This is a story about a woman named Sarika, my mother – “the lady who records”… “Addicted” to documenting her life in photos and video, and to the memories they bring up for her, over and over again.

Review by Parker Jesse Chase:

Morning light. Birds in the background. Soft music guiding us into a home stacked high with photo albums. The 86 year old woman calls herself a photo freak. Her name is Sarika, but within her family she is known as the lady who records.

This documentary is built around holding on to memory before it slips away.

Sarika documents everything. Calendars thick with notes. Margins of old photo albums filled with handwriting. Detailed captions behind printed photographs. Pens gifted to her like sacred tools. If I do not write it down, I question what I wanted, she says. Writing helps her remember. Photos help her remember.

The film frames her habit not as obsession, but as preservation. Memory, especially in old age, can shrink. Sometimes it disappears. Sarika fights back with ink and tape.

Through conversations with her daughter and the people who’ve grown alongside her, the film becomes both personal and generational. She’s the type to wake at 4 am, stirred by a memory, reaching for a notebook in the dark so the thought does not vanish. She recalls schools, childhood in Egypt, songs from decades past. There is joy in her voice when she realizes she can still reach those early years. Documentation, for her, is not just record keeping. It is proof life happened.

One of the film’s most moving threads follows her return to her childhood neighborhood. Street names have changed. Buildings look unfamiliar. But the community gathers around her search. They ask elders. They knock on doors. Eventually, they find someone who remembers her. Two women who once shared classrooms begin singing in Ladino, trading songs that survived migration and time. It is an intimate, almost fragile moment. Music unlocks something words cannot. Sarika weeps, not from sadness alone, but from recognition. Culture that feels close to fading sparks back to life through melody.

The rediscovery expands. She reconnects with the woman who taught her to sew. Old friends gather. They laugh about being tomboys, about mischief, about those who are no longer here. The camera lingers on faces lined with time, voices still carrying youth when they sing. Home is finally located, not just through maps, but through memory shared aloud.

The film also weaves in archival family footage. A grandson’s birth. Hills and gatherings. Her daughter jokes that once Sarika bought a Sony camera, the madness began. Yet it becomes clear that this instinct to record did not start with her. It runs in the family. They have long been historians of their own lives.

There are heavier chapters too. Sarika speaks about working in the ER during her military service, admitting and discharging wounded soldiers. Some images still disturb her. The documentary touches on the 1948 War of Independence, on life in a kibbutz, on political tension and compromise. At times, these shifts feel abrupt, moving quickly from intimate family portrait to national history. Yet they also underline how personal memory and collective memory are always intertwined.

We see tanks at entrances in both old photos and present day footage. Living in Israel, she says, is about compromise. Do not take everything to heart. It is not worth it.

The film returns often to love. How she met her husband. How small habits, like always adding dill to a dish because someone once suggested it, become threads that tie decades together. Love thy neighbor. Remember the goodbye.

At its core, Sarika is about the act of remembering as resistance. Against time. Against erasure. Against the quiet fading that can happen within a single mind.

The camera treats her notes and photo albums like sacred texts. These are her memoirs, written in fragments. Midnight entries. Margins filled with ink. Songs carried across continents.

By the end, one thing feels certain. Sarika will continue to record for as long as she can. Not because she fears death, but because memory gives shape to a life. And if she writes it down, if she captures it on tape, it will live a little longer, for her, and for everyone who comes after.

Mira, a curious and impish six-year-old girl, has a fundamental need in order to explore and understand the world: to feel loved by her mother.

Review by Victoria Angelique:

Abuse lingers on a child’s brain and can impact the interactions with other people even when placed somewhere safe. This is what is depicted through 6-year-old Mira in UNE VIE APRÉS, a film that will have moments that has the audience gasping out loud at the trauma this sweet child endures before she is removed from her abusive situation. 

The film begins on a sweet moment of Mira being a typical kid, in what the audience will assume is a moment where the child is staying out of trouble. The spectacular cinematography shows the point of view from Mira throughout the narrative, beginning with a literal view from the binoculars where the girl is observing nature. It’s a moment typical of most children, one filled with curiosity and wonder. This changes quickly when Mira is displaced by being locked in a shed. The cinematography changes with the change in scenery, what was beautiful turns ugly, as Mira looks at cobwebs and spiders in the dusty shed. 

