Aspect Covers the 2025 Cosmic Rays Film Festival
April 24th, 2025
Introduction by Charlie Brownlee
Popcorn and wine flows, tote bags swing, and the Cosmic Rays Film Festival has returned once again to the Triangle Area. This past March marked Cosmic Rays’ seventh year around the sun as a festival dedicated to showcasing innovative, experimental, and personal short films that reexamine and explore what the medium is capable of doing. This is the second year the festival has been housed at the Chelsea Theater, but like years past, the full extent of the festival has stretched across several locations around the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area, including installations at Peel Gallery and artists talks at Fatwood Studios.
Something interesting has happened every time I’ve attended the festival, oftentimes halfway through one of the programs. I’ll break away from the films and look out at the packed theater around me—full of people completely absorbed by the evening’s showcase. Cosmic Rays is, among other things, very well named. Its careful and dedicated programming means that attending the festival is not like watching any traditional film at the movie theater; it’s more like attuning yourself to a wavelength or signal, beaming out towards you from the darkness of the theater. It’s all about sitting back and letting the films wash over you.
Aspect editors Charlie Brownlee and Landen Fulton review a selected few films from this year’s festival, including a program guest curated by film professor and scholar Genevieve Yue.
Бабушка Галя и Дедушка Аркадий / Grandma Galya and Grandpa Arkadiy
Anna Kipervaser, 2023 // RT: 04:24
Photo Credit: Anna Kipervaser
As if almost a perfectly timed homage to the work of David Lynch, Anna Kipervaser’s Grandma Galya and Grandpa Arkadiy (Бабушка Галя и Дедушка Аркадий) exists within Cosmic Ray’s Friday evening program as a contemporary surrealist short fit to disorient even the most accustomed avant-gardeist spectator. Accordingly, Kipervaser’s non-narrative, sub-five-minute film embodies the ethos of the original surrealist movement, communicating an oneiric, or dreamlike, atmosphere behind the uncanny familiarity of an aging relationship, or, as Kipervaser describes it, “a jovial and dreamy rumination on love. On time passing.”
Originally released in 2023, the film serves as an unorthodox 16mm portrait of Kipervaser’s Ukrainian grandparents. Grandma Galya and Grandpa Arkadiy pose in front of the camera, exuberantly laughing together as they wave traditional Ukrainian fabric over their cheery expressions. Yet, without the context of any humorous stimuli, their continual laughing adopts a disorienting tone that eventually fades into an unnerving sonic drone. The elderly couple, too, becomes substituted for a visual collage of superimposed textiles. Overlapping frames of the textiles reorient the film’s original tone to an illogical, near-Lynchian sequence. The once harmless materiality of folk-patterned clothes take on a more ominous quality as viewers become hyperconscious of their all-encompassing exhibition. Perhaps, Kipervaser’s musings on love are bound to the very fabrics she displays with such intensity.
Landen Fulton
Lizzy
Susanna Wallin, 2024 // RT: 15:00
Photo Credit: Susanna Wallin
Ecological cinema is on full display in Susanna Wallin’s Lizzy, as nature and its inherent temporality are communicated through a non-diegetically explained premise. Originally from Sweden, Wallin relocated to Tampa, Florida, where she became inspired by a posthumous riddle. In a Q&A after the Cosmic Rays’ screening, Wallin explained the narrative context behind her meditative, primarily non-narrative work. After the sudden death of her elderly neighbor, Wallin inherited an electric organ, left to her through will. Having sparsely known the woman who’d passed, Wallin became heir to far more questions than answers. Consequently, Lizzy, titled after the deceased, became a form of cinematic investigation and catharsis.
The film depicts the days following Lizzy’s death as quiet, slow, listless, and indifferent to the life of a woman who had spent her entire life in the displayed local Floridian neighborhood. Alligators surround the neighboring swamp as construction workers, as if the invasive predators themselves, deconstruct Lizzy’s now-empty home. Unlike many fictional and experimental films, the locations exhibited within Lizzy do not feel separated by diegesis. Instead, they are as real and warmly familiar as hometown Americana. Wind subtly moves the tall grasses that surround the quiet suburban streets and natural wildlife exists harmoniously in the pockets of the not-yet-urbanized flora. Yet, this nostalgic tranquility is continuously interrupted by scenes of destruction and dismantling, as if one cannot exist without the other. Accordingly, the film’s sound, captured almost entirely by field recordings, is only fractured by a soft hum that slowly creeps in to introduce its haunting conclusion. The increasingly droning sonic tonic plays behind imagery of the natural setting, until its source, the eclectic organ sounding alone in an empty room, closes the nostalgic window into Lizzy’s past life. Even constructed for and viewed by a neighboring stranger, Wallin’s cinematic eulogy is a poignant and nostalgic sentiment toward remembrance and mortality.
