Prismatic Ground is a New York City film festival centered on experimental documentary and avant-garde film, co-hosted by Maysles Documentary Center and media partner Screen Slate. 2022 marks the second ever and first hybrid edition of the festival, with physical events taking place at Maysles, the Museum of the Moving Image, and Anthology Film Archives. The majority of films will simultaneously be available free, worldwide on-demand during the festival dates at http://www.prismaticground.com. New Yorkers are encouraged to attend in person; each program will feature live filmmaker Q&As.

Note: “wave” tickets are purchased as a whole, but patrons are free to come and go during the noted breaks. Once sold out, a limited number of tickets for each program will be available on a first-come basis at the door, and seats that are vacated after breaks will be re-sold. All “waves” screen at Maysles Documentary Center.

wave 4: open sky / open sea / open ground is screening in the cinema on 5/6 for $15/$7 reduced. 

cielo abierto / mar abierto / suelo abierto (Libertad Gills, Martín Baus, 4 min.)

From a point of view-listening that is both animal and elemental, between the air, the ocean and the sand, relationships emerge between humans, birds and marine life.

Notes From the Periphery (Tulapop Saenjaroen, 14 min.)

Mainly shot in the peripheral areas of the ever-expanding Laem Chabang port in Chon Buri, Thailand, Notes from the Periphery interrogates the notion of territoriality, globalized networks, and ownership through fragmented relations of the affected sites and communities nearby, shipping containers that become a policing tool against protest in Bangkok, and the life cycle of a barnacle.

Canada Park (Razan AlSalah, 8 min.)

I walk on snow to fall unto the desert. I find myself on unceded indigenous territory in so called Canada, an exile unable to return to Palestine. I trespass the colonial border as a digital spectre floating through Ayalon-Canada Park, transplanted over three Palestinian villages razed by the Israeli Occupation Forces in 1967. 

Golden Jubilee (Suneil Sanzgiri, 19 min.)

Takes as its starting point scenes of the filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India— created using the same technologies of surveillance that mining companies use to map locations for iron ore in the region. 

Lida (Lev Omelchenko, 50 min.)

Lev documents his grandmother as she tends to the small homestead and prepares for the birthday celebration in the rural village in Ukraine.