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 9: in the prison of his days / teach the free man how to praise is screening in the cinema on 5/7 for $15/$7 reduced. 

Hei'er (Yehui Zhao, 21 min.)

The filmmaker and a mannequin explore the world through its solar terms. 

Configurations  (in person only, 16mm) (James Edmonds, 9 min.)

The little personal myths and structures we set up to aid the survival of the psyche in times of low harvest. 

Looking Backward (Ben Balcom, 10 min.)

Filmed on the former grounds of Black Mountain College, Looking Backward is a brief elegy to the legacy of a utopian college and other impossible projects.

Maman Brigitte (16mm) (Ayanna Dozier, 3 min.)

Maman Brigitte stitches together the intimacy of a private manifestation Hoodoo vevue of Maman Brigitte (the barrier between the living and the dead) with the aurality of the body (spitting, running, vomiting, etc.). These “interior” corporeal practices are juxtaposed against sweeping landscapes to draw out film/ritual’s capacity to manifest.

Attic Windows of the Infinite (Sapphire Rachael Goss, 31 min.)

"A little later a thousand hungry eyes are bending over the peepholes of the stereoscope as though they were the attic windows of the infinite..." - Baudelaire, On Photography, 1859

BREAK

5PM

If From Every Tongue it Drips (Sharlene Bamboat, 68 min.)

If from Every Tongue It Drips explores questions of distance and proximity, identity and otherness, through scenes from the daily interactions between two women—a poet and a cameraperson.