Landen Fulton
Man number 4
Miranda Pennell, 2024 // RT: 09:52
Photo Credit: Miranda Pennell
Several films at this year’s festival examine the highly digital nature of modern images. Visual media takes unique form when viewed on a computer or phone screen, often becoming malleable and momentary. Pennell’s short film Man number 4 begins as a cluster of grey, red, and brown pixels. A computer cursor moves into the frame, slowly dragging the image around to reveal more pixels. A soundscape grows and swells with voices, booms, and drones, counterbalanced by a calm and collected narrator speaking above it all. It’s the voice of British filmmaker John Smith (in what I suppose could be considered a celebrity cameo for experimental cinema) narrating the act of finding and viewing this image on a forum site, in an authoritative second-person voice.
In The Biography of the Pixel, Alvy Ray Smith defines the pixel as more than just lights on a screen, but rather “a profound and abstract concept that binds our modern media world together” by organizing digital information into a visual and accessible form. Pennell focuses in on these tiny squares of light, urging us to consider the origins of this digital information, taken from almost halfway across the world and translated into light. As the image slowly zooms out, we make out the form of heads, faces, and bodies crowded into a pit in the ground until the picture fully forms: a horrific photograph of a prison camp in Beit Lahia in Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinian civilians were captured by the IDF and subjected to brutal torture and treatment in October 2023. The film’s title refers to a single prisoner, posed by an IDF soldier for the camera: Dr. Khalid Homana, a doctor whose family was killed and whose whereabouts are unknown. “And you, sat here, listening to gentle music as you look on,” Smith’s anonymous narrator continues.
Digital images are transient things, most of them glanced at for mere seconds, if even. Almost none of them are studied quite like this. What is our role here, as viewers and users of digital media in the face of unspeakable violence? Pennell examines the supersonic speed of online information in the context of ongoing genocide by slowing it down, pointing prominently back at the audience.
Charlie Brownlee
Translation Please
Rankin Renwick, 2024 // RT: 15:53
Photo Credit: Rankin Renwick
Communication is at the heart of Renwick’s short film, which quickly makes it clear that it’s concerned with far more than just language. Translation Please briefly but effectively examines different ways people attempt to study forms of speech that defy humanity—from studies of ants communicating to each other to people finding meaning through the hums of HVAC systems. Dogs, whales, and monkeys abound, as we barrel through a collage of found footage of people looking for meaning in things we can’t understand. Renwick stitches together these sources, which range from archive 16mm films to Zoom calls to feature films to Instagram reels. The film urges us to listen in as well, with dense sound design reminiscent of frightening ASMR. There’s total emphasis on the sensory—on the experience of listening and interpreting. As the found sources mingle together, a wider discussion could be made around the nature of communication through film itself—is it human or nonhuman? Renwick is just as interested in these nonhuman ways of communication as these researchers are, but understands our own obvious limitations of such a pursuit—which sometimes might feel like an attempt to defy our own humanity. Just as important, however, Renwick understands the irony inherent in that situation, making Translation Please not just an interesting watch, but at times a very funny one.
Charlie Brownlee
Go Between
Chris Kennedy, 2024 // RT: 06:30
Photo Credit: Chris Kennedy
Chris Kennedy’s Go Between is an experimental rendition of the Australian New Wave’s recognizable ethos. Set along the Brisbane River in south Queensland, Australia, Kennedy uses a series of superimpositions to pay homage to the nation’s post-colonial, increasingly-urbanized landscape. Australia has long been a hotbed for cinematic commentary on industrial modernity. Accordingly, Australian New Wave cinema has historically explored the contrast between the nation’s geographic landscape, aborginal life, and modern invasive industrialization. Go Between is reminiscent of Nicolas Roeg’s quintessential new wave film, Walkabout (1971), which displays industrial life as disharmonious with the native and natural. Yet, while Walkabout is more direct in its narrative approach to anti-industrialism, Go Between’s simulation of 1970s new wave is subtly in its tribute. Kennedy is merely a passive spectator, capturing industrial modes of transportation—contemporary vehicles and motorized boats—using an industrial, yet analog, mode of communication—the film camera. This seemingly paradoxical form of documentation is crucial in the film’s ability to communicate the simultaneously damaging-yet-normative existence of modernity within the Australian landscape. Thus, Kennedy’s accolade carries the founding new wave ethos into contemporary avant-garde.
Landen Fulton
Cherry Pie
Ella Berke, 2024 // RT: 01:08
Photo Credit: Ella Berke
A former student at UNC-Chapel Hill, now studying at CalArts, Ella Berke’s 16mm short Cherry Pie is a quick but memorable piece of playful, pseudo-body horror. Something lawless and unruly exists in this brief clip of a girl eating a slice of cherry pie off another’s stomach, before licking her lips in delight. Many films in this year’s festival are shot on film, and the 16mm texture of Berke’s film lends their images a raw tactility that emphasizes the scene, as well as a turbulent soundtrack that hits the feeling home. It’s equally angry and light-hearted, as if mocking you just for imagining its gruesome implications. A delight.
Charlie Brownlee
Moving Images
March 22nd, 7:00pm
Moving Images, the first program of the festival’s second night, was programmed by guest curator and scholar Genevieve Yue, an associate professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School, and the author of Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, published in 2020 by Fordham University Press. Yue is a member of the advisory board for October, and her writing can be found in publications such as Film Comment, Film Quarterly, MUBI Notebook, Reverse Shot, and more.
