"In the Echo of Eras"
"A cinematic exploration of how global crisis ripple across eras, illuminating the experience of individuals and communities amid displacement, disappearance, and survival."
*Content Warnings: Kidnapping, Torture, Displacement, Death.
10/21/2025 4:00 PM
Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts
Las Animas
Directed by: Matt Feldman
A haunted drift through the scarred coalfields of southeastern Colorado, where wilderness now veils the remnants of violent labor struggle. Smoldering beneath the earth, century-old coal fires echo the unresolved trauma of the Ludlow Massacre. Layering history, landscape, and slow-burning myth, this elegy conjures ghosts from soot and silence.
Documentary | 14 min | 2024 | 16mm
Subtitles language: English
Filmmaker
Matt Feldman
Matt Feldman is an artist & filmmaker based in Milwaukee, WI. His films look upon landscapes, places, and gestures in search of hidden meanings and ghostly presences. His films have screened at numerous film festivals and gallery spaces including Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, Prismatic Ground, ICA London, EXiS Seoul Onion City Experimental Film Festival, WNDX, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Slow Film Festival, No Name Cinema, and the San Mei Gallery. He currently teaches in the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee & is the programmer of the UWM Union Cinema.
Dissapearance in Three Acts | Act One
Directed by: Victor Arroyo
Act One | Act of Mourning is an ethnography of violence and conflict in rural Central Mexico. It appropriates visual motifs from 18th century European Romantic landscape painting tradition, with its depiction of the uncontrollable power of nature and cataclysmic extremes, echoing violent occupation of rural land in Mexico by criminal groups and local guerrillas. The film posits a decolonial approach to the visual representation of violence in Mexico, transporting us beyond the realm of suffering into a space for quiet contemplation as the violent terrain of occupation enters the frame.
Documentary | 15 min | 2024 | Digital HD
Audio language: Spanish
Subtitles language: English
Victor Arroyo
Filmmaker
Victor Arroyo is a video artist working in the crossfield between cinema and contemporary art. His work intersects on the borders between visual arts and non-fiction, eschewing traditional narrative forms. His films have been most recently exhibited at Sheffield Doc/Fest, Kasseler Dokfest, RIDM, BIENALSUR, Cinémathèque Québécoise, Cinemateca de Bogotá, Cinémathèque Pacific, Cinemateca do Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, among several museums and art galleries internationally.
Everything Will Be All Right
Directed by: Farhad Pakdel
Amid the pandemic outbreak in Montreal, a young drama teacher who has been keeping a secret from her family faces a dilemma when her father falls ill, urging her to return home in the Middle East.
Fiction | 16 min | 2022 | Digital 4K
Audio language: Arabic, English, French
Subtitles language: English
Filmmaker
Farhad Pakdel
Farhad Pakdel is an Iranian-Canadian filmmaker whose work explores the intersection of personal narrative and collective memory, often through themes of liminality, absence, and place. He holds an MFA in Film from York University in Toronto and an MA in Cinema from University of Art in Tehran. He has taught film courses and is a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre’s Producers’ Lab, as well as the EAVE/National Screen Institute producing program. His films have screened at international festivals including SXSW, with select works released on streaming platforms such as CBC Gem and Prime Video, and featured on Vimeo Staff Picks and Short of the Week. He is currently developing his debut feature film.
Eighteen Mill Street
Directed by: Josh Weissbach
Eighteen Mill Street introduces Ukrainian artists Marianna Tarish and Nikita Gryshko soon after their relocation to Sweden because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The film explores Tarish and Gryshko’s relationships to intimate and domestic spaces and how they have been impacted due to their experiences at the start of the war while still living in the Ukrainian city of Kherson and as part of their journey to Sweden.
Documentary | 14 min | 2024 | 16mm
Audio language: English
Josh Weissbach
Filmmaker
Josh Weissbach is an experimental filmmaker. His films have been shown worldwide in such venues as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Light Field, European Media Art Festival, 25 FPS Festival, Courtisane Festival, First Look at Museum of the Moving Image, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Festival dei Popoli, and Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris. He has won jury prizes at Montreal Underground, Videoex, ICDOCS, Onion City, Ithaca Experimental, Infinito Super 8, Denver Underground, and Art of Brooklyn Film Festival. He is the recipient of a 2021 Artistic Excellence Award from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, a 2020 Moving Image Fund Early Development Grant from the LEF Foundation, a 2018 LightPress Grant from the Interbay Cinema Society, a 2015 LEF Fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, a 2013 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Emerging Artists from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and a 2008 Cary Grant Film Award from the Princess Grace Foundation-USA. A selection of Josh's films is in distribution at Light Cone in Paris, France.
Primero, Sueño
Directed by: Andrés Lira
Deep in the Central Valley, undocumented farmworkers share their stories and describe dreams transformed into harsh reality.
Documentary | 17 min | 2023 | Digital
Audio language: Spanish
Subtitles language: English
Filmmaker
Andrés Lira
Andrés Lira is a Mexican filmmaker and artist of Indigenous Purépecha descent. His work focuses on amplifying the underrepresented stories of Latino and Indigenous communities through the exploration of identity, culture, and social justice. In 2023, he was selected as one of ten worldwide emerging filmmakers for the Sundance Ignite Fellowship with his film Primero, Sueño.
INFINITY!
Directed by: Benjamin To
Sunny & June, a Japanese American dance duo on the verge of superstardom, find themselves at the crossroads of either becoming the greatest performers ever — or becoming enemies of the state — as their secret identities become compromised at the dawn of the concentration camp era in the U.S. during World War II.
Fiction | 11 min | 2023 | Digital
Audio language: English
Benjamin To
Filmmaker
Benjamin To is an award-winning writer, director, and founder of BAND WITH NO NAME Films. He hit the ground running right out of college when his AAPI profile documentary miniseries, Life Stories, was picked up and produced by NBC News. He has since continued to work in documentaries, scripted narratives, and even video games.