Illuminations (Avant-Garde Shorts)

With filmmakers Ben Balcom, Sarah Ballard, Sam Drake, James Edmonds, Eva Giolo, Claudrena N. Harold, and Maximilien Luc Proctor in person

“In a place where much no longer made sense.” This intertitle from Helena Wittman’s anxiously beautiful A Thousand Waves Away speaks to the anxieties of this program of shorts. The many splendored avant-garde works here, all shot with artisanal precision on Super 8 or 16mm film, reveal the hidden abyss beneath the serenity and sensuality of our physical world in ominous signs and portents of personal or societal dissolution. Co-curated by Edo Choi and David Schwartz. Total running time: 125 mins, plus a ten-minute intermission. 

All descriptions below are from the artists.  

Part One: Working the Garden 

Songs Overheard in the Shadows 
Dir. James Edmonds.  2025, 22 mins. Germany. 16mm. Balanced on the edge of what is visible, everything comes from nothingness and returns to nothingness. Strands of consciousness trying to convene with each other. Forms of personal significance in a time of crisis, set free into random motion through chance operations. Recurring details point towards a center. World premiere 

Aotearoa  
Dir. Maximilien Luc Proctor. 2024, 7 mins. Germany. 16mm. The snow of Weissensee, a home in Tāmaki Makaurau, the beach in Matapōuri. Edited in camera, using double-perforated film. North American premiere 

The Phalanx 
Dir. Ben Balcom. 2025, 14 mins. U.S. DCP. Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time. World premiere 

Chelsea Drive 
Dirs. Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold. 2025, 4 mins. U.S. Digital projection. Chelsea Drive displays three decades of Black student style, fashion and dance at the University of Virginia. North American premiere 

Being Blue 
Dir. Luke Fowler. 2024, 18 mins. U.K. DCP. Filmed during a residency at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, former home of artist, filmmaker and gay rights activist Derek Jarman, Being Blue touches impressionistically on themes of sexuality, queer British life, art making, and nature. North American premiere  

Part Two: Finding the Forest 

how to make magic 
Dir. Blanca García. 2024, 5 mins. Spain/U.K. Super 8mm. How to distinguish real magic from trickery? In film, as in nature, how much does illusion depend on the unexpected, and how much does wonder depend on artifice? Filmed in the New Forest, the largest remaining unenclosed common land in England, where the entanglement of non-human and human activity hides a joyous spell. With fragments from a 1974 children’s book called How to make magic, discarded from the library I work at. New York premiere 

A Thousand Waves Away (pictured above)
Dir. Helena Wittmann. 2025, 10 mins. Germany. DCP. The people are in turmoil. The ground from which their enchanted garden grows, is trembling. Between bushes and trees, flowerbeds and fountains, everyone has lost their way on their own. Their eyes search for paths, their hands try to remember. Sometimes they spot something. Sometimes they listen. They catch a whisper, a faint promise. They follow the petals downstream. Further. North American premiere 

Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air 
Dir. Sam Drake. 2025, 9 mins. U.S. DCP. Fragmented records reveal a concealed history of Cold War–era human radiation experiments—a miasma of elite deviance. Desert dust settles into teeth. A search that dissolves into a cipher. North American premiere

Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths 
Dir. Eva Giolo. 2025, 24 mins. DCP. Belgium/Italy. In the valleys surrounding the Dolomite Mountains, children reimagine ancient Ladin legends while they examine bodies of water, holes, caves, and passages looking for something lost or forgotten. Through poetic choreography, the film becomes a fictional journey creating resonances between the landscape, magical thinking and Ladin—the protected old Rhaeto-Romanic language of the valleys, a puzzle unfolds as a timeless fable. North American premiere Supported by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) of the Government of Flanders. 

Full Out 
Dir. Sarah Ballard. 2025, 14 mins. U.S. DCP. In French with English subtitles. In 19th-century Paris at the Salpêtrière Hospital, patients were hypnotized onstage to reproduce the symptoms of hysteria for public audiences. Over a century later, high school cheerleaders are fainting en masse. World premiere 

Tickets: $17.50 / $12 senior and students / $10 youth (ages 3–17) / free for MoMI members at the Senior/Student level and above. There is a $1.50 transaction fee per ticket for all online purchases. The cost of admission may be applied toward a same-day purchase of a membership. 

