Indie Memphis Film Festival 2021

Departures Shorts Competition

Expired October 26, 2021 4:59 AM
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10 films in package
flowers/distance 3.20 - 4.19
An artist grapples with the idea of productivity amid uncertainty while completing a quarantine project in Spring 2020.
Learning Tagalog With Kayla
In this lesson, Kayla teaches you Tagalog, the language of her homeland.
BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED
BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED is a metaphysical art film about hope. Inspired by 'The Butterfly Effect'—the philosophical theorem that any small change in our environment, even the gentle flapping of a butterfly's wings may manifest big climatic change—the film documents the ethereal emergence of live butterflies over storm imagery contained in a butterfly-scale Shaker bed. Collectively, BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED's symbolism and elemental soundscape facilitate a surreal incantation for healing, hope, and recovery. The film is directed, edited, and scored by VLM.
Salvage
Salvage is a short film about aesthetics, inequality, and the consequences of taste.
The Water Knows
The Water Knows is an exploration of memory, ancestry and the Black body. Using movement and poetry to interrogate the links between our past, present, and future, it traces the relationships between us and our environment.
The Wind and the Kite
To deepen this tale of marital strife, directors Robert Machoian and Keely Song subvert the approach of the conventional dance short, choosing at moments to focus on the faces of the dancers and at other times remove them from the frame rather than to keep the camera at a distance as if shooting the whole “stage” as is usually done. The composer's sweeping orchestral score and the extra-terrestrial seeming landscape only serve to heighten this juxtaposition in this boundary-pushing piece.
Be Kind, Please
Increasingly callous messages play in contrast with sentimental home videos, revealing two conflicting narratives of a father and daughter at odds with one another.
May June July
Three months in the year 2020 - May June July - are represented with peonies, fireflies and a lone roller skater traversing the letters along Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington D.C.
A Few Things I'm Beginning To Understand
Surf the glittering channels of Xenia's mind in this highly saturated, musical spectacular in which anti-blackness is examined through the intimate lens of young love.
Closed captions available
In Place Of Monuments
With somatic knowledge, Naima Ramos-Chapman sculpts a kinetic monument on the same rooftop in the name of healing and freedom-- where they were arrested at gunpoint as a teen in 2005. Filmed during the pandemic and in the midst of the BLM movement, they intend to liberate their own body through the process of rupturing memory with collective recall and dreaming in response to the state violence and the only virus that has truly plagued their family for generations: white supremacy. May this be a balm.
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BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED is a metaphysical art film about hope. Inspired by 'The Butterfly Effect'—the philosophical theorem that any small change in our environment, even the gentle flapping of a butterfly's wings may manifest big climatic change—the film documents the ethereal emergence of live butterflies over storm imagery contained in a butterfly-scale Shaker bed. Collectively, BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED's symbolism and elemental soundscape facilitate a surreal incantation for healing, hope, and recovery. The film is directed, edited, and scored by VLM.

  • Year
    2021
  • Runtime
    6 minutes
  • Language
    English
  • Country
    United States
  • Premiere
    Tennessee Premiere
  • Director
    Virginia Lee Montgomery
  • Screenwriter
    Virginia Lee Montgomery
  • Producer
    Virginia Lee Montgomery
  • Cast
    Virginia Lee Montgomery
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