2026 Panel-Selected Short Films
ATROM
This piece is a slow apparition; body is born of wood.
From stillness life takes form.
A concealed body materializes in fragments, fragments of noise from the soundtrack attend the birth.
With every movement consciousness emerges from matter.
The flesh tries to separate from the surface that restrains it.
There is no instant reveal, but a gradual birth, incomplete, fragile.
Finally, the body rests.
No longer fighting.
No longer emerging.
Matter and life coexist once more
Directed by Elisabetta Vittoni, Alessandro Casini, Italy
CASCADE
Choreographery by kt williams
Featuring performances by
Dancers (College of DuPage Dance Program, 2025):
Madi Doweidt, Ara Krossovitch, Geneieve Lemaster,
Aubrey McGee, and Jalena Smith
Directed by kt williams, USA
"Deus Ex Machina Doctrina" The Ai Dances
'Deus Ex Machina Doctrina: The Ai Dances' is an experimental dance film that examines the deification of new technologies, the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for dance, and the extractive forces underpinning generative AI. Images of the artists in motion feed commercial AI video generators to hallucinate impossible choreographies, completely unprompted apart from the poses in the still images. In doing so, movement prompting as a new mode of interaction with AI reveals emergent aesthetics and treatments of the body embedded in these systems. An entirely AI-generated industrial hyperpop soundtrack further underscores the nauseating and addictive hallucinated dances, which animate the human body with a mythical and violent nonchalance.
Directed by Christopher Knowlton, USA
Did you have breakfast?
In today's chaotic and hectic life, a perfunctory breakfast seems to have become the norm for young people. The film, from the perspective of today's youth, constructs a spiritual dialogue between two generations through real and absurd physical portrayals, reflecting on the dilemma of cultural inheritance in the fast-paced world. Amidst the inseparable urban genes, it explores the possibility of continuation at their "fractures"
Directed by Gu Yang, China
DON'T CALL ME CUPCAKE
Directed by Gretel Schatz, USA
Hemlighet
This film is a response to the ways that life became unhinged during the pandemic. It explores states of spinning out, being untethered and recentering oneself in the body and in nature. Hemlighet is a journey beyond the confines of home into the wild.
Directed by Jukka Rajala, USA
Joy ~ Sorrow ~ Hope
Drawing on the verses of 13th-century Sufi poet Shams of Tabriz, this short dance film weaves Odissi dance with an original music composition to explore resilience — not as endurance, but as transformation.
Choreographed and performed through the refined vocabulary of Odissi, one of India's oldest classical dance forms, the work places ancient spiritual poetry in direct dialogue with contemporary emotional experience. The cycle of sorrow and joy is rendered not as narrative, but as embodied knowledge — moving through the body as Shams' words move through one's inner world.
The original score bridges Eastern and Western sensibilities, anchoring the film in a sonic world that is at once intimate and expansive.
At its heart, the film is a meditation on hope as a transcendental force — not contingent on circumstance, but woven into the fabric of existence itself.
Directed by Lindsay Gauthier, Satya Gontcho A Gontcho, USA
MY OWN COACHELLA
My Own Coachella is an inner place : a private festival, free from ego, where music becomes a way of fully existing. Here, the gaze of others no longer exists, nor the need to be seen. Only rhythm, breath, and body dancing to listen to itself remain
Directed by Giulia Federico, Italy
Parallel Threads
Parallel Threads is a series of duets and solos creating a portrait of relationships and how they shape us. It becomes a dialogue of push and pull, co-existence, and connection. The t-shirt becomes a living membrane and becomes the visible manifestation of invisible bonds.
Directed by Tanya Lewis, USA
Please Hold
In "Please Hold", Ms. Secretary shows you how the Real Work is done. She click-clacks down the hallway in her red kitten heels to clock into The Office at 8:30 am everyday - real and digital, machine and animal, fleshy and motorized. She is the Keeper of Secrets, Overlord of Communications, and Master of Technologies. Watch the fantasy unfold as Ms. Secretary stretches her reality, using your gaze as fuel for her never-ending productivity.
Directed by Nawal Assougdam, USA
SILO
The embodiment of the grit, glory, and tenderness that occurs when women are siloed but refuse to be silenced.
Directed by Jenna Zavrel, USA
The flight of the shawl
Manuel Liñán is a flamenco dancer and choreographer who has transformed the art form, making it freer and more contemporary. Intellectual and expressive, he combines an impeccable technical command with boundless imagination. A recipient of the National Dance Award, he fills theatres on tour around the world, yet it is in the tablao where he feels most alive. A space of just twelve square meters, with the audience pressed close, where every breath can be heard, demands from him an extraordinary level of concentration and honesty. Without these, he could not move his audience.
The Flight of the Shawl is a soleá performed with bata de cola and shawl—elements historically associated with female flamenco. In an art form so deeply rooted in tradition, innovation is not always understood, and controversy can erupt quickly and fiercely. Manuel knows this all too well.
Directed by JAIME DEZCALLAR, Spain
