Still from Dog & Pony short film.
Still from Untouchable short film.
Lights, camera… fun! Catch a lineup of kid-friendly short films from the 2025 Boston International Kids Film Festival. Come for one session or double the fun and see both!
11 AM |Shorts for 10 years old and under (50 min runtime)
2 PM | Shorts for ages 11–15 (74 min runtime)
Leslie Cuyjet. Photo by Daniele Sarti
Leslie Cuyjet. Photo by Daniele Sarti
Leslie Cuyjet. Photo by Peter Richards
Leslie Cuyjet. Photo by Maria Baranova
Leslie Cuyjet. Photo by Maria Baranova
“A tour-de-force” —The New York Times
“What is life? Is it the thing that happens between birth and when you die?” These questions animate Leslie Cuyjet’s wickedly funny and deeply moving For All Your Life, a performance and social experiment that investigates the value of Black life and death. Encapsulating numerous characters through film and live performance, Cuyjet explores and satirizes the labyrinthine world of the life insurance business, its darker links to the transatlantic slave trade, and how monetary value is affixed to human life. Are you prepared for what comes next? For All Your Life may have the answers.
Based in Brooklyn, NY, Leslie Cuyjet is a performer and choreographer who aims to conjure life-long questions of identity; confuse and disrupt traditional narratives; and demonstrate the angsty, explosive, sensitive, pioneering excellence of the Black woman. Hailed as “a potent choreographic force” by The New York Times, Cuyjet is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and received New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards in 2019 and 2022.
Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.
Please note: this performance includes strobe lights.
Leslie Cuyjet: For All Your Life is funded in part by the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program and the six New England state arts agencies.
Still from Tyson Houseman, opwêyakatâmêw
Still from Svetlana Romanova, Hinkelten
Still from darylina powderface, how it used to be
Filmmaker and visual artist Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) curates a selection of short films by Native North American contemporary artists relating to the themes of An Indigenous Present, including abstraction, transculturalism, and Indigenous creative practice. Runtime: 48 minutes.
“These are fleeting works, grounded in the land and in the ways these artists move through it. Through footsteps and memory, through the sounds of voices both present and past, through family and friendship, their gestures trace a continuity between what has been and what is yet to come. The impressions they leave recall the depressions of paths once walked in another life, now retraced toward another future. Each work is a site of remembrance and becoming—one that acknowledges how the act of moving through a place is also an act of shaping it. Together, these films carve their own marks on the landscape, blurring the boundaries of when and where they belong, and revealing the porous line between presence and absence, between what endures and what drifts away.”
—Sky Hopinka
Fox Maxy, Gathering Dust, 2023
Gathering Dust creates connections between water, intergenerational care, and encroaching urban development. Like the film’s layered visuals, numerous sources converge to create the film’s soundscape.
The film contemplates lessons exchanged between elders and youth, and the differences between generations, friction vs. flow, and the layers underneath Los Angeles.
Fox Maxy is a film director based in San Diego. She is Payómkawichum and Iipay Kumeyaay, from the Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians. Her work explores themes of kinship, emotional well-being, nightlife, fashion, and environmental advocacy—using cinema as a lens to illuminate both intimate and collective experiences of contemporary life.
Tyson Houseman, opwêyakatâmêw, 2024
opwêyakatâmêw is a single-channel video/experimental short created from footage gathered near Gregg Lake, Alberta, Canada. Three nêhiyaw brothers take a walk on their traditional territory and through a forest they explored as children. They find an object eaten and gnawed by a beaver and imbued with animate energy. A voice over of their grandfather offers a teaching in their language, nêhiyawewin.
Tyson Houseman is a nêhiyaw video artist, performer, and filmmaker from Paul First Nation. Tyson’s practice focuses on aspects of nêhiyaw ideologies and teachings—speaking to land-based notions of non-linear time and the interwoven relations between humans and their ecologies.
darylina powderface, how it used to be, 2025
This short experimental film centers on blood memory—how it is carried and ingrained in the land, the water, and the body itself. Through song, story, and movement, darylina awakens the past, present, and future as they coexist, weaving new and archival visuals with layered sound into a living remembrance.
darylina powderface is a multidisciplinary artist and storyteller from the Stoney Nakoda and Siksika Nation. Her work spans theater, film, photography, and movement, offering an influential exploration of indigenous identity and perspective. darylina investigates spatial and temporal realities through a Blackfoot and Nakoda lens, using her art to embody memory, knowledge, and lived experience.
Tyson Houseman, Collapsing Wave Function, 2025
Instructions for time travel. Created from footage gathered at various artist residencies in the northeastern part of North America (Vermont Studio Center, VT; MacDowell, NH; Wassaic Project, NY). Collapsing Wave Function is a reflection on alternative forms of plant consciousness, non-linear depictions of land, and plant dreaming as interpreted through perpetual video feedback loops.
