MOVIATE Underground Shorts #4: Mens Humana

MOVIATE UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL 2025

SHORTS COLLECTION #4

87 minutes | 9 Short Films

featuring a post screening Q&A with filmmakers

“A Message From Humboldt” by Matt Feldman (USA) 7 minutes
Glances at an emptied apartment in Milwaukee drift into a psychodrama confronting fears of death and loneliness. Through the use of in-camera experiments, fractured imagery inquires into the hauntings and mysteries of the everyday

“The Garden Sees Fire” by Kiera Faber (USA) 15 minutes
A mystical tale of cloaked identities, systemic traumas, and insatiable consumption: The ecology burns, reclaiming its environs.

“A Place For Everything and Everything In Its Place”
by Sophia Stezala (USA) 3 minutes
Through the combination of rudimentary mechanical stop-motion and intricate disorienting collage created from archival women’s interest magazines, A Place for Everything and Everything In Its Place weaves together both jarring and lulling elements, evoking a sense of domestic neurosis.

“Immortals” by Mark Durand (Canada) 6 minutes
Immortals is an experimental documentary short film shot in 8mm that explores the introspection of an artist, Bettina Szabo. The film delves into her relationship with her sense of belonging, her body, her imagination, and nature. Sometimes one must lose oneself to find oneself better, and burn everything down to start anew on a solid foundation.

“Despite” by Kate Raney (USA) 12 minutes
A short experimental animation exploring the tension between the wonder of motherhood and the anxiety of illness. Through collage and fragmentation, this film reflects upon the habitats that sustain life and harbor disease.

“Wherever Street Piece” by Pan Johansson (Finland) 9 minutes
Wherever Street Piece is a found footage film that describes impersonal and fragmented memories that cannot be directly linked to the life of one particular individual. Simultaneously the film documents the way these past realities - forgotten people in forgotten situations - blend together from the perspective of the present.

“Paris Model” by Brittney Appleby (Canada) 6 minutes
Paris Model was created through the use of found striptease footage and experimental analogue film manipulation techniques. By using a combination of experimental techniques to create a macabre and haunting image, Paris Model asks the audience to contemplate mortality and the temporality of the flesh.

“As I Belong To My Life” by Sarah Bliss (USA) 5 minutes
An exploration of the ways older bodies and psyches engage eros, gender, creativity, sexuality and desire. In a culture in which aging bodies are assumed to be sexless and considered neutered, what does it look and feel like to reclaim our erotic power?

“The Dissolution of the Landscape” 

by Ann-Marie Bouchard (USA) 24 minutes
Through visual metaphors, the film offers an incursion into an inner landscape, a dive into subconscious, a mix of childhood memories and recurrent dreams, between surrealism and automatism.