Curated by MFA candidate Matt Feldman. From the Archives is an ongoing series curated by MFA candidates in the 51ΑΤΖζ Film Department. The curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing from the remarkable Cinema Arts Archive collection, which contains over 400 essential works from the history of experimental cinema.

Calum Walter is an artist working in sound and moving image. His recent work has focused on human and machine error, collective anxieties, and the cultural moment as it is shaped by emerging and consumer technologies. His films have screened widely at film festivals including the Berlinale, Sundance, TIFF, the New York Film Festival, and IFF Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Alee Peoples maintains a varied artistic practice that involves screen-printing, sewing, sculpture and film. Inspired by pedestrian histories, pop song lyrics and invested in the hand-made, Peoples has generated a collection of works on 16mm and super 8mm that are at once humorous, quietly profound, and deeply sincere. She has shown her films at venues including Edinburgh, NYFF, SFMoMA and The Pompidou Center. Filmmaker in attendance.

A poetic portrait of contemporary wildlife conservation, JUST ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH reflects on empathy, agency, and the role of hope in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. A visceral, sensory meditation on what it means to live in a broken world. Marianna Milhorat is an American-Canadian filmmaker and artist based in MontrΓ©al.

An experiment in cooperation, exhibition and pedagogy, Give Chance a Chance is a collaboratively-conceived and –constructed program devised by the participants in the Indeterminacy graduate seminar. Unexpect the expected.

Upon its release in 1991, Tribulation 99 became an instant counter-culture classic. Craig Baldwin's "pseudo-pseudo-documentary" presents a factual chronicle of US intervention in Latin America in the form of the ultimate far-right conspiracy theory, combining covert action, environmental catastrophe, space aliens, cattle mutilations, killer bees, religious prophecy, doomsday diatribes, and just about every other crackpot theory broadcast through the dentures of the modern paranoiac.

This promotional initiation video lures inductees with promises of decolonization and settler remediation. Imagery of settler-led planetary destruction is juxtaposed with sequences of underground group therapy sessions where settlers can lose, forget, and explore their identities in order to indigenize. Sharing their labor, lurking through museums, and institutions, future accomplices snap thousands of cellphone pictures of every artifact and artwork on hand.

Born in Nagoya, Japan, Tomonari Nishikawa immigrated to the United States in 1999 to pursue filmmaking and earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He passed away in April 2025, leaving behind a profound legacy as an artist, teacher, and friend to many in the experimental film community.

Curated by MFA candidates from the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres, these programs feature a unique opportunity to see some of the incredible 16mm prints from the 51ΑΤΖζ Cinema Arts Archive. For each program, the curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing.

In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, β€˜Preemptive Listening’ is an ode to the sirens that are and those that could be. Siren compositions from over 20 contemporary musicians form a resonant voice to ask; Does an alarm have to be alarming?Β 

Conventionally hierarchical production practices offer a limited but culturally outsized sense of how we can make films together. This program glimpses generously at other approaches to collaborative filmmaking, pondering how the processes of production inform final forms. These ranging relational modes tease at the poetics, politics and possibilities group work magnetize and manifest.

Dani and Sheilah Restack have embarked on an artistic relationship that is formally and emotionally adjacent to their domestic lives, a quotidian zone they share with their young daughter Rose. Both artists have established careers on their own. Neither Dani’ video work or Wilson’s multimedia performance and installation work could exactly prepare us for the force of the women’s collaborative efforts. – Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope, 2017.

Adebukola Bodunrin is a Nigerian-Canadian film, & video artist who explores language, culture, and media. In her collage animations, she manipulates film using unorthodox manual and digital techniques to produce unexpected cinematic experiences. Bodunrin’s animation work has been featured on the television series Transparent, and in KCET’s β€œLost LA” series, for which she also won an LA Area Emmy award for segment direction.