Svetlana Romanova, Hinkelten, 2023
Formulated in vignettes, hinkelten (a cold autumn night in Eveny language) is carefully woven out of renderings of contemporaneity. Following the narratives around the idea of love (romantic, platonic, intimate, and maternal), this film contemplates the forms of its visualization.
Archival footage by Alexander Vasiliev.
Music by MaksNemo.
Svetlana Romanova (Sakha/Even) is an artist and filmmaker born in Yakutsk, the capital city of the Sakha Republic, Russia, located south of the Arctic Circle. Her practice centers on the importance of Indigenous visual language, particularly in the Arctic regions, and gravitates towards critical self-historization.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington, and spent several years in Palm Springs and Riverside, CA; Portland, OR; and Milwaukee, WI. In Portland, he studied and taught Chinuk Wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape—designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal and non-fictional forms of media.
In the fall of 2022, Hopinka received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work as a visual artist and filmmaker. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Film at Harvard University.
Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.
An Indigenous Present is organized by Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter, guest curators, with Erika Umali, Curator of Collections, and Max Gruber, Curatorial Assistant.
This exhibition is supported in part by Mathieu O. Gaulin, the Leonard and Ruth Horwich Family Foundation, Peggy J. Koenig, Kim Sinatra, the Fotene Demoulas Fund for Curatorial Research and Publications, and an anonymous donor.
With warmest thanks, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society in making this exhibition possible.
Calling all teens! Join us, Fast Forward teens, for a free night of food, film, and family stories. We will screen The Seltzer Factory by local director and filmmaker, Paloma Valenzuela, and host a Q&A with her right after. We invite you to bring stories from your own families or communities to share through an interactive activity we will lead. Free food and beverages too!
More about The Seltzer Factory in Paloma’s words:
The film is a short documentary (hybrid in a way with narrative parts as well) that traces back a family story from my mother’s side: a story that set off a series of events that led my great grandmother to Cleveland ultimately saving her life, as just years later the rest of her family were sent off and killed in concentration camps in the Holocaust. I want to tell this story because I think this is a powerful story that many families can relate with — in terms of looking back, tracing back and finding those moments that led us to even still being here today. There is no doubt in my mind that if my Great Grandmother, Jewish-Hungarian woman from the town of Marghita wasn’t thrust into a move to the United States before the war took millions of lives – we would not be here today.
As a Jewish woman of color, and one of only 2 in my family on my mother’s side, I
also want to tell the story from my perspective- giving myself permission to
tell this story, even if I can feel sometimes “othered” as a Jewish
woman, I am a proud Jewish-American who is also part
Afro-Caribbean/Dominican/Latina and this is my story too.
Still from Sacred Sheets
Still from The Quiet in the Land
Drop in for a looping screening of two short films presented in conjunction with Believers: Artists and the Shakers. The Quiet in the Land, produced by the ICA in 1998, shares artists’ insights into their experiences at an artist residency in the Sabbathday Lake Shaker community. Alison Halter and Maria Molteni’s Sacred Sheets (2023) was created in a transplanted Shaker house on the grounds of the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts, and documents the artists’ reimaginings of certain 19th-century Shaker drawings.
Runtime: 48 minutes
1998, 29:33 min, color, sound
Created in conjunction with a 1998 exhibition at the ICA, The Quiet in the Land documents an unorthodox artist residency while also painting a picture of the Christian sect the Shakers, known for practices of celibacy, communal living, pacifism, shared property, and gender and racial equality, along with simple living, architecture, music, and furniture design.
In 1996, curator France Morin invited ten artists to live, work, and worship in the only remaining active Shaker community, located in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. In agreeing to host the artists, the Shakers insisted that the artists participate in the village’s daily activities.
The residency yielded a dynamic body of works featured in the exhibition The Quiet in the Land: Everyday Life, Contemporary Art, and the Shakers, curated by Morin and presented at the ICA in 1998. According to Morin, the works gathered in The Quiet in the Land aimed “to explore the complex relationship between artistic practice and everyday life, as well as to define the spiritual impetus of the creative act.”
The ICA’s current exhibition, Believers: Artists and the Shakers, reunites a core group of artworks from that exhibition alongside more recent works to consider how contemporary artists derive inspiration from the utopian community’s vital experience as “ordinary people attempting to live an extraordinary life.”
