Wednesday March 5 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

We are pleased to present an evening of films by Joanna Raczynska, who will be present for a discussion with the audience following the screening.

Based in Baltimore, film programmer Joanna Raczynska organizes screenings and time-based media artist presentations for the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2009-present). She has worked with a variety of non-profit organizations including Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. She has served as a juror for many international film festivals including Animator, Poznan, Poland; Berwick, U.K.; Images, Toronto, Canada; and Oberhausen, Germany, and participated with a variety of funding agencies including the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts in their allocation of funding. Joanna earned her master’s degree in documentary by practice, Royal Holloway College, University of London (2001), attended classes in film at University of Maryland Baltimore County, and earned a BA in English Literature and Women’s Studies from University of Maryland College Park.

Thursday February 6 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Presenting short video works by students from American University's film program. The filmmakers will be in attendance for a Q&A following the screening. Films by: Lila Delaronde, Lilia Mitchell, E. Taemin Kim, Sarah Ebsworth, Tristan Au, Cody McLeod Rogers, Sara El Moustakim, Clare Miller & Will Gounaris, Shu-Tong Murray.

Thursday January 9 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

We are pleased to present an evening of films by O.Funmilayo Makarah, who will be present for a discussion with the audience following the screening.

O.Funmilayo Makarah is an award-winning filmmaker, installation artist, curator, media activist and educator from Los Angeles. She uses experimental and documentary conventions to intertwine social, political, and economic concerns with issues of history, gender, race, and identity. She is a member of the acclaimed LA Rebellion filmmaking movement, worked for the Berlin Film Festival and is the founder and Executive Director of Heritage Film Festival, a Maryland-based festival celebrating its 20th year in 2025.

Thursday December 5 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Earlier this Fall, Rhizome put out an open call for film and video submissions, and in response offered 4 micro-grants to local filmmakers working to complete short experimental films. Please join us to view the films (either completed or works-in-progress), along with earlier short films by the filmmakers and two runners-up. 

Micro-grant recipients: 
Amelia Mylvaganam
Andrew Tamburrino
Jade McCartney Arzu
Penny de la Calle

Runner-up:
Donavon Brutus

Thursday November 7 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

We are excited to present an evening of short experimental films by members of our current microcinema curatorial team: Alex Atienza, Pat Doyen, Rebecca Reynolds, and Vinny Terlizzi. Followed by Q&A with the filmmakers. Screening order to be determined.

Alexander Philip Atienza is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. He has an MFA from the University of Southern California, where he studied film and television production, and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied cognitive science and philosophy.

Pat Doyen makes, preserves, programs and writes about films and other media arts. She works independently and as part of the Arsenic Cookie Film Collective in Baltimore, MD. By day she is a film archivist with a passion for home movies and orphan films. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and she has taught hand processing and filmmaking workshops for both children and adults. She is a contributor to "The DIY Guide to Film & Video" published by Parcell Press and editor of the book "Hell Yeah! Heavy Metal Parking Lot @ 30".

Rebecca Reynolds uses cinematic "parlor tricks" to construct and pervert systems of logic with surreal and provocative imagery. Ideas are played out through uncanny juxtapositions within a divided frame, created with 16mm Bolex camera and matte box. She is currently experimenting with phytogram image-making on 16mm and 35mm film.

Vinny Terlizzi - My work explores themes of perception, memory, and transformation, to reconsider the familiar. I use a mix of 16mm original negative, digital video, found footage, and visual effects to create new works. My process is driven by a fascination with how images, shapes and sounds can be deconstructed and reassembled, using repetition, color manipulation, digital glitches, and other effects to evoke something entirely new. I’m interested in reimagining the familiar and pushing the boundaries of footage while maintaining a sense of engagement.

Thursday October 31 * doors at 7, movie at 7:30 * In the backyard * Free / donations * RSVP

Please join us for a Halloween screening of Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922). We will watch a 16mm print courtesy of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. Live improvised soundtrack by Novparolo.

