Giving Voice

An intimate meditation on exile and home, Prysia’s Garden portrays the quiet life of aging Ukrainian refugee Prysia through the detailed photographic lens of first-generation Ukrainian-American Lida Suchy. By confronting Prysia’s story, Lida reflects upon her own roots, looking to understand what makes a new place a home.

An ocean stood between Baba and her grandson, so she did the only thing she could: she became a whale and swam to him.

Formerly incarcerated writer Marvin Wade speaks personally about his 25 years in prison and the positive transformation he achieved in spite of, not because of, the criminal legal system around him.

Trapped in their frames and monitored by a menacing curator, two paintings long to escape from the art gallery's white walls. As the paintings lock eyes across the room, an unspoken connection between them sets the stage for revolution. With a distinctive blend of live-action and animation, this short film by Evan Bode employs surreal metaphor to explore ideas about power, resistance, queer identity, visibility, and liberation from constructed borders.

A film about homes on both sides of an ocean.

Vignettes of life in the village Kryvorivnya in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine, where once the novel "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" was written and later filmed and where, to this day, the passage of time has its own pace.

A love letter told through still photographs

Locked out of the school art room, a creative non-binary teen named Frog grapples with anxiety as they seek a new place to eat lunch. Imagination blurs with reality in this hybrid work of live action and animation about finding a place to belong.

Abraham lives deep in the heart of an industrial wasteland. His only companion is a giant machine. Inside the machine is a man and a woman who take care of Abraham's every need. Abraham drifts through daily life until a tiny singing cowboy bursts from his stomach and leads him into the wild.

An artist decides to involve his audience in the making of his magnum opus: The Destruction of Art.

Two brothers must deal with the sudden loss of their parents. As one falls into the darkness of a troubled marriage, the other must find an escape from the evil that is devouring his family.

Onikuma is Japanese yokai, a demon bear known for chasing horses. Surrounded by a foreign landscape, two women will understand that demons can come in different forms.

Torn from their home by a hand in the sky, colorful entities seek freedom from a rigid binary in this short experimental animation.

When I first arrived in America, (from my native Slovakia), I neither spoke nor understood a word of English and I soon found myself in the position of a mute creature. Perhaps it was this experience of muteness that inspired me to make a film about America from the perspective of a creature that neither speaks nor understands this country’s language or ways. Dogs can’t speak, but they can tell a lot about the society in which they live. About Dogs and People is an account of my journey across America to explore its’ canine culture. The film is made in the form of an essay: it uses authentic footage, but presents the material in a subjective way. Derived from my experience with non-verbal communication, the film “speaks” through imagery, using the vocabulary of archetypal gesture, tone, melody and rhythm.

What is “Slovakia”? How to explain the notion of “Slovakia” of the past 20 years to an unknown stranger, a visitor from another planet? What is the genetic makeup or the software for “Slovakia”? How to use it? How does it change? Slovakia 2.0 is a film about twenty years of independent Slovakia as seen from the perspective of ten film directors. It is composed of ten 10-minute films of different genres ranging from drama, through animation and documentaries, to experimental film. The ten recognised film directors who offer an answer to what is Slovakia include a wide range of generations, views and genres, namely Juraj Herz, Martin Šulík, Peter Kerekes, Zuzana Liová, Mišo Suchý, Ondrej Rudavský, Iveta Grófová, Peter Krištúfek, Viera Čákanyová, and Miro Jelok.