Russell Sheaffer

Playland is a boundary-pushing, transdisciplinary, hybrid film centered around the raucous activity of a time-bending night in Boston's oldest and most notorious gay bar, the Playland Café.

A stop-motion documentary that asks men one of the crucial questions of our era: “What compels you to send pictures of your penis to non-consenting others?”

Exploring the musical concept of "release," this film is a haunting found-footage study in the plurality of visual and auditory meanings of the term. A series of collaborative works pairing artists working in visual and auditory mediums, the Études meditate on individual musical concepts through experiments with sound and film. Étude 1a: Release (I) is the first in this series and is directed by filmmaker Russell Sheaffer and composer Aaron Michael Smith.

An isolated young woman uses her vibrator compulsively — until it starts deforming her body in disturbing ways. To regain control and change the way she masturbates, she goes on a journey through a lurid underground of corporate neurologists and orgasm gurus, none of whom seem to have her best interests in mind. Ultimately, there’s little she can do to withstand her vibrator’s eerie influence.

'Monotony' explores themes of fantasy and desire through an examination of morning ritualism.

Santiago Gonzalez IV, a first generation Mexican-American, struggles with the tensions between his sexuality, nationality, and religion as he prepares for his college graduation.

In present-day Texas, Maya and her on again, off again girlfriend Jules total their car after a night of backwoods raving and teen mischief. They're rescued from the wreckage by Freddy, an oil worker whose stoic facade crumbles as he comes to see himself, and his repressed desires, in Maya. As Jules recovers, Maya and Freddy develop a rapport that dulls the debilitating silence of their small-town lives. Together, they subtly encourage one another to chase after what they want the most (or at least figure out what that might be).

Masculinity/Femininity is an experimental film project interrogating normative notions of gender, sexuality and performance. Shot primarily on Super 8, the project merges academic and creative critique -- a document of gender de-construction rather than a documentary about gender construction.

Cult icon and minor Cleveland celebrity Marc Brown is known for his bizarre late night TV commercials promoting his store, Norton Furniture. Meet the man behind the commercials and discover the method to his madness.

The mental unraveling of Rowen, a religious leader faced with questions of identity and meaning as a prophesied revelation approaches.

In southern Arizona, twenty miles from the Mexico border, a young Indigenous girl discovers a Latina migrant her age who has been separated from her father while traveling through the Tohono O’odham Nation into the United States.

Shot and edited entirely on 16mm black and white reversal film. Alone presents an experimental look at the connections people form with each other within their relationship to the city.

There are spaces in this world wherein so many memories have soaked into the walls that it is hard to place these sites within a definite point in time. Memory of Objects illustrates these haphazard intersections of space and time by capturing film projections on dilapidated rural edifices. Shot on a beautiful 16mm, we see chaotic movements of light drape over barnyards and bathtubs—evoking memories of violence that haunt rural decay. Memory of Objects disrupts our linear perceptions of time by demonstrating how past traumas bleed into the present moment and latch themselves onto physical space.

A rumination on parenting, razor blades, facial hair, jello shots, Coyote Ugly, and Russell Crowe.