Live Music Meets Silent Film & Experimental Shorts

Experimental Echoes is an interdisciplinary event featuring two distinct experiences: a live musical performance synchronized with silent experimental films, and a curated selection of non-narrative shorts. The first half merges live music with silent films for an immersive audiovisual experience, while the second half showcases dynamic visuals and rhythmic editing, immersing audiences in music, dance, and sound.

Live Music Meets Silent Films

The first half of the program features electroacoustic composer Annie Dodson performing original compositions live, synchronized with silent films, including 16mm works by Malic Amalya and Hogan Seidel. Dodson’s music explores ecology, queerness, and intimacy through slow, repetitive processes, pushing artistic boundaries.
Duration: 30 min

Program:

i walked away with the garden’s weeds (2025) – 6:18 min
Hogan Seidel
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Using garden weeds both as a subject and a material, this 16mm film investigates the value we assign to plants in the context of gardening. The process involves crafting a black-and-white developer from weeds like goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, and bull thistle while also imprinting their forms directly onto film using direct animation.

Through a queer lens, Seidel explores the weed as a metaphor for transness and queerness—digging, spreading, and flourishing into untamed beauty while simultaneously facing efforts of control and eradication. This film weaves together experimental processes and metaphorical reflections, embracing the untamed and undervalued.

​Hogan Seidel is a Boston-based artist working in the traditions of experimental film and photography. Their current artistic research, framed through poetic, political, and personal lenses, delves into contemporary queer discourse, queer history, and queer ecology. Hogan currently teaches experimental analog filmmaking courses at MassArt, and darkroom photography at Simmons University.
Website : https://hoganseidel.com

 

Drifting (2010) – 18 min
Malic Amalya

Shot on an optical printer, damaged frames from 8mm home movies have been re-photographed onto 16mm film stock. By exposing the photographic anomalies of film, Drifting invites the audience to savor the photographic physicality of the media while also asking them to consider how framing mediates their viewing experience and understanding of images.

Visceral and cacophonous, Malic Amalya’s films traverse gritty landscapes of abandoned buildings, blast zones, and back rooms. Situated between non-linear avant-garde traditions, the oppositional and self-reflective aesthetic considerations of queercore, and an intersectional feminist politic, he creates single channel and expanded cinema performances across 16mm and Super 8 film, digital and analog video, and 35mm slides. His creative framework is informed by prison abolition, decolonization, anti-racism, gender self-determination, disability justice, anti-capitalism, and climate justice.

Since 2014, Malic has been collaborating with Nathan Hill under the name Vitreous Chamber. Malic’s films have screened in film festivals and queer bars across the world. Festival screenings include Festival Les Merveilles (Paris), Ann Arbor Film Festival, Light Field Film Festival (San Francisco), MIX Copenhagen, the Scottish Queer Film Festival, Cinema of the Dam’d (Amsterdam), EXiS Festival (Seoul), Onion City (Chicago), the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, MIX NYC, and the TIE Cinema Exposition (Milwaukee & Montreal). Visuals for dance nights at queer bars include “Buttcocks” at Club SchwuZ in Berlin, Germany, “Trqpiteca” at Danny’s in Chicago, and “Other Stranger” at The Stud in San Francisco.
Website : www.malicamalya.com

 

Annie Dodson is an electroacoustic composer, sound artist, and cellist from and living in Portland, ME. They make music about ecology and the environment, sensitivity and reception, and queerness and intimacy. They love working with the natural world as a creative partner, and they enjoy building their own instruments. Their work is often long with an emphasis on slow processes and gradual progression. In addition to their solo work, they play cello and bass in 3 active/touring bands.

