NEWS: Bridge Video Announces 2025 Lineup for A Festival of Holes
NEWS
Bridge Announces 2025 Festival of Holes Lineup
Bridge Video today announces the lineup for the second edition of its Festival of Holes (formerly the Bridge Film & Video Festival). THE EVENT IS FREE TO ALL, OR PAY WHAT YOU CAN. Most films will also be available for viewing anytime through subscription to Bridge Video for $25/every six months. With a few exceptions, selected film and video works will not be premiered on Bridge Video until after the festival closes. Please note that this list is subject to holes.
One Day Only: SAT, MARCH 22, 2025
PART ONE: “QUALIA MIRAGE”
5:00 - 6:00 PM – First film block (~1 hour)
6:00 - 6:05 PM – 5-minute intermission
6:05 - 6:40 PM – Four Readers (8 minutes each, 32ish minutes total)
Más cables que personas (Argentina)
Director: Camila Dron
MÁS CABLES QUE PERSONAS plunges into the interior of the human body, through the combination of various animation techniques and supports. Computer-generated images of the body are repeated over cyanotypes and disintegrate at the mercy of artificial intelligence under a motto: being deliberately unreal is a sign of honesty.
Regressus ad Uterum: the universal language beyond the incommunicable (U.K.) CLICK ABOVE TO WATCH TRAILER
Director: Micol Ceretta
My research stems from the need to investigate an immutable human peculiarity: miscommunication. By definition, it is an existential condition that makes it impossible to communicate oneself objectively to others.
This state consequently results in a form of isolation and loneliness - a continuous attempt to be understood by clinging to the most humanly possible, followed inevitably by failure.
Despite being the only living beings existing on Planet Earth to have the privilege of speech, humans are also the only living beings who fall victim to inexpression, incomprehension, and the impossibility of communication; at least, through verbal language. This experimental performance aims to overcome the barriers of speech by creating a universal language composed of the five human senses, allowing us to enter the most private sphere of the other being - a "Regressus ad Uterum."
Kuleshov in 2020 (U.S.) CLICK ABOVE TO WATCH TRAILER
Director: Jamie Courville
In the early 1900’s, Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov made a short film showing an expressionless man intercut with three other shots: a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin and a woman laid out on a sofa. When an audience was shown the film, they believed the expression on the man’s face was different each time, looking hungry, grief-stricken and lustful. It was the exact same shot of the man every time. I created a film that uses the same simple trick to expose our own perceptions about race, class and gender in these tumultuous times.
Instead of one expressionless individual, my film has two. The images are first intercut with a white man. Then, in the same order and duration, with a black woman. Finally, the images will be intercut with them side by side. The viewer will inevitably see each object differently depending on the neutral face that comes before it. Every image does heavy lifting to represent the disparities in our society, and most have multiple interpretations. They address police brutality, hunger, death, wealth, quality of life, Trump, COVID and whatever the viewer brings to it.
I chose to shoot on Super 8 for the timeless and nostalgic feel. I like the grain and imperfection of Super 8 and thought it would tie back to the texture of the original. Film has depth, and we tune in when we see it.
Le Cosmos (U.S.) CLICK ABOVE TO WATCH TRAILER
Director: Natalie Peracchio
A letterbox searches for the meaning of life.
Floating Flies (Austria) CLICK ABOVE TO WATCH TRAILER
Director: Victoria Halper
A short film exploring the permanent and uncontrollable changes to the eye that aging brings with it through the perspective of a young woman. The desire for clear vision is challenged by semi-transparent and opaque untouchable black objects floating in one's eye, known as mouches volantes. An autobiographical experimentation on film and digital material featuring analog shadows of specks of dust and mould inside the camera lens, overclocked digital static and ever increasing ominous black holes of nothingness.
Reversal (U.S.)
Director: Diane Nerwen
REVERSAL combines images and sounds from movies released or broadcast in 1973, the year the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade. In the strange new reality ushered in by the Dobbs decision, the slogan "We won't go back" is recalled with bitter irony. This collage piece evokes the spectre of regression and repression that has followed the Court's decision.
The Breathers (U.S.)
Directors: Stacy Hardy & Daniel Borzutsky.
Using Hardy and Borzutzky’s collaborative long-form poem The Breathers as a point of departure, the cinepoem of the same name will discuss breath as a form of resistance, asphyxiation in Africa and the Americas, and collaborating with musicians as a form of writing.
