This year’s edition of the Crossroads Film Festival opens with a shorts program that includes the filmmaker Amy Reid’s sensitively textured Bay Area Sampler Quilt (2026), a small-gauge paean to the art of quiltmaking which puts the craft to work as a metaphor for the artist’s own filmmaking processes: dyeing, contact printing, and social engagement. Crossroads is likewise a Bay Area sampler quilt of artist-made film and video, a quilt upon which to rest as you behold a blaze of light and shadow while summer bleeds into September. The festival is a special occasion for eclecticism, remix, and craft. Crossroads’s dedicated quiltmaker is Artistic Director Steve Polta, who once again offers the city a visual feast of contemporary international avant-garde moving images that will include eight works screened on 16mm film. The programs are intuitive, bringing together themes related to alchemy, haunting, and automatism.
Naturally, the festival’s thematic undercurrent picks up a throughline from the Beat Generation. Mystic filmmaker Harry Smith’s legendary surrealist, stop-motion cut-up Heaven and Earth Magic (1957–1962) will grace Crossroads’s second program. The film was created in fits and starts—part of a sleep-deprivation ritual Smith devised for himself in order to arrive at a free, associative state of mind—and comes across as a mechanist fever dream that brings together clippings from 19th century ladies’ catalogues. Crossroads’s screening of the film will include live musical accompaniment from the renowned composer JG Thirlwell, who will perform a surround-sound electronic score with theremin and cascading samples. Thirlwell’s own frenetic film Sonder (2018) is also included in the second program and delivers a breakneck New York City symphony.
Countless other films channel the forces of raw association this year. The American premiere of Matthew Berka’s stunning Body, remember... (2025) begins with the sound and image of a fingertip wiping the film gate to initiate a series of voyeuristic vignettes in a public park. Painterly macro shots of human eyes turn them undeniably animal, as the camera augments and remembers perception and the desires it both exposes and occludes. Also engaging with sensuous detail, but with a different surface intimacy, TT Takemoto’s Swing Swish Sway (2026) warps tactile images in order to dream the unrealized queer sanctuary imagined by Filipina American paintbrush maker Rosalie “Rose” Bamberger, who in 1955 founded the first lesbian political rights organization in the United States. Women share food, explore, and dance, as bison roam and pigs scamper across tattered shapes of lifted emulsion.
Some works take a more drastic approach to automatic poetry. Joshua Gen Solondz’s XTENDED RELEASE (version 2.5) (2026) is an explosively rendered abstract diary punctuated by documentary footage filmed on 35mm, “collaged with tape, ink, skin, semen, and various corrosive chemicals.” Marcos Serafilm’s semipermeable: syringe (2024) appropriates generative AI to depict the HIV epidemic across the US/Mexico borderlands in order to reveal an inherited system of regulation and knowledge in which distortion is a feature not a bug.
Across the festival, the past re-emerges amid the profoundly existential present. Cauleen Smith’s Only Now (2025) is an experimental documentary that careens across footage of weavers and beach travelers on Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal, once a center of the transatlantic slave trade. Smith arrests rhythmic footage of body-intensive weaving to declare, “I now accept that the sound of the ocean can offer me no peace.” The sound of weavers at work and the ocean crashing bracket a receptive pause to acknowledge the violent material and spatial matrix of modern history within a diasporic present. Rajee Samarasinghe similarly carries on the complex tradition of documentary reflexivity. A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth (2026) grapples with the unease of capture, born from unused testimonial footage of a Tamil mother who lost her son near the end of Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war. Samarasinghe reflects, “Every time I put [her testimony] in the edit, it seemed to destroy all the other testimonies.” Abandoning his original form to employ silence and interruption, the film points to the withheld realities revealed by documentary forms rather than imply historical closure.
Elsewhere, filmmakers engage with the potential of death and rebirth. SEAM (2021) is one of the festival’s signature flower films, a short and meditative work from the late Sheri Wills, to whom the program “coming and going / breath by breath” is dedicated in memoriam. Superimposed petals are haunted by a soundtrack of early wax cylinder recordings that captured the sounds of daily life produced by early adopters of the technology. Later, Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold deliver a poignant film eulogy to the legendary Queen of Disco, the singer Sylvester “Dooni” James Jr., in Dooni (2025). Performer Timothy Johnson voices the words of the gospel singer and pastor Walter Hawkins in a re-animation of love as dancers shimmer and flash in purple darkness.
Jiayi Chen’s flickering red Mounds Above the Earth (2026) trains a lens on the landscapes and insect eyes animated by the rare simultaneous emergence of two cicada broods, an event unfolding in 2024 for the first time since 1803 due to ecological disruption. The film reminds us that planetary collapse has been foretold through translated proxies, including cicadas and parables. In Chen’s film, a fable is offered in the convergent darkness of a blood moon, in which the moon’s reflection might be pulled out of a well. Off screen, a young person attempts to interpret such ancient poetry, offering a fragment of hope: “So that the everlasting night of the world is no longer so dark. Make the long nights of the world grow bright.”
If you’ve ever attended, put together, or written about an experimental film festival, you know that such an experience resembles that of a quilt quilted from quilts. You come away a bit breathless and with a gestalt impression of a total pattern that emerges from blocks of poetry and materiality that are discrete yet enmeshed. The completionists among us will wrap themselves up in the whole thing, others will sit down for a brief moment and enjoy one or two programs from their favorite corner, and some might even snip away pieces as souvenirs that will appear in their own quilts in due time.