Directed by Allison Halter and Maria Molteni
Cinematography by Gabe Elder
2023, 17:42 min, color, sound
Sacred Sheets, titled after Gift Drawings made by Shaker sisters during their 19th century “Era of Manifestations” (aka “Mother’s Work”), translates the imagery and calligraphic spirit writing of these inspired works into a colorful cut-paper floor drawing. Shifting light marks a day’s passage and frames a ritualized space clearing, evoking and reawakening the spirit of women’s creative labor. Performances by the artists revisit a fruitful historic period for femme inspiration and agency through intimate observations of Shaker ephemera and the natural world.
Allison Halter is a conceptual artist and witch. Using performance, video, sound, and photography, Halter explores themes of physical and psychic accumulation and calls into question audience expectations. Repetitive actions hint at mysterious prior events. The viewer must extrapolate the significance of these proliferating gestures, which take on a deeper emotional charge as they slowly and inexorably pile up.
Maria Molteni is a Massachusetts-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, mystic, and independent Shaker researcher since their first visit to the living Shakers in 2007. They descend from competitive square dancers, quilters and beekeepers who farmed Tennessee land near South Union Shaker Village. With formal backgrounds in painting, publication, dance, and athletics, their practice blooms to incorporate research, embodied spirituality and collaboration with the living and the dead.
Molteni has worked closely with the archives of most existing historic Shaker villages- particularly Canterbury (NH), Hancock (MA), Harvard and Shirley Shaker Villages, and South Union (KY), including experiential research on the grounds of Sabbathday Lake (Maine), Mount Lebanon (NY), and Watervliet (NY). In addition to short essays, Molteni has offered Shaker-related lectures and programs through the American Folk Art Museum (NY), Viktor Wynd Museum/Last Tuesday Society (London), Shannon Taggart’s Lily Dale Symposium (NY), Fruitlands Museum (MA), Nashville Film Festival (TN) to name a few. Until its recent sunset, Molteni served on the board of the Golden Dome School for mystic artists.
For more info related to the film and Molteni’s Shaker research: Unseen Hours: Space Clearing for Spirit Work, the Sacred Sheets film’s accompanying publication, is sold in the ICA Store, as are copies of Boston Art Review’s Fall issue Make Believe which includes an essay co-written by Molteni and Laura Campagna. Read about Shaker and Spiritualist influence found in “Believers” and other recent area exhibitions in Holding a Mirror to Heaven. This June Molteni’s installation, “All Around the Room” will open at Hancock Shaker Village.
Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.
Still From Assembly
Still From Assembly
Assembly follows visionary artist Rashaad Newsome as he transforms a historic military facility into a Black queer utopia, blending art, AI, and performance. Through stunning visuals and deeply personal performances, Assembly captures the transformative power of creativity as a fractured community comes together to find strength, solidarity, and liberation.
Runtime: 99 minutes
Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.
Still from Eno
Following two sold-out screenings, Eno returns to the ICA with three unique presentations of Gary Hustwit’s groundbreaking, Oscar-shortlisted documentary. Working with generative software, Hustwit created a documentary process that produces infinite variations—each with its own archival material, interviews, backstage footage, oblique strategies, and musical numbers—befitting its always experimental subject, Brian Eno. The visionary musician and artist is known for producing music for David Bowie, U2, and Talking Heads, among many others; playing with the glam-rock band Roxy Music; pioneering the genre of ambient music; and releasing more than 40 solo and collaboration albums. The New York Times describes Eno as both “unlike any other portrait of a musician” and “marvelously watchable.”
Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.
Still from Luis Arnías, Bisagras
Still from Curtis Essel, Allumuah
“You do not go where your mother is not.”
Taking its title from the Saidiya Hartman text Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic Slave Route and inspired by a print by the graphic designer Nontsikelelo Mutiti entitled Kusina Mai/ Kusina Mai Futi, a Chivanhu saying warning against being in a foreign land without the necessary support of people that would protect and encourage you, BlackStar Projects presents an evening of short films exploring ancestral connections through time and space. These dynamic filmmakers ask, who are we if not amalgams of the people and the experiences that built us? Food, music, technology, and more work to define our culture, and our culture is what we leave behind. Featuring experimental films by Charlotte Brathwaite, Curtis Essel, Jenn Nkiru, Joseph Douglas Elmhirst, and Luis Arnías.
Post-screening discussion with filmmaker Luis Arnías and Maori Karmael Holmes, Chief Executive and Artistic Officer of BlackStar.
Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.
Sponsored by Wagner Foundation
Pioneering electronic musician/avant garde artist/spiritual explorer/gender revolutionary/cult leader(?) Genesis P-Orridge has been featured in numerous films and videos, but never the full story…until now. In this “authorized” but extremely raw and personal documentary, award-winning director David Charles Rodrigues (Gay Chorus Deep South) documents the final year of P-Orridge’s existence as they grapple with mortality in the final years of their life. Featuring William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Timothy Leary, Alice Genesse (PTV), David J (Bauhaus/Love and Rockets), Nepalese monks, African Witch doctors and a special cameo by her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, plus never before seen archival treasures, performances from COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV. Very few artists lived their art, but Genesis died three times for it.
