2026 FILM PROGRAM 4

2026 FILM PROGRAM

1129 Weaver Dairy Rd Suite AB
Chapel Hill NC 27514
United States

Sunday March 22 @ 1:30PM

Program 4: Crystal Palace

Films about war, sad poetry, and failed experiments in communal living. There are forever chemicals in the Cape Fear River. But don’t give up hope. Utopia is a roller rink inside a crystal palace.

Geométrika

Nicole Blundell, 2024
RT: 04:00 minutes

Geométrika is a mathematical odyssey that invites viewers on an experimental journey through the geometric wonders of the universe, reminiscent of watching floaters under your eyelids. Shot on 16mm and hand painted and developed.

The Phalanx

Benjamin Balcom, 2025
RT: 13:30 minutes

Filmed on the former site of Ceresco, a 19th-century agrarian commune in Ripon, Wisconsin, this lyrical, experimental film revisits the utopian aspirations of a community striving to live “in association,” guided by principles of harmony and shared ownership. Founded in 1844 and disbanded in 1851, Ceresco was one of several communes across North America inspired by the writings of French philosopher Charles Fourier. These fleeting but potent attempts to imagine alternative ways of living now serve as a lens to explore the fragility of collective ideals.

Foot to Ground

Christopher Thompson, 2024
RT: 08:11 minutes

Minimalist frontiers proliferate from acquisition. Larping utopia, shedding skins, forging new luxury amidst shards of past lives. Embracing shadows, sculpting stagnant futures in the flicker of ancient flames.

How Now, House

Tess Martin, 2025
RT: 13:00 minutes

How Now, House? investigates our yearning to leave traces behind through the prism of one house in Rotterdam. Using archives, personal memories and the philosophy of time, the film questions whether a space can ever really belong to one person, or time period, at all.

Good Neighbors Care

Kate E. Hinshaw, 2025
RT: 03:30 minutes

For decades chemical company DuPont and its subsidiary Chemours poisoned North Carolina’s drinking water through illegally dumping forever chemicals into the Cape Fear River. On altered 16mm film, corporate promises of community care and pure water dissolve as rivers and bodies merge in a meditation on what it means to exist in an imperfect environment.

Allrecipes (Stuffed Manifesto)

David de Rozas, 2025
RT: 05:17 minutes

A constellation of fragmented memories and gestures that shape the body, mind, and spirit as layered, shifting, and unresolved sites. Skirting the edge of coherence, the film becomes a space of offering and defiance, where transformation is unstable, leaky, and refuses to stay quiet.

09/05/1982

Camilo Restrepo, Jorge Caballero, 2025
RT: 11:00 minutes

Signs of turmoil linger on walls and windshields in the grainy footage revisited in 09/05/1982. A recurring slogan, Matanza del 9 de mayo (Massacre of 9 May), is graffitied on multiple buildings. Shots of bullet holes, crowds in the streets, and burning barricades made of car tires evoke a bloody street clash somewhere in Latin America in the early 80s.

The recovered footage, seemingly countering the official narrative, is damaged and fragmentary.Rather than argue a thesis, this film builds an intrigue that unfolds in time, asking who speaks through images and how we come to believe them—until the evidence itself demands a second look.

Another Earth

Ben Russell, 2025
RT: 11:10 minutes

From mouth to cave to fire to screen to war to skin, this is a dizzying 16mm portrait of an increasingly chaotic present, one whose political contours are affected by everything and nothing all at once. In the words of Zadie Smith: Time is not what it is / But how it is felt.

Crystal Palace

Linda Izcali Scobie, 2024
RT: 08:30 minutes

Two films align as a languid meditation on motion, color, pattern and joy. A collaboration between filmmaker Linda Izcali Scobie and musician John Davis for John’s 2024 LP release “Landlines”.