Dearest Ghouls and Goblins,
We’re excited to announce our October program, OCCULT AESTHETICS. Join us for an evening of ghost hunting, Satanic Panic, and journeys into the underworld.
Featuring work by Pia Borg, Alex Familian, Riar Rizaldi, and Danielle Wakin, this month’s program highlights films in which the image-making process itself is occult(ed), uncanny, and/or haunted. Using a wide array of formal strategies, our filmmakers explore the generative possibilities of cinematic liminal space.
Summon your demons. Dig up the dead. Come party with us.
Join us on Thursday, October 17th at Coaxial Arts. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the artists and frightfully festive snacks and drinks!
PROGRAM
MR. CHIHUAHUA PRESENTS: THE BACKROOMS | Alex Familian
A chihuahua’s fate takes a tragic turn when he unexpectedly falls into a sinkhole and awakens to find himself inside a nightmarish maze of office backrooms haunted by a malevolent force. Things only get weirder when he finds…a bag of Taco Bell.
GHOST LIKE US | Riar Rizaldi
Revisiting the Indonesian horror/exploitation films of the 80s and 90s that he loved as a teenager, Riar Rizaldi examines the ways in which these films – shown outside of the theatre and other formal spaces of the film industry – constitute a ‘cinematic elsewhere’.
HYMN TO DEMETER | Danielle Wakin
Reflecting on the descent into the elusive liminal space—a katabasis. Propelled through the intricate anatomy of a creature, yearning for the moment of resurfacing, gasping for air.
DEMONIC | Pia Borg
Demonic revisits the infamous Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic of the 1980s, a mass hysteria where people around the world recovered memories of debauchery, murder, human sacrifice, and satanic cults. Blending archive and reconstruction, the film uncovers the forces at play between psychiatry, media, and false memory.
FILMMAKERS
Pia Borg is a Maltese/Australian filmmaker based in Los Angeles. In 2022 she received a Netflix Non-Fiction fellowship and was a resident at MacDowell. She was recently awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Her film, DEMONIC, premiered in Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival (2019) and was nominated for an Australian Academy Award. Working with archive, CGI, and re-enactments, Borg’s films portray historical and cultural events, chronicling psychological phenomena like false memory syndrome and collective hysteria. In 2015, Borg was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film in Filmmaker Magazine.
In 2014, her mid-length film ABANDONED GOODS was awarded the Golden Leopard for best international short at Locarno Film Festival and was selected for the documentary competition of Sundance in 2015. UK Magazine Little White Lies, named it one of the 100 Greatest British Films. SILICA was installed in the Maltese Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and awarded at the AFI fest, Ann Arbor, 25 FPS, and Tacoma Film Festival. Borg has had solo screenings of her films at REDCAT, Los Angeles; Museum of Moving Image, New York; ICA, London and Cineteca, Mexico City. In 2014 she joined the faculty at CalArts.
Alex Familian has produced and/or edited films that have premiered at Sundance, SXSW, Slamdance, Fantastic Fest, Tribeca, and Sitges.
In 2023, Alex produced & edited Appendage, which premiered at SXSW. It was released worldwide on Hulu and Disney+ in October 2023– receiving rave reviews from RogerEbert.com, The Daily Beast, and Screenrant, as well as garnering a featured streaming pick from The New York Times.
In 2024, Alex edited Mr. Crocket, which premiered as the Closing Night Film at Fantastic Fest before its October Hulu and Disney+ release.
His Taco Bell order is a Cheesy Gordita Crunch and a bean and cheese burrito with an overabundance of fire sauce.
He was raised in Las Vegas and currently lives in LA.
Riar Rizaldi works as an artist and filmmaker. He works predominantly with the medium of moving images and sound, both in the black-box of cinema settings as well spatial presentation as installation. His artistic practice focuses mostly on the relationship between technology, labour, and nature, worldviews, genre cinema, and the possibility of theoretical fiction. His works have been shown at various international film festivals (including Locarno, IFFR, FID Marseille, Viennale, BFI London, Cinema du Reel, Vancouver, etc.) as well as Centre Pompidou Paris (2021), Museum of Modern Art (2024), Whitney Biennial (2024), Taipei Biennial (2023), Istanbul Biennial (2023), Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), Biennale Jogja (2021), National Gallery of Indonesia (2019), and other venues and institutions. In addition, recent solo exhibitions and focus programs of his works had been held at Gasworks London (2024), Z33 Hasselt (2024), Centre de la photographie Genève (2023), and Batalha Centro de Cinema Porto (2023) amongst others.
Danielle Wakin is an experimental film & video artist based in Los Angeles. Her work draws inspiration from memory, esotericism, mythology, and psychological states. She holds a BFA in Film & Photography from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Film & Video from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been screened at the San Diego Underground Film Festival, Millennium Workshop Channel, Kinoskop International Festival of Analog Experimental Cinema, Montreal Independent Film Festival, Blum & Poe, and more.