Novparolo creates cinematic scores for films which haven’t even been made yet, but which just through their sonic grace conjure a thousand images...It is chamber-synth-pop, but with gentle, futuristic electronica replacing the more traditional sounds and beats which seem only to guide and structure rather than drive the music.

Friday September 27 * 7pm * Free / donations * RSVP

Rhizome DC and Filament present A Night of Moving Images, a juried showcase of thirteen experimental digital and 16 mm short films by DC area filmmakers selected from the Fall 2024 Film and Video Open Call. The screening will feature a conversation with the selected artists followed by a performance by Providence-based A/V artist Jayden Barber. 16 mm prints of the films will be screened when possible.

The selected artists are Jillian Banner, Gabriel Achilles Bellone, Mark Burchick, Tushar Gidwani, CJ Hibbeln, Anna Hogg, Vasilios Papaioannu, Adrien Picquenot, Nathan R. Smith, Erik Sutch, Andrew Tamburrino, Timothy Wisniewski, and Tara Youngborg.

Filament is a new screening initiative building a community for independent film in DC. The Film & Video Open Call is organized by Alexander Atienza with film projection capabilities generously provided courtesy Osheen Keshishian.

Thursday August 1 * doors at 8, films at sunset (~8:30pm) * outside * FREE RSVP

Join us for a screening of 16mm experimental films by various artists, projected outside. Sound will be via FM radio headsets - radios with headphones will be provided, or feel free to bring a radio and headphones of your own.

Thursday May 2 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

We are pleased to welcome James June Schneider for a screening of The End Of The Light Age (aka 1,2,3 Whiteout) (2007) followed by Q&A.

Produced by Sphairos Productions (USA), La Huitième compagnie (France)
(2007, 16mm, color, 75 min, USA / France)
Starring Karine Adrover and Lou Castel

"This 'tone-poem' for darkness' mixes amazing scenes with diverse archive footage, an exceptional sci-fi sensibility and incredible soundscapes to form a blissfully imaginative retro-futuristic creation." - Leeds Intl. film festival, 2007

Thursday March 7 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Our microcinema program continues its focus on DC filmmakers this month with a collection of short films by Pam Kray. She has exhibited in the United States and internationally through numerous solo screenings and festival participation and has collaborated artistically with film and video makers, audio composers, painters, sculptors, and dancers.

Tentative program:

1. Six Degrees of High Plains Drifter (2011, 14 min., orig mini-dv)
2. Sanctuary: Last of the Artists (2003, 5 min., orig mini-dv)
3. Virtually Certain (2006, 5 min., orig mini-dv: 3-in-1 screen) OR
ALTERNATIVELY
Wanna Bet (2006, 10 min, orig mini-dv)
4. Small Town Dr. So and So (1993, 8 min., orig S-8)
5. Intermission 10-12 min OR not
6. Waiting For Godard teaser (2018, 10 min, digital)
7. Mushroom Seekers excerpt (2023/2002, 10-12 min., orig mini-dv)
8. Piss Mission (1990, 9 min, orig S-8)
9. Penis Puppets (1987, 12 min, orig S-8)

Thursday February 1 * 7pm * $10-20 sliding scale * TICKETS

We are excited to feature two films by Paul Bishow - CINEMA OF REVENGE and LAST ARTHOUSE ON THE LEFT - followed by Q&A with Paul Bishow.

Paul Bishow is an experimental filmmaker who along with fellow filmmakers Pierre DeVeaux and Pam Kray founded I AM EYE, a film forum dedicated to showing films and encouraging and supporting others who do the same. All three also worked as motion picture projectionists in Washington DC with IATSE local 224 projectionist union. CINEMA OF REVENGE shows union members picketing in front of The Key Theater on Wisconsin Ave. and the dismantling and removing of a wheel boot of car. The Biograph Theater was indeed the The Last Arthouse on the Left. It was located at 2819 M street in NW DC. The film is an intimate portrait of the last days the theater was open.

