Cadence 2025 – we effervesce minutely [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:
(61 min TRT)
Life cycles leave a snail trail across the screen. These video poems navigate the vast expanse of time with subtle, personal narratives that collapse the space between art and home, womb and grave, career and honey bucket. Through mantras, photographs, and windows the works in this showcase offer a glimpse into eternity while embracing the temporary.
Header photo credit: legs, dir. Christine Fellows, Jennifer Still & Chantel Mierau
Showcase title credit: The Shadows of Paper Trees, dir. Aida Daneshvar & Christopher Dreisbach
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:
In this short life
World Premiere!
Can the reuse of home video archives transcend mere nostalgia? Blending home video archives with a subtle musical score, In this short life explores memory and time through a recurring clock tower motif, reflecting on the tension between nostalgia and the impossibility of truly preserving the past.
(DIR. Gloria Regonesi // POEM Emily Dickinson, Italy, Germany, 2025, 4 min, in English with English intertitles)
The Snail Disco Diner
World Premiere!
A diner managed by snails is frequented by customers who use time as currency.
(Alec Mazzoli, Jake Weissblatt, US, 2025, 2 min, in English with hardcoded English text)
Waves
A young Black man grapples with his toxic cycle, his day unfolding through a visual poem set to a tape cassette that weaves the rhythm of his struggles, echoing his journey toward self-awareness and change.
(Sultan Ali Jr., US, 2025, 4 min, in English with English subtitles)
The Shadows of Paper Trees
Time-collapsed images of nature collide with reverie-soaked tableaus in this experimental short film that illustrates and interprets verses from “Panjereh” (“Window”) by Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad.
(Aida Daneshvar, Christopher Dreisbach, US, 2024, 7 min, in Persian with English subtitles)
Nest Egg
Driven to gain control over her body and reproductive rights, an artist documents her procedure of human oocyte cryopreservation (freezing eggs). Her story tracks the medical and emotional impacts while addressing the position of the artist in society in relation to traditional family structures. Borrowing from the staging of hidden mother photography in the Victorian era, the artist invites the viewer to consider the expectations of holding a child ‘stable’ while fulfilling societal expectations in a precarious world.
(Merve Kılıçer, Netherlands, 2021, 16 min, in English & Turkish with English subtitles and hardcoded English text)
Third space
World Premiere!
Finding your location.
(wendy oberlander, Canada, 2024, 1 min, in English with English intertitles)
YES! (JAH!)
US Premiere!
The corners, slopes, dead ends, and curves nudge to ponder the dilemmas of the achievement society. Should we push ourselves into a box or shall we dare to be wrong? Based on the poem of European Poetry Slam 2024 winner Joonas Veelmaa.
(Madli Lääne, Estonia, 2024, 3 min, in Estonian with English subtitles)
our ob or os
World Premiere!
if every bone had not been sucked hollow,
the meat held for ransom. the yearling
still struggling to walk, its hock bent backwards.
its tongue meant to be peeled after boiling —
(Argot Chen, US, 2025, 2 min, in English)
Insurance Man 1946
West Coast Premiere!
Poet Sean Hill performs his poem Insurance Man 1946 while wandering a rural Montana town’s general store.
(DIR. Matthew Thompson // POEM Sean Hill, US, 2023, 2 min, in English)
legs
West Coast Premiere!
Three artists work in stride to translate, in sound and motion, the heart of a poem. They collaborate with life’s unexpecteds—snapped clotheslines, drained swimming pools, terminal diagnoses—and learn what falls away is not necessarily gone.
(DIR. Christine Fellows, Jennifer Still, Chantel Mierau // POEM Jennifer Still, Canada, 2023, 14 min, in English)
smirnov fedot (смирнов федот)
US Premiere!
The ordinary life of an ordinary person condensed into seven days and two quatrains, this film obituaty pairs an old English nursery rhyme with Soviet and Russian film footage. What happens if you go with the flow until the very end?
(Misha Ketov, Russian Federation, 2024, 4 min, in English & Russian with English subtitles)
Espectro
World Premiere!
Antarctica, 1953. Like a espectro (specter) in my mind, I search for you, you search for me. I dream of you and you dream of me.
(Allison Rojas, Canada, 2024, 3 min, in Spanish with English subtitles)
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