Presented in partnership with Wicked Queer, Boston’s LGBTQ+ Film Festival.
Please note: gallery admission is not included with ticket.
Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.
The Scramble
Bridge: My Little Friends
Drawing Land
Shepherd Shippington and the Missing Mutts
Sprout
Still from Two One Two
Still from The Queen’s Flowers
Relax during the holiday weekend, and stream family-friendly short films created by kids, for kids, curated by the Boston International Kids Film Festival! The films will be available through the ICA website from Wednesday, November 27 through Sunday, December 1.
Please note there is no on-site Play Date this month. If you are in Seaport, please join us in our Art Lab installation and activity, Courage to Care!
The Scramble (3:03)
Angelina Retodo, United States
A ninja chef goes on a journey to find a rare dragon egg and cook the ultimate omelet. Along the way, she encounters a mysterious stranger who stands in the way of her culinary dream.
Drawing Land (7:40)
Tony Collingwood, United Kingdom
We join an artist as he draws a little character called a Splot. The Splot begins to talk back to the artist as he draws. Soon we are on a journey through the sketchbook searching for the Splot’s special colour, meeting lots of fun characters along the way.
Shepherd Shippington and the Missing Mutts (3:52)
Erim Xolo Cetinel, United States
Upon discovering the dogs of a seaside town mysteriously disappear, it is up to a group of children to rescue their beloved hounds.
Two One Two (4:10)
Shira Avni, Canada
Two One Two, by award-winning filmmaker Shira Avni, combines shimmering clay on glass animation with personal archives in this deeply intimate, experimental animated documentary love letter to motherhood, parenting on the spectrum, and two headed monsters everywhere.
The Queen’s Flowers (11:32)
Ciara Leinaala Lacy, United States
A magical take on a true story, The Queen’s Flowers is an animated short adventure for kids that follows Emma, a native Hawaiian girl in 1915 Honolulu, as she makes a special gift for the last monarch of Hawai`i, Queen Lili`uokalani.
Sprout (9:28)
Carolina Bermúdez, United States
Sprout is a light-hearted 3D animated short created for children. The story follows Sprout, a tiny robot, who quickly becomes overwhelmed by his list of garden tasks that he’s unable to complete. After chaos ensues, misfit animals turned friends offer support, and Sprout learns that it’s ok to accept help from others. Together, Sprout and his new friends accomplish all of their tasks in the garden through teamwork.
Bridge: My Little Friends (9:30)
Kazuyuki Ishihara, Japan
‘I’ll take you to see Shiro. That’s a promise!” Jin, a cat, promised Mugi, who was saddened by the loss of his beloved dog Shiro. Jin, who loves Mugi, heard an anecdote about the “Rainbow Bridge” from his owner, Kageyama, and decided to take Mugi to see Shiro at the foot of the rainbow! Will Jin be able to save Mugi from his grief? Jin invites the pigeons and squirrels in the neighborhood to join him on his grand mission!
Filmmakers Collaborative:
Founded in 1987, Filmmakers Collaborative is a tax-exempt organization that provides low-cost fiscal sponsorship to independent media makers. It is now the grantee of record for thousands of media projects across the country. Our mission is to sponsor and support the independent media community through fiscal sponsorship as well as offering programming opportunities that bring people together for learning and networking. Filmmakers Collaborative not only offers fiscal sponsorship but also actively engages with youth through our dynamic programs, including the Boston International Kids Film Festival and FC Academy, our year-round student filmmaking program. We believe every child has a unique story to share and provide them with a supportive platform to explore their creativity and find their voice through the art of filmmaking.
The Boston International Kids Film Festival (BIKFF):
The Boston International Kids Film Festival highlights the talent of independent filmmakers everywhere while inspiring young people to share their own stories with the world. Filmmakers Collaborative created the BIKFF in 2013 with a goal of showing kids that making a film can be a powerful way to tell a story, express your emotions, state a point of view and (more importantly) to have fun! By screening amazing student-made films from around the world while at the same time offering these young filmmakers a look at professionally-made films created just for them, we are enabling the next generation of filmmakers to realize the power and potential of media. Join us on November 22—24, 2024 to celebrate the 12th annual Boston International Kids Film Festival!
Questions? Reach us at familyprograms@icaboston.org.
Your support helps keeps programs like this – both virtual and in-person – free and accessible. If you are able, please consider becoming a member or making a one-time gift to support the ICA.