Paul Bishow moved to DC in the mid-70s. He has since made dozens of films, both feature-length and short subject, mostly in Super-8 format. They range from the film essay Anarchy and Chaos Prelude, DC to Bad Brains (1979) to the feature fiction film It’s a Wonderful Horrible Life (2001). Many DC punk bands have appeared in his films. Footage from his films has appeared many docs, including Don Lett’s Punk Attitude and Mandy Stein’s Bad Brains, Band in DC (2012). Paul was a member of the “I Am Eye” Film Forum, which ran an underground film series from 1982-1997. He (along with Sam Lavine and James June Schneider) was part of the team that made Punk the Capital (2019) about the DC music scene in the 1980s.

Wednesday December 6 * 7pm * TICKETS

It’s A WONDERFUL HORRIBLE LIFE

PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY PAUL BISHOW
Shot and Edited by Paul Bishow
Written by the director and principal characters
Original format: mini-DV; TRT: 77min; completion date: 12/2001

It’s A WONDERFUL HORRIBLE LIFE takes off from the classic, It’s A WONDERFUL LIFE by Frank Capra. In this not a remake, the Jimmy Stewart-like character, Mickey Solo (played by Mitchell Blakely) is a drug-dealing, possible band manager who mostly seems to end each scene bloody due either to his incompetence or his offensiveness. The angel Clarence (played by Alec Armbrister) is an aspiring devil who encourages the protagonist to end his life because it really would make everyone else’s existence better. Mickey’s romantic involvement, Penelope (played by Sashi Ohbi), finds the honeymoon over when it becomes clear that she is now the nursemaid to Solo and his two teenage children from a previous, well, that’s not clear. Other various family and business characters and dealings crash-land the movie where you may or may not expect. With soundtrack and score by punk band Flinch.

Thursday November 2 * 7pm * TICKETS

Screening followed by Q&A with the film's director Justin Zuckerman...

Made for less than the rent of the Brooklyn apartment that it was filmed in, the MiniDV curio YELLING FIRE IN AN EMPTY THEATER is an affectionate tribute to the young masses who continue to flock to the greatest city on Earth. Fresh off the plane, a recent college grad (Isadora Leiva) moves in with an eccentric couple (Kelly Cooper and Michael Patrick Nicholson) and soon becomes entangled in their strange and crumbling relationship. Shot over the course of a few days, and featuring a cast of some of Brooklyn’s brightest up-and-comers, this debut film acts as a loving ode to youthful naivety and skyscraper-sized expectations.

Thursday October 5 * 7pm * TICKETS

We are so pleased to welcome Le Ratoire for a night of spectacular 16mm projections followed by discussion with the filmmakers.

Le Ratoire is a filmmaking collective composed of Léa Lanoë, Pierre Borel (Labo L’argent, Marseille, France), Katherine Bauer, Joyce Lainé, and Loïc Verdillon (Atelier MTK, Grenoble, France). Since 2019, they have elaborated a methodology for collective filmmaking wherein each film is defined by a particular set of parameters; both technical and, especially, situational. Sometimes referring to their practice as “action-filming”, the members of le Ratoire meet to create all aspects and stages of the film in a single go, from filming, processing, and printing to the final edit.

The name “Le Ratoire” refers to the verb in french, rater, that means “to miss, fail, or flunk” and laboratoire, indicating the analog hand-made laboratory practices that each film is made with. When spoken, it sounds like l’oratoire, referencing the oracular and prophetic, in echo to the instinct that must be used in each filmmaking experience to find the film’s final form. We begin with a constraint (a place, a theme, a technical method) and embrace the unplanned that emerges within the process. The unexpected “failures” that inevitably occur are as important as the constraints that first inspired the process of their creation; as with any experimental process, the mistakes help delineate a contour and become key for more elaborate and complete understanding. In English, “Le Ratoire” can reference the idea of a ratery or site for the “lab rat”; in this case we are the rats running tests on themselves.

Thursday September 7 * 7pm * TICKETS

Please join us for an evening of work by Anna Kipervaser presented in 16mm film projection.

