The Other Side

Brocolis

Dancing Plague, a GTA V mod, flips the script. Holding H key forces male NPCs to dance uncontrollably, revealing the game's biased animations where female characters (often sex workers) have the flashiest moves. This disrupts the game's gender roles, making masculinity both playful and challenged. Interestingly, female characters ignore the male dance frenzy. This is a humorous critique of the game's gender politics. The mod's soundtrack, by Azu Tiwaline, blends electronic music with trance traditions, deepening the critique and adding an immersive ritualistic feel.

Fragments from Brussels, about the flow of the city, A cinema, A body, A film, and a wind that blows through the town. The film is a Schizomentry experience that blends real stories and fiction. After all, where is the border?

A half-hour experimental film that shows Fukui moving towards cyberpunk imagery in a manner similar to Tsukamoto, featuring industrial locations, a malfunctioning cyborg/android and a hulking metallic ‘caterpillar’ that stalks characters.

The film takes a look at seven different twilight zones between the physical and virtual. We cannot escape from the grid but can we bend it from the inside?

When a trans Latinx mermaid defies her mother’s warnings, she is forced to confront the violent legacies of colonialism, environmental destruction and the danger of being desired in the human world. The BlackStar Philadelphia Filmmaker Lab is presented with support from Independence Public Media Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and Wyncote Foundation. This project has been supported by The Philadelphia Independent Media Fund administered by Scribe Video Center with funds provided by the Independence Public Media Foundation and the Wyncote Foundation.

Yukari Nishihara, 25, earns her living as an art model and aspires to become an actress. One day, while she was out, she saw “a man's face about to jump off the roof of a building”, and since then she has been suffering from a peculiar constitution: she sees a suicide while on her period, faints, and develops a fever. The goddess of love does not smile on Yukari, who is unable to become a sweet girl with a nice boyfriend. The only things that can save Yukari now are her best friend Hana, who has a keen intuition, and a suppository that can break a fever in one shot. On the day of an important audition, Yukari has decided that this is her last chance. However, Yukari realizes that she has forgotten her antipyretic suppositories, and her eyes meet those of another soon-to-be suicide victim. She is in a desperate situation. What does Yukari do?

"...The journey of a determined warrior seeking answers..."

In a city where fire, water, land and air residents live together, a fiery young woman and a go-with-the-flow guy will discover something elemental: how much they have in common.

Hoping to find a sense of connection to her late mother, Gorgeous takes a trip with her friends to visit her aunt's ancestral house in the countryside. The girls soon discover that there is more to the old house than meets the eye.

When Jane finds a body washed up on shore, with a mysterious looking rock in their hand, she starts feeling mesmerized by the strange object and the rolling waves of the sea. Will the ocean claim its next victim?

“Omen, a dark and timeless traveler, emerges from the belly of a gutted sheep and finds himself in an unknown void. In this tormented space, a disturbing encounter awaits him: an Enchantress. Through silent revelations and hidden omens, a haunting and supernatural journey begins, in search of meaning beyond appearances.”

"A vampiric Elf awakens in his eerie dwelling, where the arrival of disturbing figures through a mysterious portal unsettles the atmosphere. An enigmatic and mystical journey into the unknown."

Moving Matter is the culmination of a material-led process with artists from dance, costume design and film that began with a study of old kitchen flooring about to be discarded. This flax-based material enters our orbit in the 1950s, where a measured homelife and prescribed domesticity offered a reassuring antidote to bomb scares, political turmoil, and paranormativity. Stability topples as the flooring becomes entangled in the lives of those who don the material as garments and shelters. This film was made through Moving Matter, a long-term research-creation project that offers a methodology for rethinking the dynamism between raw materials, garments, and the body. Moving Matter steers the locus of choreography and wearable design away from human hierarchy to instead support truer collaboration amongst all moving materials, both human and non-human, in this case… linoleum.

A porcelain doll’s explorations of a dreamer’s imagination.

In this 60 second art piece, a dog named Layla is called upon by nature to defend harmless daisy flowers from the wild grass that is conquering their territory.

A reframing of the classic tale of Narcissus, the director draws on snippets of conversation with a trusted friend to muse on gender and identity. Just as shimmers are difficult to grasp as knowable entities, so does the concept of a gendered self feel unknowable except through reflection. Is it Narcissus that Echo truly longs for, or simply the Knowing he possesses when gazing upon himself?

Filmmaker and artist Jack Smith described his own film as a “comedy set in a haunted movie studio.” Flaming Creatures begins humorously enough with several men and women, mostly of indeterminate gender, vamping it up in front of the camera and participating in a mock advertisement for an indelible, heart-shaped brand of lipstick. However, things take a dark, nightmarish turn when a transvestite chases, catches and begins molesting a woman. Soon, all of the titular “creatures” participate in a (mostly clothed) orgy that causes a massive earthquake. After the creatures are killed in the resulting chaos, a vampire dressed like an old Hollywood starlet rises from her coffin to resurrect the dead. All ends happily enough when the now undead creatures dance with each other, even though another orgy and earthquake loom over the end title card.

Keratin is a collaboration with the London Sinfionetta, visually responding to Gavin Higgins' Seven Welsh Folk Songs: I. Dacw 'Nghariad i. The film tells the journey of a mating of elements, two bodies grieve over a lost third: a child separated from their womb. The three bodies bound by their keratin, regain connection in a wombic journey which spiritually networks the three into a fused collective body.

Seeing himself as a form unable to experience intimacy, he is given the chance when brought to the household of twin sisters.