Cadence 2025 – grounding into the space [Hybrid]
Watch online: April 25 – May 4, 2025
In-person tickets > ($20 General Admission / $10 Community Access)
Virtual tickets > (Pay what you can, $5 – 25)
Festival passes > (Pay what you can, $65 – $80 – $95 / NWFF Members, $40)
All Festival Passes are HYBRID, granting access to both virtual and in-person viewing! Non-member passes are priced on a sliding scale; please pay what you can to support our work. Passes include the Festival Preview at Frye Art Museum on April 24.
About the program:
(73 min TRT)
In the face of displacement, exile, conformity, and crisis, these video poems approach existence as resistance. Creating belonging in new places, taking up space through performance art, examining the material reality of tragedy, and communing with nature to explore internal worlds—the works in this showcase offer sure footing and tender steps forward as the global landscape shifts beneath our feet.
Header photo credit: The Melting, dir. Lananh Chu
Showcase title credit: whereverever, dir. Alysha Seriani, Erika Mitsuhashi & Alexa Solveig Mardon
BUY TICKETS HERE
Ticketing, concessions, cinemas, restrooms, and our public edit lab are located on Northwest Film Forum’s ground floor, which is wheelchair accessible. All doors in Northwest Film Forum are non-motorized, and may require staff assistance to open. Our upstairs workshop room is not wheelchair accessible.
We have a limited number of assistive listening devices available for programs hosted in our larger theater, Cinema 1. These devices are maintained by the Technical Director, and can be requested at the ticketing and concessions counter. Also available at the front desk is a Sensory Kit you can borrow, which includes a Communication Card, noise-reducing headphones, and fidget toys.
The Forum does NOT have assistive devices for the visually impaired, and is not (yet) a scent-free venue. Our commitment to increasing access for our audiences is ongoing, and we welcome all public input on the subject!
If you have additional specific questions about accessibility at our venue, please contact our Director of Exhibition at cole@nwfilmforum.org. Our phone number (206-329-2629) is voicemail-only, but we check it often.
Made possible due to a grant from Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, in partnership with Sensory Access, our Sensory Access document presents a visual and descriptive walk-through of the NWFF space. View it in advance of attending an in-person event at bit.ly/nwffsocialnarrativepdf, in order to prepare yourself for the experience.
Northwest Film Forum values being a COVID-safer space for the filmmakers and film lovers who need us to be. From the moment we reopened to the public in September 2021, we required masks. Due to economic pressure, however, a new mask policy took effect on September 20, 2024.
We will continue to require masks at select showtimes – Thursday nights and Saturday and Sunday matinees – but the majority of screenings will now be “masks strongly encouraged.” Please note additional details here, and be sure to read each calendar event thoroughly for policy differences.
- Purchase your ticket; come to the show!
- You can also purchase a ticket on the day of the screening at Northwest Film Forum (1515 12th Ave, Seattle).
- If you have purchased a Hybrid Festival Pass, we’ll look you up at Will Call by the name you purchased under.
- Purchase your ticket through Northwest Film Forum’s Eventive virtual cinema. A free Eventive login is required.
- From the Eventive virtual catalog page, purchased tickets will appear under “My Content Library” under your user menu (upper-right). From the Eventive festival landing page, they will appear under “My Tickets” on the site’s menu bar (at top).
- Your confirmation email will also route you back to these pages to watch. (Can’t find it? Check spam!)
- If all else fails, please contact cadencevideopoetry@gmail.com.
Films in this program:
GOLDEN IN THE MORNING CRANE OUR NECKS
West Coast Premiere!
CAConrad tapes the text of their shaped poem GOLDEN IN THE MORNING CRANE OUR NECKS to windows and walls around Manhattan.
(DIR. Matthew Thompson // POEM CAConrad, US, 2023, 2 min, in English)
American Myth - To Walla Walla
World Premiere!
Where does forgiveness live in the house of language?
(Whitney K Bashaw, US, 2024, 3 min, in English with hardcoded English text)
The Melting
Northwest Premiere!
Commemorating the deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants in the U.K. in 2019, The Melting addresses the unbearable catastrophe of migration, surveillance technologies, and thermal violence.
(Lananh Chu, Viet Nam, 2024, 19 min, in English & Vietnamese with hardcoded English text)
Jesus
West Coast Premiere!
Envision Jesus as an immigrant crossing from Mexico into the US.
(DIR. Samuel Miranda, Ellie Walton // POEM Nico Avina, US, 2024, 2 min, in English with English subtitles)
whereverever
US Premiere!
Recorded on location in Finland and Japan—the respective ancestral homelands of Canadian choreographic duo Mardon + Mitsuhashi—this docu-poem intertwines visits with relatives, folk and contemporary dancing, and playful noticings of rupture with a focus on gesture, movement, and impulse. whereverever is a spell to visit with ancestors past and future through the technologies of dreaming, dancing, and fabulating what isn’t and cannot be known—treating the gaps, tears and absences as valuable knowledges, too.
(Alysha Seriani, Erika Mitsuhashi & Alexa Solveig Mardon, Canada, 2023, 16 min, in English, Finnish & Japanese with English subtitles, hardcoded English text, and poetic captions)
land.scape notes on exile
World Premiere!
A poetic journey of rediscovery and return. Routing us through shifting landscapes and waterways, the narrative reflections of a seeker are mystically guided by Oshun, the venerated orisha of water and destiny.
(Berette S Macaulay, US, 2025, 5 min, in English with hardcoded English text)
Mercy
US Premiere!
Mercy weaves poetry and imagery with gesture, movement, and voice into an intricate meditation on Black womanhood. The film voices issues of race, place, and identity, and dives into the double-voiced discourses of a particular Black literary tradition concerning the complication of the slave learning their captor’s language. “The hands of the dancers are the hands of my mother and sister, the hands of our grandmother, the hands of their mothers.” — Cornelius Eady
(DIR. Philip Szporer // POEM Cornelius Eady, Canada, 2025, 16 min, in English)
School Kills Creativity
World Premiere!
This performance art installation in an elementary school in Tehran, Iran serves as a critical response to a crushing education system that devalues art education and creative thinking.
(Rose Ansari, Iran, 2020, 2 min, nonverbal)
The Forest for the Trees
Northwest Premiere!
A reflective journey through the forest and the mind, carving a path between the physical and internal world with poetry as the guide.
(Alison Johnson, US, 2023, 5 min, in English with hardcoded English text)
they are here now
US Premiere!
A contemporary telling of an ancestral story about an encounter with an unidentified light, written by Ida Gertrude Materne (b. 1914).
(DIR. Sarah Moore // POEM Ida Gertrude Materne, Australia, Iceland, 2024, 3 min, in English with English subtitles)
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