The story delves into what abuse, both psychological and physical, can do to the brain. Mira is able to daydream about the places and people that make her feel safe. It is often interrupted by her abusive mother, where the film delves straight into the child’s brain by showing neurons changing from the calm blue to a warning red. Red slowly begins to cover up the blue, as Mira is always on guard. She is not able to recite a poem at a gathering of her parent’s friends, embarrassing both of them, only made worse when she drops chocolate cake on her new dress. Red fires at all cylinders, Mira knows she’s not safe from her mother’s biting words. 

The final gasping moment is when the neurons are almost completely red as Mira’s mother chases her with a whip that hangs on the wall. The audience knows what is coming, even though the film doesn’t depict the child being beaten, the firing neurons state how bad this physical form of abuse is hurting Mira. The words were bad enough, but the beating only adds to the damage. Fortunately Mira’s mother is drunk, so she falls down the stairs unconscious. Mira’s father ignored the entire situation, which allows the small child to be whisked to safety by social services to live with her Nanny.

This is the moment where the film shows the brain is healing, but a small red warning light remains tucked in the corner of Mira’s brain. She is beginning to heal and words of encouragement cause the neurons to fire like fireworks. This indicates that it will take awhile to heal, but healing is possible. 

This short film shows the true impact of abuse on children’s delicate minds. It is powerful and will leave a lasting impact on anyone that watches Mira’s story. 

In his new comedy special “Slouching Towards Branson,” singer-songwriter and alt-comic Will Wood performs for audiences across the U.S., intertwining songs from his discography with a drug-addled, rat-filled, spiritually confused “about as true as a true story can be while still being a story” story about accidentally going viral, timeshare presentations, and the end of the world. The special has received glowing reviews from independent outlets and critics as well as from both fans and newcomers to his work alike, and has been winning a variety of awards and nominations on the independent film festival circuit.

Project Links

•  Website
•  Instagram

Review by Andie Kay:

This full length feature follows Will Wood across several comedy venues and is reminiscent of a Netflix Comedy Special. The difficulty in filming anything performed live on stage is going to be lighting. Not to have your performer in shadow or completely over-exposed. Director of photography Jacob Feldman really nailed that balance and the film had beautiful cinematography.

It was incredibly smart to have several camera operators filming from different angles. It really helped the “at home” audience feel connected to what was happening on stage. Since this was filmed in various venues, the switch to a new venue was a little jarring but the graphic text of the chapter cards helped alleviate some of that.

There is absolutely no doubt that Will Wood is a wonderful musician and singer-songwriter. Musically speaking the songs delivered great hooks and Will’s vocals have such a nice timbre to them. I really found myself looking forward to the next song and where he was going to vocally go with it.

The Encarne Trilogy is a series of no-budget shorts regarding the creation of my son and his entrance into the physical plane. It won Honorable Mention for Best Experimental Film at the 2025 Paris Around Films International Film Festival (ARFF), Best Arthouse in the Absurd Film Festival Monthly (Milan) July 2025, and Bangkok Society of Film Critics Award for Experimental Film at the Bangkok Movie Awards for July 2025.

The Encarne Trilogy

Review by Andie Kay:

This zero budget short film from SI Reasoning is an award winning surrealist short film split into multiple acts. It’s very experimental, avant garde and definitely surreal. What impressed me was the quality of the cinematography for this short as well as the make up application on the actors. Even the blending of superimposing one image onto another was decently done for not having a budget.

Musically this had a very apocalyptic feel and quickly became a cacophony of sound. Having that degree of repetitive dissonance without resolve is auditorily uncomfortable. Perhaps that was the idea all along, to create discomfort through music? Either way it works great as you can’t keep your eyes and ears off the film. There is a magnificent blend of a visual design, mixed with the music, that gives the viewer a new emotion. This is what experimental film is all about. There is a great story here, but in many ways it’s all about what the individual thinks and feels. And they’ll interpret their own story.

I am aware that this is SI Reasoning’s first film – can’t wait to see what he does next.

In the forgotten corners of the city, a young homeless addict named JD drifts through nights haunted by silence, addiction, and disconnection. Alongside Max, a hardened street survivor, and Luna, a mentally ill woman caught in a cycle of delusion and innocence, JD stumbles through a grim urban purgatory. When tragedy strikes under the glow of streetlights and stars, JD is forced to confront the cost of invisibility — and the fragile spark of hope that may still exist.

