(Brady Lewis | color/sound | 5:12 | S8 to digital | US)

“Front Ear Theory” is a five-minute history lesson. To be more precise, it’s a story about a history lesson. Or about a history teacher. It’s an experimental narrative that was shot entirely on super-8 (mostly Kodachrome) film.

(color/sound | 9:00 | 16mm to digital | US)

A portrait of a huge open-air copper mine in Butte, Montana. The closed mine dominates the city geographically, and also financially, culturally, historically, and in the on-going health effects from the highly toxic metals and chemicals which fill the bright blue-green water in the pit. (The pit is a designated Superfund site.) After a few opening titles which briefly introduce us to the pit and its history, the film becomes a wordless visual montage, almost always superimposing several layers of footage.–David Finkelstein. 

(Andrea Nevi  | color/sound | 4:47 | Super 8 to digital | Italy)

A community displaced by a climate disaster settles in a new habitat, where memories of their former way of life slowly begin to resurface.  BLU is an experimental climate fiction short film made entirely from Super 8mm found footage recovered from a flea market.

(Eislow Johnson | color/sound | 13:28 | 16mm to digital | US)

Need help? Crashouts, manifestation influencers and injury lawyers collide in this breakneck ride through the Midwest. 50 years after attorney ads were first legalized in the U.S., their ubiquitous self-portraits (allegedly) invoke a churn-and-burn economy of volume, velocity, fears and veneers.

(Karl Nussbaum  | color/sound | 1:25 | 16mm to digital | US)

This film is about what the audience doesn’t see when we watch a film – the sprockets, the optical soundtrack, the splicing tape, the celluloid itself, the frame lines, etc.  This is a very short Direct Animation film I made at MONO NO AWARE in Brooklyn. It’s totally analog and was made using only 16 mm and Super 8 found footage film strips.

(Dave Johnson  | color/sound | 3:02 | 16mm to digital | CA)

From the depths of London, England’s Barracks district amongst the derelict weapons huts, comes a public service expose from the 1970s revealing “THE HORRORS” of kids participating in the act of glue sniffing. The narrative is told in three parts: The reporter, a mother, and her “addict son” David.  This film and its title have been appropriated from a 1970’s BBC expose. The visual treatment exposed the footage (and the filmmaker) by gluing pieces of film together then ripping it apart. This becomes an interesting metaphor of creating using the substance of the problem presented in the film. The film was edited by hand and sequenced using measurements to time each shot.

(Charlotte Pryce | color/sound | 14:00 | 16mm to digital | US)

A  metaphorical tale of pyrophytic transmutation, of metamorphosis through fire. Inspired by medieval paintings of celestial portents, The Gloaming is a work of bio-mysticism that takes the form of a fable. The slippage between substances and the ethereal nature of matter finds a parallel in the chemical accretions of the hand processed film. In a time of environmental uncertainty, the film offers a story of adaptation and survival.

(Dirk De Bruyn | color/sound | 10:27 | 16mm to digital | AU)

Initiated in 1996 and belatedly completed in 2026, this home-processed 16mm film material was inspired by Marc Adrian’s Total (1968) and incorporates Moucle Blackout and Laszlo Dudas’s voices. Partially shot at Hearst’s San Simeon Castle, Canada and Royal Melbourne Show, it is an exploration of overcoming traumatic thoughts through materialist actions onto the film surface. The completion gap demonstrates the power of and resistance to traumatic events.

(Kathryn Ramey | color/sound | 2:13 | 16mm to digital |  US)

An agitprop made from two 30-second GE adverts from the 1970s repurposed to rebuke the role white women voters in the US have chosen to uphold white supremacy and the patriarchy instead of supporting the interests of women and anyone who loves them. 

(Kevin T. Allen  | color/sound | 8:53 | Super 8 to digital | US)

A Stone Tape film inspired by the yellow fever epidemic in 19th century New Orleans, using analog camera techniques and contact microphones to excavate the material traces of trauma.  Coined by archaeologist and parapsychologist T.C. Lethbridge, Stone Tape Theory posits that material objects record traumatic events of the past…and that they can be played back.

(Kate E. Hinshaw | color/sound | 3:50 | 16mm to digital | US)

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.

(Hogan Seidel  | b&w/sound | 3:00 | 16mm to digital | US)

I found a decaying print of Nanook of the North and continued its collapse through photochemical processes, confronting the violence of its legacy. “North” is not a restoration, but a reckoning—an act of holding damaged images until they blur, bleed, and refuse the gaze that once claimed them.

(Christine Lucy Latimer | color/sound | 2:22 | 16mm print | CA)

Hundreds of digitally generated filters and assets used by online content creators to simulate a “shot on film” aesthetic are collaged together on expired 16mm Ektachrome. Random contemporary approximations of film artifacts, ranging from industrial to experimental, move through the frame in impossible trajectories. A film of transitions that never transition, positioning moving image signifiers in a post-truth era.

(Sidney Gordon | color/sound | 5:00 | 16mm print | CA)

“Ashes to Ashes” depicts fragments of the artist’s diary as they undergo physical and emotional transformation through a blazing agricultural landscape. Words turn to ash as the past is consumed by flames. Rivers ignite from embers, flow through vessels and begin to crack. Manifested through the land and material processes lies a situated reflection on recovery, loss and evolution. The film was shot at the 2024 Independent Imaging Retreat. It was developed with common comfrey and contaminated wood ash foraged from the farm and was coated in the artist’s blood.

The 9th Engauge Experimental Film Festival celebrates sprocket-driven, artist-made experimental film, presenting six programs of shorts over three nights at NWFF’s cinema in Capitol Hill. All work featured in the festival originates on film stock.