Order tickets. Please pick up tickets at the Museum’s admissions desk upon arrival. All seating is general admission. 

 

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About the filmmakers:

Ben Balcom is a filmmaker and educator currently living and working in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His films have been exhibited around the world at venues and festivals such as Museum of the Moving Image, European Media Arts Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, IndieLisboa, Media City Film Festival, Alchemy Film, and Slamdance.

Sarah Ballard is a filmmaker currently based in Milwaukee, WI. Her work has been programmed at venues and film festivals such as the Museum of the Moving Image, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Images Festival, CROSSROADS, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, and Antimatter [Media Art]. She is a 2025-2026 Mary L. Nohl Fund Artist Fellow and a recipient of the 2023 Princess Grace Award in Film. Sarah teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Sam Drake is an artist and filmmaker currently based in Milwaukee. Her work has been exhibited at film festivals and venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, Media City Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, CROSSROADS, Collectif Jeune Cinéma, Edinburgh International Film Festival, EXiS, Transient Visions, Beijing International Short Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and Antimatter. She has programmed for the Union Cinema and Mini Microcinema and is currently a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

James Edmonds is a British artist-filmmaker living in Berlin. His work is driven by personal observations and a poetic approach to the everyday that is both formalistic and lyrical. His films have been shown at international festivals including TIFF Toronto, NYFF New York, MoMI New York, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Curtas Vila do Conde, Open City London, FICUNAM Mexico City, and EXiS Seoul. He also makes paintings and installations, writes texts and poems, teaches workshops, and organizes various screenings and events.

Kevin Jerome Everson, born in Mansfield, Ohio, lives and works in Charlottesville, VA. Everson is the Commonwealth and Ruffin Foundation Distinguished Professor of Studio Art, Director of Studio Arts at the University of Virginia. His art practice encompasses photography, printmaking, sculpture, and film, 12 features and over 300 short form works, including the ongoing Black Fire film collaborations with UVA colleague Claudrena N. Harold.

Luke Fowler lives and works in Glasgow. Fowler questions the style and political implications of conventional modes of documentary through a varied practice which encompasses film, sound, installation, and photography. He is concerned with finding new ways to meaningfully engage with marginal cultural figures as well as spaces and archive materials through the medium of 16mm film.

Blanca García is a writer, filmmaker, and researcher based in London (UK). Blanca’s films are shot exclusively on Super 8 reversal stock so that each film exists as a single copy, continually inscribing the memory of each of its projections. Her films explore diaristic notions of presence and chance encounters with the natural world and everyday life. Playing with the interaction of visual and verbal poetics, she draws on writers such as Emily Dickinson, Ann Quinn, and Robert Walser.

Eva Giolo is an audiovisual artist working in film, video, and installation. Her work has been widely exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including Sadie Coles HQ, Harlan Levey Project, WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art, MAXXI–National Museum of 21st Century Art, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Palazzo Strozzi, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Kunsthalle Wien, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Media City Film Festival, Viennale, FIDMarseille, Vision du Réel, and New York Film Festival among others. She is a founding member of elephy, a production and distribution organization for film and media art.

Claudrena N. Harold, born in Jacksonville, FL, lives and works in Charlottesville, VA. Associate Dean for Social Sciences and Edward Stettinius Professor of History at the University of Virginia, Claudrena specializes in African American history, Black cultural politics, and labor history. Since 2013 she has collaborated, as co-director, writer, and producer, with UVA colleague Kevin Jerome Everson on several short films (including Gospel Hill, First Look 2023) as part of the multimedia project Black Fire.

Maximilien Luc Proctor (MLP) is a French-American filmmaker, critic, and curator. He records music in the band Two Nice Catholic Boys, is the founder and co-editor of Ultra Dogme, and the avant-garde instructor for Berlin’s Art-on-the-Run film school.

Helena Wittmann is an artist and filmmaker based in Hamburg, Germany. Her films, including her feature films Human Flowers of Flesh (2022) and Drift (2017) have been shown internationally at film festivals as well as in exhibitions and have received several awards. She has been teaching at Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts from and at Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola in San Sebastian, Spain. Besides her films, she does installation works and collaborates as DoP with various directors and artists.