“Under the Stars” is a haunting, poetic portrait of those society ignores, where even in the darkest moments, humanity flickers like a lighter in the night.

Conversation with filmmaker Jason G. Mercado, with his assistant Nadine Emrich.

—

Subscribe to the podcast:

Tweets by wildsoundpod

https://www.instagram.com/wildsoundpod/

https://www.facebook.com/wildsoundpod

A young, ambitious journalist will have her first high-profile live interview with the President. The country is on the verge of a significant war, externally and internally. After a series of questions, the interview takes a dangerous course.

Project Links

•  Instagram

Review by Julie C. Sheppard

Though fictional, the short film Exposed is an apt parallel with what is going on in the world today, as so many conscientious journalists courageously seek to reveal the truth. The talented performer playing the central character convincingly depicts a journalist who is in the right profession, given her desperate need to expose corruption, even at the risk of losing her job. Another skillful performer plays the president, a driven woman who, unlike the journalist, seeks to hide the truth from the general population, as so many politicians are known to do. The structure of the short is airtight, moving from a strong set up of the journalist fighting to expose the president’s lies at the potential cost of bringing the network down, to the interview that pits the two together in a parry of wits.

In advance of the interview, the staging of a flurry of production staff working on a time crunch is quite believable, as is the flashy TV promo announcing the upcoming event. Once the interview begins, the brilliant screenplay reveals a strong undertone of mistrust and competitiveness between the two female leads, who have both fought hard for their positions. What begins as a civil interchange, the situation quickly moves to justified anger of the journalist and attempts of political manoeuvring and denial by the president. 

The resulting tension in the production booth, combined with the pride of the journalist for doing her job, moves the situation rapidly into dangerous territory. Despite the undertones of danger, it can be quite satisfying for the viewer to see that justice is served in this fictional account when, in our world today, there are so many untold secrets that journalists of integrity are constantly having to fight tooth and nail to expose.

Portraits of an Unverified Self operates in the unstable interval between identity, play, and technology. The vertical film/installation proposes a succession of figures that do not fix a subject, but rehearse multiple possibilities of presence, recognition, and failure. From the author’s own image, mutant figures emerge—visual heteronyms—that oscillate between recognition and estrangement, maintaining a fragile connection to the original body. 

Project Links

•  Website
•  Instagram

Review by Parker Jesse Chase:

Portraits of an Unverified Self by Vasco Diogo, feels like a fever dream exposed to the internet. The film lives in the space between identity, play, and tech, where the self is never fixed and never safe. What we see is one body, one face, endlessly shifting. Not improving. Not resolving. Just mutating. The artist’s own image becomes raw material. From it come doubles, distortions,
and visual stand-ins that almost resemble him, then slip away. Recognition keeps failing. That failure is the point.

Shot vertically, the film borrows the language of phones, selfies, apps, filters. It looks familiar at first, like portrait tests or casual snaps. Then it breaks. Faces inflate like balloons. An older man turns into a baby. Construction workers dig into a human face. The same figure becomes packaged meat, a stress toy, on display at a gallery. He shifts eras, genders, roles, and symbols without warning.

AI is clearly in play here, but not as a tool for polish or control. It acts more like a prankster or a glitch. It mutates rather than explains. The images refuse to settle into one story or one truth. They feel closer to a fever dream than a tech demo. Like a stack of Snap filters pushed too far, edited together until the self collapses under the weight of its own versions.

There’s humor, but it’s uneasy. There’s beauty, but it never lasts. The body keeps getting squished, stretched, erased, praised, consumed. Strong, toy-like sound effects make the transformations feel physical, almost cartoonistic with their violence. The gallery on the wall turns the human in the portrait into skin and bone. The viewer shifts with it. Watching starts to feel like participation.

Power, fame, desire, and worship all brush past the same face. None of it sticks. Some images repeat. Others return with small changes, like the system is testing variations and failing each time.

Near the end, the only clear text appears: “What do you see?” It lands like a challenge, not a prompt. By then, the question is less about the figure on screen and more about the viewer. About how badly we want coherence. About how quickly we accept distortion when it wears a familiar face.