Anna Kipervaser is a Ukrainian-born artist whose practice engages with a range of topics including human and animal bodies, ethnicity, religion, colonialism, and environmental conservation. Her engagement with these topics is informed by a commitment to formal experimentation, DIY and alternative processes, spanning disciplines including experimental and documentary moving image works in both 16mm film and digital video. Her work has screened at festivals internationally, in classrooms, galleries, museums, microcinemas, basements, and schoolhouses! Her films are distributed by CFMDC, Alchemiya, and Canyon Cinema. She is also a painter, printmaker, educator, curator of exhibitions, programmer of screenings.

Thursday August 17 * 7pm * TICKETS

We are pleased to welcome Philip Józef Brubaker for an in-person screening followed by discussion with the audience.

In this soul-baring essay film, a manic experimental filmmaker summons a manifestation of Stanley Kubrick into his apartment to confront him on the negative depiction of mental illness in his filmography. The two directors go on a feverish journey through Kubrick's films, as the master director is confronted for his negative portrayal of the burden of insanity.  Characters from Dr. Strangelove, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket are re-evaluated, as the experimental filmmaker demands the recalcitrant Kubrick admit to his bias against the mentally ill.

Thursday May 11 * 7pm screening, Zoom Q&A with the filmmaker afterwards * TICKETS

CASH COW: In the Fall of 2020, a financially struggling actor camps and explores early Mormon historical sites as he anxiously awaits national broadcast for his Domino’s Pizza commercial. "Self-funded and shot alone over 30 days during the COVID pandemic, the Slamdance 2023 low budget comedy blends documentary and narrative, resulting in a deadpan comedy through one man's lens."

Cash Cow was shot alone (by me) over a month in October 2020 and plays like a comedic essay/personal doc/diy diary film. I wanted it to feel sort of like a "PBS/BBC field correspondent" was left alone to make something and was slowly unraveling. I think you'll enjoy where it goes. -matt

Wednesday March 8 * 7pm * TICKETS

Rhizome is pleased to present the films of Baltimore/Wisconsin-based filmmaker Cathy Cook along with a post-screening discussion with the filmmaker.

The Match That Started My Fire
(1992, 19 min, 16mm) | Live-action / found footage
This unconventional comedy explores women’s sexuality through candid stories of sexual discoveries, fantasies, and pleasures.

Beyond Voluntary Control
(2000, 30min, 16mm & DVD) | Live-action / Animation, Color, Sound
”Beyond Voluntary Control” conveys the experience of psychological and physical confinement.

Wednesday November 30 * 7pm * TICKETS

Join us for a screening of recent works by Janelle VanderKelen, and stay for a Q-and-A after the program conducted with the artist over Zoom.

Janelle VanderKelen is an artist, curator, and educator based in Milwaukee, WI. Her films and intermedia installations imagine alternative acts of relation between imperfect bodies (human, vegetal, geological, or otherwise) and make the agency of plants visible through experimental time-based media processes. She co-curates a monthly screening series called aCinema and teaches film and video at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she received both her MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres and her MA in Intermedia Art.

Sunday September 25 * 1pm * REGISTER

Participants will learn about 16mm film projection, create their own hand drawn physical film loops, and see their own film loops projected. Materials will be provided.

Emily Francisco is a sculptress utilizing signal flow as medium. Born in Honolulu, raised in the lead belt, educated in Saint Louis and the District of Columbia - she has exhibited work internationally and occasionally performs around Washington DC. Emily currently maintains her studio at STABLE Arts and works at a museum to support her toddler and their furry friends.

Joana Stillwell is an artist working with video, installation, text, and photographs. She was born in the Philippines and raised around the Pacific. She received her BFA from the University of Washington and her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is an audiovisual archivist working between Baltimore and D.C.

