scene + Heard festivals.

His plays have been staged in Smock Alley as part of the Scene + Heard Festival and in the Civic Theatre as part of the New Irish Playbook.

Gareth’s work takes the audience into uncomfortable places that explore our cultures' contradictions. I’m interested in how relationships are changing, and how the strange and conflicting belief systems that now exist in parallel encounter one another.

Old Fantasy

I want to be old like my grandmas.

Director: Carly Lauren Lieberman

Space to Breathe

Director: Juicebox P Burton

Ingrato Sureño Invasor

When my father was 7 years old, his family emigrated from Peru to Ecuador in the midst of an armed conflict over territory in the region. Years later, he reflects on his experiences growing up during a time of active combat, and the ways these memories do not seem so foreign in our present.

Director: Sofía Arbaiza Martínez

Sofía Arbaiza Martínez is an Ecuadorian animator, designer, and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. She focuses her work on narratives that center around stories of displacement and connection, particularly in immigrant communities. Her Latin American identity is a crucial part of her inspiration as an artist.

Sofía graduated from Pratt Institute in 2024 with a BFA in Digital Art and 2D Animation and a minor in Literature and Writing. Currently she is pursing her MFA at the Computer Arts department in the School of Visual Arts. Through her craft, she looks to innovate and uplift stories about her heritage and community. She loves animals, writing, and enjoys cooking.