(59 min TRT)

Image Credit: legs (still), 2023; courtesy of Christine Fellows, Jennifer Still, and Chantel Mierau
Title credit: Stormers (Fırtına) (still), 2022; courtesy of Esme Madra

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. 

(directors: Christine Fellows, Jennifer Still, Chantel Mierau, poet: Jennifer Still, Canada, 2023, 14 min, in English)

King County Recology’s Material Recovery Facility in Seattle is a curiosity: a site ripe for anthropological digs, offering a continual parade of infinitely mucky, diverse, commingled materials that form a collective portrait of desire, consumption, and willful forgetting. Along the route of the behemoth sorting machine, where humans pick out contaminants by hand, there is a place where paper waste is shuffled along: faded family photos, handwritten homework, Valentines and love letters, postcards and pornography. This film is about one such thing. 

(Amanda Manitach, US, 2023, 1 min, in English with hardcoded English text)

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, and Japanese with English subtitles)

One poet visits the house of her friend, also a poet, in Lisbon. Both migrants from Barranquilla, Colombia, they journey together between clothespins, mango, and waves.

(directors: Lilián Pallares & Charles Olsen, poets: Lilián Pallares & Lauren Mendinueta, Spain, 2025, 9 min, in Spanish with English subtitles)

As the artist disappears and reappears through a retrospective installation of their work, After Grace IV is a visual relic of Dez’Mon’s first foray into performance art. In an attempt to hold space for opposing principles while escalating towards a common vision, the After Grace series has become an ongoing project where filmmakers create pieces based on the same poem—a poem that convinced a painter to strongly consider writing, then writing strongly advocated for performance, then performance insisted upon installation. After Grace, as a whole, is meant to remind the artist of origins, being green, the earnestness and eagerness of unrefined creativity holding the many hands of collaboration and possibility, being led in many directions in the hopes of returning as something familiar, however renewed.

(director: Camille Cotteverte, poet: Dez’Mon Omega Fair, US, 1 min, in English)

The playful dynamic between two people whose games shield them from reality is disrupted with the arrival of a third to their home. The newcomer shifts this flourishing space, changing the rules of the game and forcing all three of them to construct a new way of relating to one another.

(Esme Madra, Türkiye, 2022, 17 min, in Turkish with English subtitles)

Seattle artist Dawn Cerny’s abstract sculptures transform a museum gallery into a colorful domestic landscape. Her interactive furniture pieces crafted from humble materials celebrate the theatricality of everyday life, often to humorous effect. The exhibition opens a literal window into the neighboring Frye Salon, where Cerny’s contemporary works mingle among the traditional oil paintings. Archly embracing the tension between real and artificial, Cerny’s work underscores that the original Frye Salon—the in-home gallery of Charles and Emma Frye—was both a private living space and a carefully staged backdrop for public social events.

Image credit: Dawn Cerny. Kleenex Side-table for Simone Weil, 2024. Wood, paint, cardboard, Aqua-Resin, epoxy clay, fiberglass, Kleenex, Boucherouite rug, wire, trash bag. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

Founded in 1952, the Frye is Seattle’s only free art museum, bringing together art and new ideas within a stunning Olson Sundberg Kundig-designed building in historic First Hill. A founding collection of turn-of-the-century oil paintings is bolstered by a wide range of modern and contemporary art holdings, reflecting our region’s evolving identity and a commitment to exploring the art of our time. Learn more at fryemuseum.org.

Cadence Video Poetry Festival, co-directed by Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and Rana San, is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry during National Poetry Month.

Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image. Featuring screenings, an artist residency, generative workshops for youth and adults, artist gatherings, and a virtual poetry book fair, Cadence fosters critical and creative growth around the medium of video poetry.

⚠️ Please note: NWFF patrons will be required to wear masks that cover both nose and mouth while in the building. We are not currently checking vaccination cards.