Ken Jacobs, one of the true radicals of American cinema and a lion of experimental film, passed October 5th, a mere season since his beloved wife and collaborator Flo preceded him. They lived long, full, beautiful lives. In addition to his inimitable work in film, video, painting, performance and all range of moving images, Ken started and was at the center of the film program at SUNY-Binghamton and co-founded The Millennium Film Workshop.

In her debut feature, photographer and filmmaker Celeste Rojas Mugica confronts the political weight of images, revisiting her father’s photographic archive developed in exile in Latin America following activist involvement during the Pinochet dictatorship. 51 years later, this gentle, complex and visually resourceful account of densely traumatic history conjures an intimate family portrait from the dark room – opening spaces for reflection and resistance.

Curated by MFA candidates from the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres, these programs feature a unique opportunity to see some of the incredible 16mm prints from the UWM Cinema Arts Archive. For each program, the curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing.

Iva Radivojević was born in Belgrade and spent her early years in Yugoslavia, Cyprus and NYC. She is an artist and filmmaker who currently divides her time between Athens and Lesbos. Her work presents itself as a collection of fragments {observations, poetry, images, sounds, melodies, languages}  which collage together to connect into a ruminating whole. The work circles around dislocation, migration and belonging, seeking to connect to the metaphysical or the magical. 

The weather moves around as the clouds imagine their own nephology: wondering what these people see when they see what they see. Fluttering by, attention pulls focus from the movement of the cloud, to the movement of the wind, to the movement of the eye, to the movement of the mind, without ever moving an inch. All the while, we’re watching seeing, or observing looking, or something like that. A program of short works that explore place, space and the weather, in all its sublime, mundane and chaotic glory.

The weather moves around as the clouds imagine their own nephology: wondering what these people see when they see what they see. Fluttering by, attention pulls focus from the movement of the cloud, to the movement of the wind, to the movement of the eye, to the movement of the mind, without ever moving an inch. All the while, we’re watching seeing, or observing looking, or something like that. A program of short works that explore place, space and the weather, in all its sublime, mundane and chaotic glory.

Curated by MFA candidates from the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres, these programs feature a unique opportunity to see some of the incredible 16mm prints from the UWM Cinema Arts Archive. For each program, the curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing.

Curated by MFA candidates from the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres, these programs feature a unique opportunity to see some of the incredible 16mm prints from the UWM Cinema Arts Archive. For each program, the curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing.

An evening of films, videos and conversation with the legendary filmmaker, artist, community activist and educator Ben Caldwell. Caldwell is widely known for his role in the L.A. Rebellion and for founding KAOS Network, a media arts hub dedicated to Black artistry, fellowship, and love for over four decades. 

A collection of shorts that shift from abject to exalted in the black between frames. In each of these films, the mire of life is dissolved and re-made by humor. And don't we need it.

Curated by MFA candidates from the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres, these programs feature a unique opportunity to see some of the incredible 16mm prints from the UWM Cinema Arts Archive. For each program, the curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing.

Peggy Ahwesh’s wildly heterogeneous body of work—across moving image formats (from Pixelvision to machinima to super-8 and everywhere between), in installation and as object and through the ephemeral—engages with the political, the social, genre and identity in fascinatingly idiosyncratic, oneiric, visceral and rigorous ways.

Location, location, location. A neighborhood of experimental shorts, drawn from the UWM Cinema Arts Archive and the world at large, focusing on place. We are where we are, often here, sometimes there, always where. And the cinema too is a there, a where, a place we share to gather paradise and expand our sense of the possible.

Join archivist Shiraz Bhathena in conversation with Dick Blau to celebrate a major archiving and remastering project. Blau—a co-founder of the UWM Film Department, longtime professor and fixture of the Milwaukee art community—works across film, photography and video producing a varied body of work that includes psychological portraiture, experimental narrative, devised performance, ethnomusicology and the domestic.

TCB - The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing is a biography of the influential writer, filmmaker and cultural worker, who with humor and deep insight, inspired a generation of artists to dedicate themselves to community empowerment. The film is structured as a series of lessons on cultural organizing, gleaned from Bambara's life and shared by her friends, colleagues and students. Join us in-person for a dialogue with the Producer/Director, Louis Messiah and Marquise Mays.

Drawing upon a background in painting and the Fine Arts, Julie Murray has made over 25 beguiling and beautiful moving image works, equally invested in metaphysics as they are in material. Murray will be present to share a program of her recent short work on 16mm and digital.

Karthik Pandian’s work in film, installation and intervention renders mythologies of the present through forgotten, fragmentary and futuristic pasts, unsettling the ground of history.

Curated by MFA candidates from the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres, these programs feature a unique opportunity to see some of the incredible 16mm prints from the UWM Cinema Arts Archive. For each program, the curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing.

Alisi Telengut is a Canadian artist of Mongolian roots living between Berlin and Montréal/Tiohtià:ke. She creates frame-by-frame, under-the-camera animations using mixed media, including oil pastel, sand, stones, crystals, and found materials. Through handmade and painterly processes, her work explores human-nature relationships, animistic worldviews, and Indigenous knowledge systems of Mongolian peoples.