Prismatic Ground Presents
31 Episodes
One of the most exciting and adventurous film festivals to emerge in recent years, Prismatic Ground brings together aesthetically innovative, politically radical work at the intersection of experimental and documentary cinema. This selection of shorts from the festival’s first five editions offers an eclectic cross section of vital works by filmmakers whose approach to image-making eschews traditional narrative in favor of abstraction and sensation, showing how avant-garde techniques can be deployed to illuminate profound personal experiences as well as violent histories of colonialism, oppression, and dispossession. The latest additions from the festival’s 2025 edition confront topics as varied as class, labor, family, memory, landscape, history, consciousness, and resistance with rigorous attention to form and galvanizing emotional power. The sixth edition of Prismatic Ground runs from April 29–May 3, 2026.
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09:07Episode 1Winter Portrait
Episode 1
Directed by Fernando Saldivia Yáñez • 2024 • Chile
A misty afternoon brings a Mapuche couple back to their wedding video. In their civil ceremony, they are noted as one of only two couples married in the Indigenous language of Mapudungun.
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22:17Episode 3All Said Done
Episode 3
Directed by Micah Weber • 2025 • United States
Dedicated to the memory of the filmmaker’s father, ALL SAID DONE is less a portrait of a person than an incomplete image of class relations and affective labor.
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15:06Episode 4Remote Views
Episode 4
Directed by Alexis McCrimmon • 2025 • United States
REMOTE VIEWS is a televisual stream of consciousness assembled from archival footage of the Black-media explosion of the 1980s: a frenetic remix of public-access television, video diaries, commercial mass media, and citizen journalism sequenced...
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22:57Episode 6Kalighat Fetish
Episode 6
Directed by Ashish Avikunthak • 1999 • India
KALIGHAT FETISH negotiates with the duality that is associated with the ceremonial veneration of the Mother Goddess Kali, the presiding deity of Calcutta. It delves into the subliminal layers of consciousness underlying the ritual of Kali worship.
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Tuktuit
Episode 7
Directed by Lindsay McIntyre • 2025 • United States
Created with handmade and manufactured emulsions, TUKTUIT explores the close and enduring connections between Inuit, caribou, lichen, and land use. Lichen developers help process the images of a caribou hide being fleshed down to rawhide to mak...
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05:54Episode 8typhoon diary 风球日记
Episode 8
Directed by Helix Zhang • 2024 • United States
TYPHOON DIARY 风球日记 travels through various dream states to explore the narrator’s connection to rain as a dissociative and liberating force.
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Concrete Resources (Thank you for keeping me a company of images)
Episode 9
Directed by Emir West • 2024 • United States
Inseparable from its reputation as “the land of lakes and volcanoes” is Nicaragua’s legacy as a “country of poets,” rendering a resistance that is encountered in all physical senses. CONCRETE RESOURCES examines the enmeshment of poetry and violence wi...
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Hemel
Episode 10
Directed by Danielle Dean • 2024 • United Kingdom
A portrait of Hemel Hempstead, the English town where director Danielle Dean was raised, unfolds as a personal essay on the town’s history. The work’s central reference is a 1957 sci-fi/horror B movie shot in town about the arrival of a nonhuman ...
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28:14Episode 11A Radical Duet
Episode 11
Directed by Onyeka Igwe • 2023 • United Kingdom
Starring Renee Bailey, Tomi Ogunjobi, Emmanuel KojoWhat happened in 1940s London when two women of different generations, both fighting against colonialism, came together to put their fervor and imagination into writing a revolutionary play?
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ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong
Episode 12
Directed by Daphne Xu • 2024 • United States
A playful audiovisual experiment layers ping pong games at New York City’s Seward Park with advice from an immigration lawyer.
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Hinkelten
Episode 13
Directed by Svetlana Romanova • 2023 • Russia
Filmed in the Yakutian Arctic and constructed out of personal poems and notes, this visual essay poses questions about our perception of contemporaneity and image production’s intersection with the creation of narratives around the idea of love (roma...
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11:28Episode 14at the bamboo green
Episode 14
Directed by Xiaolu Wang • 2024 • United States
A one-take recording captures a family’s visit to the bamboo green at the foot of the Helan Mountains.
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19:18Episode 15Before Seriana
Episode 15
Directed by Samy Benammar • 2024 • Algeria, Canada
“Mom, you brought me back to our homeland. All I know about these harsh landscapes I learned from books written by the hand that burned these mountains. I try to undo the colonial myths engraved into my memory, but the hills escape my gaze. Do y...
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28:25Episode 16Landscape Suspended
Episode 16
Directed by Naghmeh Abbasi • 2022 • Iran, Canada
Through an interrogation of the landscape of Iran’s Shaho Mountain, LANDSCAPE SUSPENDED reflects on the sociopolitical history and violence that surround the people who reside in the region.
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16:31Episode 17121280 Ritual
Episode 17
Directed by Antoinetta Angelidi • 2008 • Greece
Filmed in 1980 and completed in 2008, Antoinetta Angelidi’s candid self-portrait is a song to life and an incantatory vision of pregnancy as a kind of ritual.
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40:29Episode 18A Stone’s Throw
Episode 18
Directed by Razan AlSalah • 2024 • Canada, Lebanon, Palestine
Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice, from land and labor, from Haifa to Beirut to a Gulf offshore oil platform. A STONE’S THROW trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and...
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33:45Episode 19Ma’loul Celebrates Its Destruction
Episode 19
Directed by Michel Khleifi • 1984 • Palestine, Belgium
Ma’loul is a Palestinian village in Galilee which was destroyed by the Israeli armed forces in 1948. The former inhabitants are only allowed to visit once a year, on the anniversary of Israel’s independence, and have developed a new traditio...
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16:47Episode 20On the Battlefield
Episode 20
Directed by Little Egypt Collective • 2024 • United States
In the Southern Illinois region of Little Egypt, a sound recordist gathers sonic ephemera as he revisits the flat fields where once stood Pyramid Courts—the housing projects that formed the heart of the Black community of his hometown, C...
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41:39Episode 21Life on the CAPS: Parts 1&2
Episode 21
Directed by Meriem Bennani • 2018–2021 • Morocco
Meriem Bennani conjures an immersive augmented-reality world in the first two parts of a trilogy that issues a wild, up-to-the-minute commentary on diasporic cultures and the West’s dystopian immigration policies. A talking crocodile named Fiona a...
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20:19Episode 22Promised Lands
Episode 22
Directed by Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa • 2018 • Uganda, Austria
PROMISED LANDS is a fragmentary, essayistic meditation on (among other things) art, fact, fiction, memory, rights to land, place, and displacement that marks the culmination of a substantial body of work by the late artist Emma Wolukau-W...
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As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night
Episode 23
Directed by Søren Lind and Larissa Sansour • 2022 • United Kingdom, Denmark
AS IF NO MISFORTUNE HAD OCCURRED IN THE NIGHT is a three-channel video work featuring an Arabic-language opera on loss, mourning, and inherited trauma, performed by Palestinian soprano Nour Darwish and accompanied by arc...
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L’escale
Episode 24
Directed by Paul Shemisi, Nizar Saleh, Rob Jacobs, and Anne Reijniers • 2022 • Congo, Belgium
Filmmakers Paul Shemisi and Nizar Saleh travel from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Germany for a screening of their new film. During a layover in Angola, they’re stopped at the airport because the ...