A Child Already Knows
Tiffany Sia, 2024 // RT: 33 minutes
Photo Credit: Tiffany Sia
After the program, Yue stated that a source of inspiration for curating Moving Images was her recent research on trains in film, made evident by A Child Already Knows. The whirring sound of train tracks plays steadily over the course of the film’s 33-minute runtime, creating a densely atmospheric experience. Sia’s film tells the story of a child’s escape from Shanghai through a long, winding journey of railroads and family members, told purely through intertitles dispersed among footage of Mao-era cartoons. Format is interesting here—the anonymous narrator asks the now-grown child if they remember any of the cartoons shown in the film, yet they can’t recognize a single one. “The secret of cinema (you know it) is that the small art (small a) is invisible,” a title card states. What role does the “small art” we see over the course of our lives play in our understanding of the world? Of ourselves?
Sia has previously shown A Child Already Knows as an installation in galleries, playing on an old CRT television set to mirror the context in which the cartoons would have been seen by the child in the film’s story. Watching it on a massive theater screen, however, is a very different experience. The rhythmic nature of the intertitles and the consistent whirring of a train seemed to lull half the audience to a state somewhere between being asleep and being awake. Somehow, this felt like a crucial part of the experience. Like a train, the film carries us through time and history much like a parent carrying their sleeping child, or a train carrying a sleeping passenger.
Charlie Brownlee
space_invaders
Malaz Ustas, 2024 // RT: 11 minutes
Photo Credit: Malaz Ustas
A major throughline in Moving Images is the theme of displacement—something Ustas explores through various media in space_invaders. Of all the films which source footage from different formats, Ustas’ film maybe stretches the farthest across mediums and eras to create a pointed meditation on the experience of being a refugee. Archive footage, feature films, and even footage of video games like Grand Theft Auto play as computer-generated voices discuss the meaning of being a displaced person. Ustas uses these different formats to create a collage which reflects his own experience being displaced from Syria. Through this collage, he maps the experience of displacement onto the viewer’s experience, disorienting us from our usual modes of viewership.
Charlie Brownlee
Dau:añcut // Moving Along Image
Adam Piron, 2024 // RT: 15 minutes
Photo Credit: Adam Piron
Various apps, social media interfaces, and images flash across a phone screen in Adam Piron’s short, which is effectively made with the rudimentary technology of the “screen record” button on an iPhone. In a phone call, Piron, a filmmaker with Kiowa and Mohawk heritage, and his cousin discuss their experience of discovering a photo on Google Images of a Ukrainian soldier with a tattoo of their ancestor on his bicep, all while various forms of online activity are shown, including the very same Google Image results of the soldier and the cousins’ relative. Weaved together with this is a Facebook live stream of a dedication ceremony at Fort Sill outside Oklahoma, in which several members of the Kiowa tribe dedicate a Bell OH-58 attack helicopter, along with a series of TikTok videos made by those stationed at Fort Sill.
It’s been a long time since I felt truly taken aback in a movie theater in the same way I was when Piron’s short began and I was confronted by the monolithic vertical interface of the Facebook app on a twelve-foot tall screen. There’s something about watching this specific short film in a packed theater that added a great deal of depth to the experience. Piron’s film challenges the notion that the immaterial space of the internet is separate from historical trends and narratives that proliferate our cultural understanding of each other—if anything, the internet only spreads this. Piron is not indicting the internet, but is more interested in asking us to consider the broader historical and cultural connections that are filtered through our phones, and the potential offline consequences of them. Seeing other forms of digital media in a packed theater really changes the impact and meaning of the film, and with an audience as big as this one, Dau:añcut // Moving Along Image felt like an even more prescient demonstration of how the private, hyper-individualized interfaces of a smart phone can actually point to larger cultural and political complexities if we only take a step back to look at it.
Charlie Brownlee
Solo Damas
Callum Hill, 2016 // RT: 11:33
Photo Credit: Callum Hill
The last film in Moving Images was Solo Damas by Callum Hill, a slow and sweet, reflective short whose name comes from a sign marked at stations in Mexico City for train cars separated by gender. Translation: Ladies Only. An anonymous feminine perspective navigates the streets and the riverways of Xochimilco, all while considering her relationship to the environment. A particularly captivating moment hones in on the gently floating plants growing atop the surface of the canal. The shot is brief (relatively speaking) yet this moment exemplifies Hill’s ability to tune you into small details and block out the rest. This ability goes a long way for a film all about exploring one’s relationship to their surroundings, and the lush film cinematography creates a warm intimacy that amplifies this theme. Like all of the films curated in this program, Solo Damas is less concerned with the exact circumstances of displacement and instead chooses to focus on the experience itself, extending it to the viewer.
Charlie Brownlee
Aspect would like to thank everyone involved with the Cosmic Rays Film Festival including Bill Brown, Sabine Gruffat, and Kristin Pearson, as well as Genevieve Yue, Fatwood Studios, and the Chelsea Theater.