La8

editing experiments with a light source. my first experience with editing. originally made in march 2023

Human hands can be both destructive and healing, Jeffrie Po suggests in his experimental film with spiritual outreach. He portrays a human being as a faun who roams the jungle dauntlessly, yet is destructive. The forest with vanishing cattle becomes a battlefield between dark powers and the power of salvation.

In the middle of the night, a sleepless subject rediscovers the ability to use their hands to produce and play with shadows on the ceiling.

Thirty-six layers of water aligned to create a perfect circle. 2 of 2

A landscape film about winter.

After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.

"Bagong Buhay" is a short experimental film that dispels the common belief that packing up and moving to a new place will magically improve one's quality of life. The film challenges this presumption by portraying two contrasting ways of life through objects and locations, encouraging viewers to think critically about the complexities of what makes a better life. In the Philippines, it's believed that relocating to a new area will bring about positive changes in one's existence. True satisfaction is a complex and multifaceted notion, and "Bagong Buhay" encourages us to ponder that relocating to a new place is not a surefire way to attain it.

A visual meditation on creative sovereignty in the machine's age. A research-creation short film.

Sunmoon is a visual experiment in "blended reality," seamlessly integrating live-action with computer-generated animation. The film follows a young woman's confrontation with her inner selves: Piper, a bionic manifestation of her doubts; Phany, an animal spirit totem; and Sunmoon, her human core. As the timer counts down, poetry and imagination become the only tools left to bridge the gap between digital isolation and human emotion.

A dough-eyed newcomer to New York is sent on a mental spiral of his own self-worth when he is asked to take photos of a random couple in a park and he finds out what it truly means to be a New Yorker.

An astronaut spending their last day on earth.

Three stories. Three ages. Three men. Grandfather, father, son. One is an orderly, one is a leading sportsman, and one is a master taxidermist. One desires love, the other success, and the third immortality.

NAILS is a black and white, dialogue-free surreal horror short film. The story is carried through image, rhythm, and score rather than dialogue.

A group of college students about to graduate have a party one night, in which they discuss their emotional, academic and romantic concerns, only to realize at the end of the evening the great emotional void that each one suffers.

A relationship between a man and a woman discloses during the course of the film.

TRAILERS unites the most personal and experimental aspects of underground filmmaking with a scope that is as cosmically vast as a science fiction epic. Rashidi’s ongoing exploration into the nature of cinema sees a group of characters adrift in space, each locked into their own sexual rituals while a cataclysm of universal proportions unfolds. Humanity has become a mysterious burlesque show for alien eyes: the gaze of the film camera. This visionary spectacle uses multiple formats and visual textures in weaving an erotic anti-narrative suspended in its own space and time.

HE, the third work in the ongoing collaboration between Rouzbeh Rashidi and actor James Devereaux, is a troubling and mysterious portrait of a suicidal man. Rashidi juxtaposes the lead character’s apparently revealing monologues with scenes and images that layer the film with ambiguity. Its deliberate, hypnotic pace and boldly experimental structure result in an unusual and challenging view of its unsettling subject.

Self Decapitation is a Janus-headed self-portrait by Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain in which death and desire each take possession of this film in two parts. The ambiguities of inhabiting a human body are conjured by way of film technology in its faults, faulty memories and false promises. There is no escape from its haunting – except perhaps to haunt it in turn…

Interrogations of patricide offenders, footage of vandalised statues, and photographs of Victorian children in faux gardens are interwoven into a metaphor for the perverse legacy of privilege and wealth inherited by those who inhabit The Garden.

Empty box-like apartments and shipping containers evoke the border crossing vampire who travels in a coffin. Unboxing Nosferatu is part of the anthology ‘I Went to a Party Alone’ in which YouTube vlogs of random daily life are recast as scenes imbued with mythic allusions. When the hard cuts and juxtapositions reveal a landscape of oppressive social control, the vloggers’ mundane normal soon gives way to the surreal. Surveillance helicopters chase astral travellers; child hunters look through scope-cam rifles to aim for the heart; 'unboxing' and 'apartment tour' vlogs conjure containment and borders; a 'drive with me' transforms into sousveillance. Seemingly innocuous recordings about shopping, driving or dating are fraught with foreboding as the vloggers who yearn for freedom, love and self-expression find themselves unable to escape society’s haunting bondage.