The “Story of The Cricket Queen” recreates digital media tropes, trends, and aesthetics with analog film techniques.

The Story of The Cricket Queen

Inspired by the announcement of his mother's wedding, filmmaker Simon Ruscinski feels compelled to make a movie for her. It takes much longer than anticipated.

My Mommy Movie(s)

A ghost shifts through centuries of footage in attempts to piece together a memory.... Through the use of archival material and manipulated photographs to generate a memory, 'the archivist is dying' is a personal, experimental short, invoking the mystical and academic in composition of poetry. The project uses footage from American Folklife Center Archive, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Internet Archive, Prelinger Archives, Black Film Archives, YouTube, LAPL, and is sound designed using Free Sound, The WPA and the Slave Narrative Collection, and original audio. The thesis of the "disturbed familiar" (a disrupted memory) is built out of filmmaker, Jonas Mekas' belief that “home movies are […] lyric poetry […] created by the people” 'the archivist is dying' is showing Blackness, often gentle as it is joyous with the constant disruption, threat.

The Archivist is dying

The Fifth Floor is an ascent. It takes us on a journey through layered imagery that includes 8mm home movies decayed by time, luminous kaleidoscopic patterns, and sacred geometry. The two visual worlds compete and collide. Moments of clarity dissolve. Ultimately it becomes a meditation on the beauty of loss, decay, and transcendence. Structured as an elevator ride through an interior landscape, The Fifth Floor invites audiences to bring their own map. Whether it evokes stages of grief, meditation, therapy, or spiritual awakening the elevator will rise and the doors will open. Where you arrive depends on what you bring with you.

The Fifth Floor

A neuro-refuge of haptic cinema. Polychora moves between analog and digital, cellular and cosmic, organic membrane and fractal geometry. Chromatic masses drift through an aqueous prismatic field. A slowly-evolving electronic composition, biophilic and seemingly breathing, establishes volume. Image and sound suspend, fold, and dissolve duration, rendering time palpable as somatic experience. The screen becomes a space for inhabitation and refuge.

Polychora

In an underground garage, a voice message becomes the testament of a love left in limbo, while fleeting images allude to the moment that led to it.

A Poem

In this docu-fiction short, a group of community theater actors create a casino through a sense-memory workshop and explore the workshop’s effect on their own histories, imaginations, and performances.

CASINO!

Two sisters say goodbye to the only house they have ever lived in. This house is a refuge, but also a burden and a weight. It is memory, but also a wound. Through dance, words, and movement, The House Left Empty is a farewell ritual to a space that became too heavy to inhabit.

The House Left Empty

A voice-presence makes a "sad film of his homeland, Venezuela", for a dying patient to ease its passing. In between montage errors and political archival imagery of Kennedy's strange visit to South America in the year 61´, the personal and the collective collides one last time through the words of poet Reinaldo Arenas.

We Keep On Looking For You

The Morning godless

Experimental Block #1

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