re:assemblage collective

― DIFFUSION 6: Common Forms, 59' ―

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Outdoor Screening
Saturday 09 August 2025 · 9:00pm screening
401 Richmond Courtyard; 401 Richmond Street W., Tkaronto

Entrance by donation at the door

Wheelchair accessible venue

The five films in this program trace migrations of body, memory, and sound across time’s slippery surface. Each film dwells between presence and disappearance, mourning and motion, form and fracture. A game becomes ritual, digestion turns into cosmology, a home forgets itself, a utopia falters, and a dream erupts into political lament. These are films about commoning, of gestures shared across distance, of time folded in on itself and of the dead living through us.

ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong · Daphne Xu Language of the Entrails · Luciana Decker Orozco A. · Ramon Balcells The Phalanx · Ben Balcom When The Blues Goes Marching In (Pengais Mimpi) · Beny Kristia

The Phalanx

Directed by Ben Balcom
USA · 2025 · 14'00

Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association, the frictions that give way to fracture. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time. -BB

Ben Balcom is a filmmaker and educator based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he is an assistant professor of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Balcom’s recent films explore the histories and afterlives of radical social ideals and communal living. Working within experimental nonfiction, his projects combine archival research, poetic narration, and observational filmmaking to reflect on the possibilities of alternative ways of living. Drawing from speculative fiction, critical theory, and utopian poetics, his work often revisits the sites of now-defunct experimental schools and intentional communities, using cinema as a space for both research and imagination. Featuring landscapes both real and imagined, these films engage collective memory while speculating on futures beyond the limits of capitalism. Earlier in his practice, Balcom worked with abstraction, introspection, and formal experimentation, exploring the tensions between perception and communication, and probing the materiality of film itself. These threads continue to inform his evolving approach to nonfiction and poetic cinema. Balcom’s films have screened internationally at venues and festivals including the Museum of the Moving Image, International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Arts Festival, IndieLisboa, Media City Film Festival, and Ann Arbor Film Festival. He has received awards from Onion City, Athens International Film + Video Festival, and Ann Arbor. In 2023, he was a research fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies. He also co-founded Microlights Cinema, a microcinema that ran from 2013 to 2023, dedicated to bringing experimental film and video art to audiences in Milwaukee. [↗]