Promisedland™

Director: Frank Eli Martin

Year: 2024

In 1985, the Irish village of Ballinspittle was the site of a mass visionary experience. Worshippers at the local grotto saw the statue of Mary move. Almost forty years later, a handful of local devotees remain, including the statue’s dutiful caretaker Patrick Joseph Simms. Here, the film documents both the mystical landscape of rural Irish Catholicism and a terrible darkness beneath its surface. The film uses a non-realist form and style in order to depict the transcendent experience of its subjects. In so doing, it attempts to offer a credibility to the experience of the film’s participants, whose voices have been deliberately dismissed by the institution that oversees their faith. Official Selection Uppsala Short Film Festival 2024

Director: Ornella Mutoni

Year: 2024

A group of young adults born during or just after the 1994 genocide against Rwanda's Tutsi people gather to find the courage to break a powerful taboo. Rwanda is one of the few nations in the world providing specialist counselling for children conceived through rape, who number 10,000 across the country. Here, course leader Emilienne, a mother, therapist and genocide survivor, helps the group to imagine a future free from family secrets and societal stigma. In a circle of supportive peers, they tell their individual stories and face their struggles together, in the hope their participation will advocate for others facing similar trauma. Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2024 NY African Film Festival 2025

Director: Aaron Brookner, Rodrigo Areias

Year: 2025

NOVA '78 resurrects the legendary Nova Convention, the groundbreaking three-day gathering held in New York in 1978 to celebrate William S. Burroughs and the artistic revolution he inspired. Built from newly restored, previously unseen 16mm footage shot by Howard Brookner, the film captures extraordinary performances and intimate backstage moments featuring Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and many other defining voices of the era. More than a concert film or historical record, NOVA '78 is an immersive time capsule of a fleeting moment when literature, music, art and radical ideas collided to reshape contemporary culture.