Born in Nagoya, Japan, Tomonari Nishikawa immigrated to the United States in 1999 to pursue filmmaking and earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He passed away in April 2025, leaving behind a profound legacy as an artist, teacher, and friend to many in the experimental film community.
This promotional initiation video lures inductees with promises of decolonization and settler remediation. Imagery of settler-led planetary destruction is juxtaposed with sequences of underground group therapy sessions where settlers can lose, forget, and explore their identities in order to indigenize. Sharing their labor, lurking through museums, and institutions, future accomplices snap thousands of cellphone pictures of every artifact and artwork on hand.
Upon its release in 1991, Tribulation 99 became an instant counter-culture classic. Craig Baldwin's "pseudo-pseudo-documentary" presents a factual chronicle of US intervention in Latin America in the form of the ultimate far-right conspiracy theory, combining covert action, environmental catastrophe, space aliens, cattle mutilations, killer bees, religious prophecy, doomsday diatribes, and just about every other crackpot theory broadcast through the dentures of the modern paranoiac.
An experiment in cooperation, exhibition and pedagogy, Give Chance a Chance is a collaboratively-conceived and –constructed program devised by the participants in the Indeterminacy graduate seminar. Unexpect the expected.
A poetic portrait of contemporary wildlife conservation, JUST ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH reflects on empathy, agency, and the role of hope in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. A visceral, sensory meditation on what it means to live in a broken world. Marianna Milhorat is an American-Canadian filmmaker and artist based in Montréal.
Calum Walter is an artist working in sound and moving image. His recent work has focused on human and machine error, collective anxieties, and the cultural moment as it is shaped by emerging and consumer technologies. His films have screened widely at film festivals including the Berlinale, Sundance, TIFF, the New York Film Festival, and IFF Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Curated by MFA candidate Matt Feldman. From the Archives is an ongoing series curated by MFA candidates in the UWM Film Department. The curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing from the remarkable Cinema Arts Archive collection, which contains over 400 essential works from the history of experimental cinema.
Curated by MFA candidate Chae Yu. From the Archives is an ongoing series curated by MFA candidates in the UWM Film Department. The curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing from the remarkable Cinema Arts Archive collection, which contains over 400 essential works from the history of experimental cinema.
Resolutely feminist in form and content, Gibson’s films explore the personal and the political and draw on cult figures from experimental literature and poetry - from Kathy Acker to Gertrude Stein. Collapsing fiction and documentary, and liquefying both, they range from experimental autobiography to nocturnal thriller and cast friends and influences as their characters and co-creators. Collaboration and credit are at their heart.
“I have a personal interest or collision with everything I use. I’m interested in the world around me. The stuff of everyday life.” Raised in Maine and based in NYC, Wilkins creates moving image works combining conceptual rigor, uncanny observations, and bone-dry wit. From public hearings to mysterious videotapes, his work launches meditations on images, race, Hollywood, and life under late capitalism.
A screening of animated long shorts by collaborators Yifan Jiang and James J.A. Mercer to be followed by a Q&A. Yifan Jiang Chinese-Canadian, conceptually-driven, project-based artist who works across painting, animation, sculpture, and performance. Her paintings explore her experiences growing up in a world of multiple cultures and languages. Mercer is a New York based artist working with painting, drawing and animation.
Peter Rose’s films, performances, and installations delve into the nature of time, space, and perception, drawing on his background in mathematics and structuralist cinema. With a keen interest in language as both form and concept, his work explores concrete texts, political satire, and the absurd. Exhibited globally at MoMA, the Whitney Biennial, and Centre Pompidou, Rose’s art reimagines the boundaries of media and thought.
Co-curated by FVANG programming committee members, this edition invokes the absent presence of our beloved colleague and series founder, Carl Bogner, through some of the core works he loved to show in class. From the Archives is an ongoing series curated by MFA candidates in the UWM Film Department. The curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing from the remarkable Cinema Arts Archive collection, which contains over 400 essential works from the history of experimental cinema.
This special edition of From the Archives is curated by series founder, esteemed Faculty Emeritus, Carl Bogner, and features a rare 16mm print of Warren Sonbert’s Carriage Trade. In Carriage Trade, Sonbert interweaves footage taken from his journeys throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States, together with shots he removed from the camera originals of a number of his earlier films.
Curated by MFA candidate Tristen Ives this program will feature 16mm prints from the UWM Film Department’s Cinema Arts Archive. From the Archives is an ongoing series curated by MFA candidates in the UWM Film Department. For each program, the curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing.
Join artist Ayanna Dozier live in person for a Q&A after the screening! Ayanna Dozier is a Brooklyn-based artist-writer working across film (both motion picture and still), performance, and installation.
A program of recent short, by 2023 Nohl Fellow Janelle VanderKelen, that use experimental animation and filmmaking techniques to imagine alternative acts of relation between imperfect bodies (human, vegetal, geological, or otherwise).
With artist Lisa Truttmann live in person for a Q&A after the screening! Lisa Truttmann is an artist and filmmaker based in Vienna. In her artistic practice, she combines documentary, essayistic, and poetic methods to investigate the sociologies and ecologies of landscapes and architectures. She is interested in relationships between human and non-human agents as well as in their spaces of interaction.
Curated by MFA candidate Tom Dixon this program will feature 16mm prints from the UWM Film Department’s Cinema Arts Archive. From the Archives is an ongoing series curated by MFA candidates in the UWM Film Department. For each program, the curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing.
Winner of the Grand Prize at Cinéma du Réel 2024 and Best Film of the Encounter Program at Berlinale 2024. Direct action is a tactical strategy of protest that seeks to achieve an end directly and by the most effective means.