Half Halt

Snatches from personal archives compiled during the month of forced slowness following a surgery. The dog died. Her oranges ripened. The horse unbridled. Cantering around Circle A.

In a whimsical, themed hotel in Wisconsin, seven guests’ lives intersect through overlapping spaces, improvised movement, and intimate encounters. Letters exchanged between the filmmakers frame a meditation on desire, blurred identities, and collaborative intimacy, as strangers and selves merge in ephemeral, poetic choreography.

A parking lot by the airport where people sit in their cars, eat takeout, and watch the planes land. A parking lot outside a mega pet store. Inspired by Amy Hempel’s short story collection, Reasons to Live, and the work of poet Bernadette Mayer. An ensemble cast riffs on what we might discover about intimacy in parking lots.

The dreams of a horse girl are evoked in this freewheeling soliloquy through a melange of text, images, and voices, each a piece of an altogether mysterious puzzle.

Exploring reproduction, photographic method and questions of emotional inheritance, Sofia Theodore-Pierce's "One Off" is a conversation between a mother and daughter, weaving together dispatches from an incomplete record.

Butterfly as verb. The monarch migration and an unearthed cassette tape correspondence form a storm speaking towards motherhood, loss, expectation, care and legacy. An elegy. An ode to uncertainty. A cry for radical optimism and a reordering of splendor.

"And there are other tidal effects, mysterious and intangible."-Rachel Carson, "The Edge of the Sea" (1955). An attempt to communicate my lived experience of epilepsy through form. Mimicking mind-body dissociation and disorientation, while gesturing towards how relational entanglements sustain us. A riddle composed of fragments–cyanotype postcard exchanges with friends, an effusive letter read aloud by someone who didn’t write it, my EEG readout as a score, and my mother half-translating a song memorized in childhood.

A meditation on how women traverse their own bodies, through pregnancy and the desire to be pregnant. In documenting corporeal passivity and gestures of desire, questions arise—at what stages do we recognize pregnancy and how do women’s bodies come to matter?