Portraits of an Unverified Self does not offer answers or closure. It shows a self treated as data, toy, myth, and mistake all at once. A human experience pushed into forms that should not be possible, yet feel uncomfortably close to daily life online. The film understands that in a world of constant self-display, identity is no longer proven by clarity, but by how much instability it can
survive.

A dancer and a violinist, isolated yet connected by sound, break and rise through the silence between them.

Project Links

•  Website
•  Instagram

Review by Andie Kay:

Kristina Perez is the creator, actress and co-writer of The Duet with her writing partner being Karyante Franklin. This short film is about connection through music and was directed by Gica Pucca.

One of the things I adored was the attention to detail within the film. The way the light played on the dancer and how the colors within the room matched the music box she held. Shadows played a huge role for the violinist, as well as a warm, more masculine color palette. Micha J. Adams handled all the lighting and it was gorgeous. The cinematography within the film was equally exceptional and we have Nathan Cayanan to thank for it. I truly appreciated the artistry with the camera and capturing Kristina’s reflection in the mirror of the music box.

There is this mysterious back and forth between the violin and the dancer as they explore their unspoken connection and it proves that music is a universal language.

A young, ambitious journalist will have her first high-profile live interview with the President. The country is on the verge of a significant war, externally and internally. After a series of questions, the interview takes a dangerous course.

Review by Julie C. Sheppard

Though fictional, the short film Exposed is an apt parallel with what is going on in the world today, as so many conscientious journalists courageously seek to reveal the truth. The talented performer playing the central character convincingly depicts a journalist who is in the right profession, given her desperate need to expose corruption, even at the risk of losing her job. Another skillful performer plays the president, a driven woman who, unlike the journalist, seeks to hide the truth from the general population, as so many politicians are known to do. The structure of the short is airtight, moving from a strong set up of the journalist fighting to expose the president’s lies at the potential cost of bringing the network down, to the interview that pits the two together in a parry of wits.

In advance of the interview, the staging of a flurry of production staff working on a time crunch is quite believable, as is the flashy TV promo announcing the upcoming event. Once the interview begins, the brilliant screenplay reveals a strong undertone of mistrust and competitiveness between the two female leads, who have both fought hard for their positions. What begins as a civil interchange, the situation quickly moves to justified anger of the journalist and attempts of political manoeuvring and denial by the president. 

The resulting tension in the production booth, combined with the pride of the journalist for doing her job, moves the situation rapidly into dangerous territory. Despite the undertones of danger, it can be quite satisfying for the viewer to see that justice is served in this fictional account when, in our world today, there are so many untold secrets that journalists of integrity are constantly having to fight tooth and nail to expose.

Shanaya’s Path follows the intimate journey of Shanaya, a young person from Darjeeling who identifies as a woman and dreams of transitioning despite immense social and familial resistance. Since gender norms are rigid and visibility for trans people is scarce in her home town, Shanaya leaves for New Delhi, but her desire to become her true self is met with hostility, shame, and fear.

Review by Julie C. Sheppard:

Shanaya’s Path is a film that highlights how important it is to have self love, in a world that so often can be harsh and judgmental. We are introduced to Shanaya, a transgender woman in India, who is confident and self-assured despite the reluctance of many of her family members to accept and understand her. This documentary also does remarkable job of showing her transitioning journey from 2019 to 2025, as she goes through tangible steps such as growing her hair longer, working on removing facial hair, taking hormones and the necessary steps to surgery. 

The film reveals also her beauty, inside and out. We are treated to intimate footage of her warm, gentle manner, and her skillful eye for fashion items and colour, and her talent for make up and hair design. In addition to showing Shanaya’s beauty, the camera also captures the vibrancy of many parts of India – – from gorgeous misty trees and valleys to populated streets, to modern corporate thoroughfares.  

While Shanaya is shown going through her transitioning with hope and optimism, the interviews of the various people who do not understand nor accept her were challenging to watch. However, Shanaya’s inner spirit and determination show through repeatedly in this film. In addition to showing her resilience, there is a real sense of her relief and joy during special events that she attends, such as transgender fashion shows and festivals. You sense her inner peace that comes from being around other people who do not shame, but the exact opposite – – who celebrate, love and accept her.