Inspired by newsprint, poetry, and an urgency to preserve the stories of his sovereign island country, filmmaker Leang Ren Ong serves up Singapore’s final day of hardcopy news in Morning Times—an audiovisual time capsule of anthropological research and age-old breakfast routines blended with radio announcing, a history lesson, and a dash of socialism. All in a matter of minutes. A USA premiere in Good Symptom.

(Leang Ren Ong, Singapore, 2021, 4 min, in Chinese – Min Nan with English subtitles)

Artist Arden Carlson cribs the educational how-to format to render a queerly comic, sparsely staged, meticulously choreographed instructional video for enacting care and splices it with a series of interstitial stock footage sequences of wild horses, each one narrated by a disembodied voice-of-God praising the attributes of horses with a patriarchal authority defining of 1950s America. This darkly funny coupling of dystopic retrofuturism and video mixtape neatly adds up to a good symptom of disturbance. A world premiere in Good Symptom.

(Arden Carlson, US, 2022, 8 min, in English)

Alien Human asks us, “Is human the only species who can hurt each other psychologically?”

In Wen Pang’s animated reimagining of a comic series by Yuewei Wang, four short stories are pared down to four fleeting poems—Pearl, The Goldfish, Ocean and Hole. An audiovisual pleasure that will delight even those among us who think they don’t care for animation. The first moment the velvety narrator promises, “If you hold your breath long enough, I’ll take you to another world,” let yourself be transported. A USA premiere in Good Symptom.

(Wen Pang, Japan, 2021, 5 min, in English)

Blurring literary and cinematic boundaries in a filmic reflection on recognizing female authorship in art, filmmaker Maria Shuvanova draws from an intimate conversation and delivers an improvised monologue composed of coming-of-age art appreciation, personal revelations, political realizations, film history, and autotheory fluently coupled visually with creative interventions in film fragments and other works by experimental luminaries Marie Menken, Maya Deren, Germaine Dulac, Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman. A world premiere in Good Symptom.

(Maria Shuvanova, Russian Federation, 2021, 9 min, in Russian with English subtitles)

From Black queer disabled writer and artist Naima Lowe, who creates films, performances and texts using improvisational and collaborative strategies rooted in the alchemic survival practices known as Black cultural production, comes this genre-defiant piece evoking the raw splendor of a Zora Neale Hurston archived recording. According To Sun Ra, None Of Us Are Real is an improvised audiovisual performance set to a poem about the mundane queerness of Sun Ra, and the sounds of living under water.

(Naima Lowe, US, 2020, 5 min, in English)

Quenton Baker’s we pilot the blood considers the position of blackness and the ongoing afterlife of slavery in this cinematic adaptation of their poem by the same title, crafted from redacted U.S. Senate documents detailing the 1841 revolt of enslaved people aboard the brig Creole. “Quenton Baker’s redactions are Black redactions,” writes scholar Christina Sharpe, “to make documents…speak something that they were never meant to reveal.” Those revelations are intercut in a meditative visual mix with the sea—alive and moving, closeup and tender—and paired with Baker’s transporting vocalization—at once, urgent, slow, visceral, and prophetic. A world premiere in Good Symptom.

(Quenton Baker, US, 2023, 6 min, in English)

Media artist, writer, contemplative guide and independent scholar, M Freeman creates at the intersections of reckoning and resiliency, queerness and film, and contemplative, creative and social practices. They are author of The Illuminated Space: A Personal Theory and Contemplative Practice of Media Art (The 3rd Thing, 2020) and creator of Cinema Divina—short films made through and for guided contemplative practice. Their work is at TriQuarterly, Blackbird, NinthLetter, The Fourth Genre, Abbey of the Arts, on PBS and in literary/film festivals worldwide.

Rana San is an intermedia artist, curator, and night dreamer pondering language and lineage, intimacy and interdependence. Her film poetry and analog photography meld dreamwork, movement, and word play. She is the Artistic Director at Northwest Film Forum in Seattle and Co-Director of the annual Cadence Video Poetry Festival.

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke is a writer and arts organizer exploring the liminal spaces of the literary arts. She is the author of 3 chapbooks and is co-founder and co-director of Cadence Video Poetry Festival.

The 3rd Thing is an independent press dedicated to publishing necessary alternatives. Every year or so we publish a cohort of projects representing in form, content, and perspective our interdisciplinary, intersectional priorities.

We publish work mainly by artists and writers who identify as members of traditionally marginalized groups, primarily Indigenous people, womxn, queer people and people of color.

Often our books are the result of an artist working in a non-dominant discipline—a playwright writes a book of poems, a theater-maker writes a book of essays, a filmmaker writes a book of theory…. And while our emphasis is on print traditions, our projects may take any number of forms: books, broadsides, performances, installations, colloquia, video anthologies, etc.