Maybe the title of the program is a bit cheeky. After all, what kinds of images would appear in a film festival other than those that move? The images here, however, take movement further, in often unexpected directions.

They accompany travelers, like the boy in Tiffany Sia’s A Child Already Knows (2024), who is too young to understand his family’s escape from Cold War-era Shanghai, but nevertheless grasps something of the journey in the cartoon images that float alongside him.

In Malaz Usta’s space_invaders.exe (2024), archival footage, videogames, and a computer-generated voice kaleidoscopically evoke the experience of a displaced person, just as they themselves are uprooted and denaturalized from their sources.

The movement of images exceeds that of the filmmaker in Adam Piron’s Dau:añcut // Moving Along Image (2022), which tracks the consumption and circulation of native American imagery worldwide. In the film’s key example, after a simple Google search for “ukrainian tattoo american indian chief,” Piron is surprised to discover the face of his relative emblazoned on the arm of a Ukrainian soldier.

Finally, multiple speeds and moments of migration are rendered in Callum Hill’s Solo Damas (2016), from women riding the “only women” cars in the subway, to pilgrims gathering at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, and, furthest back, the slow glide along the ancient Aztec waterways of Xochimilco. As these films remind us, the movement of images is nothing to be taken for granted. Sometimes, they move the viewer along with them.

PROGRAM 5: I’M NOT YOUR MONSTER @ 1PM