Website: anniedodson.com
Listen:  Bandcamp
Watch Live Performances:  anniedodson.com/video

 

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Experimental Shorts

The second half presents a curated selection of non-narrative shorts that immerse audiences in music, dance, and sound through dynamic visuals and rhythmic editing. With films by: Tracey Lindsay Chan, Eric Mann, Britany Gunderson, Mia Martelli, Lauren Flinner, danielle Mackenzie Long, Samantha Matney, Janella Mele, Sofie Jo Lebow, and Annie Acker.
Duration: 50 min

Program:

PANELS
Tracey Lindsay Chan & Eric Mann

In a poignant search for solace, three grievers, each embodying distinct emotional states—Fervid, Pensive, and Stoic—grapple with the loss of a lifelong friend. Surrounded by fresh earth, they contemplate trading places with the deceased and test the bounds of their reality. Two cross the dirt threshold between earthly and otherworldly planes.

The Fervid Griever finds themselves in a room inhabited by corpse-like figures. In exchanging energies with them, she is simultaneously enticed by and resistant to their pull. The Pensive Griever navigates a realm cloaked in darkness, stumbling upon a bizarre party where sinister lurks beneath apparent revelry. Stuck above ground, The Stoic Griever is tormented by solitude, forced to face her inner turmoil, while desperately searching for her companions.

​After confronting their personal trials across realms, the grievers reunite with the unbearable weight of their grief shed, marking a pivotal moment in their shared journey of healing.

Tracey is a choreographer, global researcher, and dance filmmaker, born and raised in San Francisco. A central goal of her work is to let people know they are seen and understood—a powerful form of healing. She gravitates to universal themes, and loves to explore them within fantastical, genre-specific frameworks. For Tracey, creation is a means of introspection and connection, seeking answers that help her understand her life and the shared human experience.
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Eric is a documentarian and filmmaker who grew up loving the classic films he’d see with his dad at the San Francisco Castro Theater. He first learned filmmaking with his brothers on a Tyco Black and White camera that recorded via the VCR. In 2011, he and his wife Meera Joshi created Darling Street Pictures, a boutique production company with works featured in The New York Times, Australian TV, the Chicago South Asian Film Festival, and ISAFF Vancouver.

 

Night Collections #1
​Britany Gunderson

Shadow bouquet version, rain where there isn’t and fire where there is; an image reused to relay contextual evidence. Built from the top down zoomed out; this is the foundation redecorated, returning to the handmade. An archive of collected images, buried and unearthed then dissected and buried again. Archive as personal. Archive as a noun: records preserved as evidence; what’s placed in or left out is a consequential act. Only the ghosts remain.
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Britany Gunderson is a filmmaker and artist living in Milwaukee, WI. Her practice involves creating moving image work that uses material forms such as textiles and celluloid film to investigate personal histories through process-based experimentation and direct intervention. Gunderson received a Jury Award from the Milwaukee Film Festival. Her films have exhibited internationally at venues such as Saigon Experimental Film Festival, ANALOGICA, and Light Field. Gunderson received a BFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Gunderson has given artist talks and workshops at various institutions and galleries nationally.

 

Sitting by a body of water in the dark
Mia Martelli

“Sitting by a body of water in the dark” re-imagines Ewa Partum’s 1971 performance film “Active Poetry” as a method of prayer, and re-aestheticizes it on newly sub-tropical NYC beaches. Shot on a super8 camera, Martelli reveres the tones and textures of vintage surf footage. Performers Noa Rui-Piin Weiss and Nina Guevara are captured signaling, like radio towers, to each other and the ocean under a score by Stella Silbert, Arkm Foam, and Neil “cloaca” Young. This work was created with MONO NO AWARE.
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Mia Martelli is a Brooklyn-based artist working in dance, poetry, and video. Her performances have been presented by PAGEANT, The Brick Theater, New Dance Alliance, and AUNTS. She has created site-specific, multi-media works on Rockaway Beach and on Governors Island. Her videos and poems have been screened by MONO NO AWARE, GRRL Haus Cinema, Red Hook Community Cinema, Millennium Film Workshop, SplashLand Magazine, and Skurt Cobain Zine. Mia has been an artist in residence with the West Harlem Art Fund, New Dance Alliance, and The Monira Foundation. She’s received additional support for her work from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and at Louis Place.