Thursday August 4 * 7pm * MASKS, VAX REQUIRED * TICKETS

Love and Other Violences is a powerful cinematic and personal exploration with an interplay of work from video artists Cecelia Condit and Kym McDaniel. Through a selection of their short works, we will open up some of the common themes that thread through them, from relief, to empowerment, to reclamation, or voicing one’s own interior. This program intends to ask how love and violence can be conflated and misconstrued.

From McDaniel's reclamation of history through personal video diaries and non-linear experimental vignettes, to Condit’s work within the psychological landscape of contemporary fairy tales, dreams and poetry that uncovers innate violence, we’ll reflect on the embedded feminism and their parsing of these questions and concerns in a dialogue following the program.

Thursday July 7 * 7pm * MASKS, VAX REQUIRED * TICKETS

For this month’s microcinema we are zooming out from our usual regional focus to bring you this special program of Peace Letters to Ukraine, curated by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne of The New Museum of Networked Art.

Peace Letters to Ukraine 9

The 9th part – sending the message of the positive creativity – via the specific solidarity screening program ” Dark Summer” to be shown in physical space for the 1st time in Washington (DC) – documenting the globally networked collaboration between artists, curators and institutions – a composition of Peace Letters 1 and a selection from Peace Letters 2 and 6.

Cultural and artistic networking is representing one way how art can serve as a tool to show and confirm solidarity with the Ukrainian people – for Peace and Freedom – not just on times of war, the Russian-Ukraine War. But it’s freedom, of course, as it is understood in a liberal democracy, as it is possible only through the diversity as a result of networking.

Wednesday March 2 * 8pm * MASKS, VAX REQUIRED * TICKETS

TOUR WITHOUT END is an experimental fiction/doc hybrid that casts real-life musicians, artists and actors as bands on tour, and expands into a cross-generational, Trump-era commentary on contemporary culture and politics. Film screening with director Laura Parnes in person for post-film discussion.

TOUR WITHOUT END (Twenty-One Portraits and a Protest) stars the legendary Wooster Group founder Kate Valk and Jim Fletcher (The NYC Players), and includes musicians Kathleen Hanna, Lizzie Bougatsos (Gang Gang Dance), Brontez Purnell (The Younger Lovers), and the poet Eileen Myles along with many other queer and feminist icons. Shot in real environments and situations, the core group of players improvise based on semi-scripted scenes. Because many of these performers are legendary in the downtown scene in NYC, they are archetypes playing archetypes. As the players move in and out of fictionalized characters and real life -- the film moves in and out of non-linear narrative and historical document.

The work revels in the sometimes hilarious but always complex band dynamics the characters endure in touring, collaborating, and aging in a youth-driven music industry. The sometimes self-indulgent, bubble the bands exist in is burst when, while on tour, they attend the protests surrounding the republican convention. The rockumentary tradition of Spinal Tap and Medium Cool are evoked along with the political currents of our time— drawing connections between past and present to assert that no one exists outside of politics.

Wednesday, December 8th * 7pm * indoors at Rhizome * MASKS REQUIRED * PROOF OF VACCINATION OR NEGATIVE COVID TEST IN PAST 48 HOURS REQUIRED, ALONG WITH PHOTO ID * TICKETS ($5-$10 sliding scale)

Film + special session after with filmmaker Ellie Walton and cast members

On May 5th, 1991, people took to the streets of Washington D.C.’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood to protest the police shooting of Daniel Gomez, a young man from El Salvador. Through testimony, song, poetry, and street theatre, La Manplesa weaves together the collective memory of one of D.C.’s first barrios and dives into the roots of the ‘91 rebellion. As people across the world take to the streets to demand an end to police brutality, the film honors the largely untold stories that have come before us and explores how artists prompt us to remember what we still have to fight for.