The Cavalry (U.S.) CLICK ABOVE TO WATCH TRAILER
Director: Alina Orlov
This hybrid documentary explores the involuntary role of animals in human conflict. Filmed during January to September 2023 in Israel and the West Bank, the film provides a glimpse into daily life in the months preceding the Israel-Gaza War.
Amanda Goldblatt
Amanda Goldblatt is the author of the novel Hard Mouth. Her fiction and essays can be found at Guernica, Chicago Review, Fence, and elsewhere. She has been a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and currently teaches at Northeastern Illinois University.
Anne Yoder
Anne K. Yoder is the author of the novel The Enhancers from Meekling Press. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Fence, BOMB, Tin House, NY Tyrant, and MAKE, and has been recognized in Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks and is a staff writer for The Millions. She writes, lives, and occasionally dispenses pharmaceuticals in Chicago.
Logan Berry
Logan Berry is author of Ultratheatre Volume 1 (11:11 Press) and Casket Flare (Inside the Castle) among others. His next book, Doom is the House Without A Door, drops from Inside the Castle in late Spring of this year. He's a playwright and theatre director. Check out www.logan-berry.com for more.
Ben Niespodziany
Benjamin Niespodziany’s work has appeared in Bennington Review, Puerto del Sol, Conduit, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. He released a book of poems in 2022 with Okay Donkey and a book of microfictions in 2023 with X-R-A-Y. You can find more at neonpajamas.com.
PART TWO: “INVISIBLE HISTORIES”
6:40 - 7:25 PM – Second film block (~45 min)
7:25 - 7:50 PM – Three readers (8 minutes each, 24ish min total)
7:50 - 7:55 PM – 5-minute intermission
Vision (Japan)
Director: Çağıl Harmandar
Eyes are magical spheres that make up dreams and retain memories. In our eyes, the visions of the within and of the beyond overlap. New worlds come to be when our gazes meet.
Vollúpya (Brazil) CLICK ABOVE TO WATCH TRAILER
Director: Éri Sarmet & Jocimar Dias Jr.
In a post-apocalyptic future, an intergalactic explorer lands at an abandoned museum on a quest to find traces of his long-lost ancestors, and ends up being teleported to the dance floor of a Brazilian queer nightclub in the 1990s.
Sonido: Ivans & Tobis (Portugal)
Director: Diogo Baldaia
Many children are subjected to an exhausting sound experience. Tested through a long and insensitive questionnaire, they are victims and witnesses of different manifestations of violence. Ivan, one of the children, overcomes everything by mysteriously transcending himself. Tobi challenges him and projects themselves into an idyllic world where it is possible to live in harmony.
Daniel Borzutzky
Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024), and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024); and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún.
Margaret Hawkins
Margaret Hawkins writes essays, stories, novels, and unclassifiable stuff about art and ideas. Also a memoir. Her short fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review and Minerva Rising Press. Her third novel was published by Penguin. Her essays have run in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Brevity, The Perch (Yale) and elsewhere. Currently she writes for The Democracy Chain and teaches writing at Loyola University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives north of Chicago with her husband and her dog.
Jeff Wolf
Jeffrey Wolf’s writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He has received a fellowship grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and was a finalist for the Arkansas International Emerging Writer’s Prize. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.
7:55 PM - 8:30 PM – Half-hour DJ set & premiere of Coterminus, a Bridge limited edition flexi-disc project
COTERMINUS, the first album in the new Bridge Audio Flexi-Disc series, follows on the artistic history begun with the publication of the third volume of the Bridge Journal, released in 2001. Presented in a slipcase on the inside back cover of V1N3 with a cover by Marcel Dzama, the Bridge CD included audio by TV POW, John Barthes, Negativland, Joshuah Bearman, Eiren Caffal and others for a total of 29 entries. This inaugural in the Bridge Audio flexi-disc series establishes a precedent for new sound art practices, including durational works existing outside traditional recording ranges, innovative composition techniques, and new minimalisms. Each recording samples a moment from a full -length recording available only in the online Listening Room using a password unique to physical copies of the album. Coterminus is a limited edition run of 150 copies total. Preorders are available for purchase here.
DJ: Allen Moore
Allen Moore is a Chicago based Educator, Curator, Painter, and Experimental Sound Artist. He was born and raised in Robbins Illinois. Allen holds a Masters in Art from Governors State University and a Masters of Fine Art from Northern Illinois University. His work converses with signifiers of Black culture and personal narrative; bringing to view the underlying themes of racial, emotional and socio-economical conditions.