 

Teenage Mausoleum
Samantha Matney

Created in the style of visual poetry, Teenage Mausoleum is told through a series of vignettes that capture different aspects of the adolescent experience. The film was adapted from a poem written by Matney titled American Teenager. Inspired by the works of great female poets such as Audre Lorde and Marge Piercy, Teenage Mausoleum focuses on the themes of girlhood and dread, and how life in our modern age lends many girls to feel isolated and estranged from their own existence.

Samantha Matney is a self-produced writer and director. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Boston University’s Graduate Screenwriting Program. With a background in creative writing, she enjoys blending narrative depth with unique visuals to create stories for the screen. Her upcoming project, evol, is a narrative short film that explores the effects of mental health and suicide on personal relationships.

 

B + W Dino
Janella Mele
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Seeing what you feel. It is a time for self-realization. You are a necessary part of an important search to which there is no end. Animation by Janella Mele and scored by Denver Nuckolls

Janella Mele is an international multidisciplinary artist whose works and short films have been exhibited in Berlin, Mexico, Boston, the ICA, MFA, Art Basel Miami Beach, and Croatia. She studied animation at the Museum School of Fine Arts at Tufts and graduated with a BFA in 2018. Janella performed the first Self Tattoo Performance at Galería Monet in Tampico, Mexico during her artist residency and Solo Exhibition in May 2022. She works as a tattoo artist at Hidden Vibes in Cambridge using fine-line detail and dot work and loves imaginative free-handing, often creating emotive monsters and exploring surrealist abstractions. Her next solo exhibition will be at 2 Linden st in Cambridge through Behind VA Shadows from 4/25-5/15

 

Lost Pieces of Her
Sofie Jo Lebow

This film allowed me to wrestle with questions and emotions that I can’t put into words. While creating this film, I wasn’t fully aware of the why, but upon reflection, I see how it was shaped by living with a non-visible disability. The concept stemmed from an idea I had of a woman giving a past version of herself a funeral. I wanted to capture her journey and what it feels like to chase after who you thought you would be, yet isn’t you anymore, and the struggle to let go. It’s about grasping for an identity just out of reach, a past self, a forgotten feeling, a person lost in time. The film explores the emotional journey of bringing together those lost pieces of oneself that have been shattered—of healing, of acceptance, and of simply being.

This film would not have been possible without the incredible crew of women from all over the world who brought it to life, as well as the pioneering female avant-garde filmmakers, Maya Deren and Věra Chytilová, for paving the way.

Sofie Jo Lebow is a filmmaker, artist, and poet living and working in Prague who uses dream-like logic to explore our inner worlds, demons, and the evolution of the self over time. She is passionate about pushing the boundaries of cinema through experimentation with form and the integration of fine arts, including analog and 2D animation. Her work emphasizes collaboration with other artists to create pieces where the creative process itself becomes a crucial element of the film’s emotional impact.

 

Connected
Annie Acker

Through new and found footage, Connected considers physical and cognitive presence as we occupy space in a modern world. This piece is shot on 16mm Tri-X Reversal Film with a Bolex camera and edited on a Steenbeck. Sound design is built with distorted audio recordings, synthesized tones, and the laughter of children. Credits are digitally added.
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Annie Acker works as a multimedia artist, currently based in Boston, Massachusetts. She grew up in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, a city she loves deeply, which has shaped her passion for humanity, the power of community, and civil and environmental rights. Annie has an undergraduate degree in Electronic Media and Broadcasting with a minor in Film Studies from Appalachian State University. She’s currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Media Arts at Emerson College.

Annie confidently declared her aspirations to be part of the film industry starting at a young age, welcoming raised eyebrows and skeptical encouragement in response. Her love of film, performing, and the art of storytelling are a pillar of her origin. She began experimenting with digital media as a preteen, continuing to this day. Annie finds growth through play, expanding her skills on both sides of the camera for a variety of projects.