Thursday October 14 * 7pm * outside at Rhizome * TiCKETS

UNDERSTORY: A JOURNEY INTO THE TONGASS
A Film by Wild Confluence Media and Last Stands

Runtime: 40 minutes

Synopsis: Elsa Sebastian is a young fisherman who grew up in a salty fishing village in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. When Elsa learns that millions of acres of her rainforest home will be stripped of protections and opened to clearcut logging, she’s driven to action; first fixing up an old sailboat, and then setting sail on a 350-mile voyage to explore the last stands of ancient forest in the Tongass. Elsa’s joined on this expedition by two friends: a biologist, Dr. Natalie Dawson, and a botanical illustrator, Mara Menahan. Together, the three women document the wild beauty of the coastal temperate rainforest and bear witness to the destructive impacts of clearcut logging. This is a documentary aimed at addressing the current plight of the Tongass National Forest and is intended to spark greater understanding and conversation around the link between public lands & climate change.

Mara Menahan will introduce the film and answer questions afterwards. Both the film and Mara's paintings on display at Rhizome grew from the same female-led storytelling project called Last Stands. This will be one of the last opportunities to see Mara's Landscape Portraits exhibit.

Available to stream anytime * WATCH

Who Will Start Another Fire is a collection of nine films by emerging filmmakers from underrepresented communities around the world, presented by the new distribution initiative Dedza Films. Each of these stories is personal and distinctly told, but unified by themes of rebirth and growth. These films reject the idea of art for art's sake and do not exist in self-designed aesthetic vacuums. Their creation represents a necessary reckoning for their makers and so perhaps, too, their viewers. These are growing films by growing filmmakers, made for the future and the past, presented for you to experience for the first time now and again and again afterwards.

The title Who Will Start Another Fire alludes to Malawian poet Jack Mapanje’s Before Chilembwe Tree (1981), in which he asks, “Who will start another fire?” By omitting the question mark and retaining his language, we propose an answer to his question.

premieres Thursday June 17 at 7pm Eastern / available throughout June/July * WATCH * DONATE

MILOTI series curated by Cameron Sharp

Roger Beebe is a filmmaker whose work since 2006 consists primarily of multiple projector performances that explore the world of found images and the "found" landscapes of late capitalism. Video statement:
"de rerum natura” is a three-part meditation on beauty in the natural world with lots of hand-wringing about whether there’s anything much to say about all that.

Nancy Kangas is a poet and teaching artist based in Columbus. She has poetry in numerous journals and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Preschool Poets, which she co-directed and produced, features poems composed by some of her students. @nancykangas

Josh Kun, an award-winning director and cinematographer, works as a freelance director of photography on a wide range of commercial and theatrical film projects. @oakhousefilms www.oakhousefilms.com

Arvcúken Noquisi is a Mvskoke & Tsalagi, trangender Native artist. Noquisi’s special interest in radio communication has culminated in an obsession with temporality and audiovisual abstraction, which they blend with their ongoing ambition to deconstruct settler-colonial structures that confine Indigenous existence and expression.

Thursday May 6 * online at 7pm Eastern * WATCH * DONATE TO THE ARTISTS

Will Connally is a photo-based artist whose practice encompasses fiction writing, set design, performance, and installation. In addition to drawing inspiration from personal narratives, his original work is influenced by literary sources, film noir, and amateur theater productions. He received his MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art and his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. He was a resident at Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, and was awarded a Professional Fellowship from The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He has presented his work in exhibitions and lectures across the United States and Canada, has artwork in the permanent collection of Cranbrook Art Museum, and will soon embark on an upcoming residency at Arteles Creative Center in Finland. @will.connally

Through a photographic lens, Jenny Fine explores her relationship to history through the landscape of her family farm. The interiors of relative’s homes become a stage on which costumed bodies perform identity. Grounded in the Victorian sentiment that it was better to have an image of your dead child than no image at all, the photographs function as both presence and absence. Fine (b. 1981, Enterprise, AL) is a visual artist and professor currently living and working in Alabama. Rooted in the photographic form, Fine’s practice employs time as material in an exploration of both personal and cultural memory, identity, and our shifting relationship to the photograph in our digital, image-saturated age. She received her M.F.A in photography at The Ohio State University (2010) and is currently exhibiting an immersive installation at Southeast Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, N.C. @fannieamericus