 

Knot Waking
Lauren Flinner

This quarantine had him believing he was re-living it and he was afraid.
I, on the other hand, had been throwing up from stress two to three times a week when I had a day job. Now that I didn’t–
Out of obsession
​Knot Waking was
made
of a small collection of thrift store books (gathered over the past decade), along with some forgotten fragments of unfinished ideas, assembled by stream of consciousness.
It is a quarantine story- the suddenness of springtime stillness, sunshine and peaceful hours listening to birds in a frozen world, dying everywhere. There are yellow blossoms in my yard. I am well kept.
What would your dream be if you were me? What is it like to die?
I think trees experience time differently from us. Maybe I saw it online. Paper. Circuit. Tree.
What I mean is, I’m trying to see the shape of the movement between.
And I wonder, does a stump have memories?
I use my body to dream— A dream of the combined afterlife of one thousand trees. A sensual, stream of consciousness assemblage of scraps. Tiny triangles of paper mediate.

Lauren Flinner is a filmmaker, collagist, animator, and sculptor living in Boston, MA. As a multimedia artist, Flinner’s work explores and extols a philosophy inspired by “the movement between” (i.e. frames in a film, identities, seemingly absolute truths, and so on). Flinner’s short films are experimental, often autobiographically inspired, and reflect on the roles played by visual and textual languages within society. Their films document moments of cognitive dissonance which implicate black and white thinking patterns and binary divisions.

Born in the Midwest of the USA, Flinner was influenced by the quietly violent undertones of suburban life. Through performance, and the juxtaposition of various art mediums and traditional modes of expression, Flinner calls attention to the nuances and paradoxes present in their life.

They received an MFA from CalArts in Experimental Animation, and have a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, and a BA from Hampshire College.

Flinner has worked as a teacher in various contexts, including running art workshops with incarcerated youth, leading after school programs in arts-underserved districts both urban and rural, and assisting adults with disabilities with their studio practices.

Flinner has also participated in residencies with Kolaj Institute, Union Docs and Boston Center for the Arts and their films have screened internationally. They have exhibited with Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA and other US venues.

 

opaqueREFUSALS
danielle Mackenzie Long

In the search to be brought back home to its body, a lonely ribcage seeks out assistance from a diaphragm made of bubble wrap. Before long, the ribcage finds itself confronted with the question of whether or not this intertwined, evolving dynamic is supporting or restricting its desires.
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opaqueREFUSALS is Volume 1 of an interdisciplinary project combining experimental digital media, installation, online game design and live performance. The work aims to empower genderqueer dance artists to exist in an alternate reality beyond our physical world, where gender is neither binary, nor defined. Incorporating motion capture data from a non-binary dance artist’s movement to generate the physicality of the ribcage, the film uses animation to present dance through non-gendered means of performance.

Director, Animator, Dancer, Editor: danielle Mackenzie Long
Sound Designer: Miya Kosowick Mawatari
New Media Support: Freya Björg Olafson, Casey Koyczan
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I use a lowercase “d” because I desire to navigate the world by easing into spaces. I go by my full name to acknowledge my maternal lineage.

danielle Mackenzie Long, a queer emerging artist, resides on the stolen and unceded territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm nations. They seek to use new media and film to liberate gender non-conforming dance artists to create work that surpasses gendered bodies through various means of visual presentation and audience access. At this time their creative practice is being expanded through engagements with Action at a Distance/Vanessa Goodman, Co.ERASGA/Alvin Erasga Tolentino, Shion Skye Carter, steph cyr, Kaili Che, and self checkout/Lamont. Spaces they have been in recent residencies with include Toronto Dance Theatre (Pilot Episodes) and New Works. As the current Associate Artistic Director of the Festival of Recorded Movement (F-O-R-M), they work alongside a small team of creatives, supporting the seeds of creations by Youth and Emerging artists whose works speak to the theme of “recorded movement.”

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GRRL HAUS CINEMA, is a Nonprofit film festival, screening series, and collective dedicated to promoting the works of women, trans, non-binary, and genderqueer filmmakers in the realms of experimental, low-budget, and underground cinema. Our emphasis on low budget and DIY culture creates a space for underrepresented voices in cinema to be heard by promoting creativity and diversity of expression through film.

Visit www.grrlhauscinema.com to learn more.

This event made possible by a grant from New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA). Experimental Echoes is supported in part by a New England States Touring (NEST) grant. Funded in part by the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program and the six New England state arts agencies. ​