Genres: docufiction

  • Shadow Nettes

    The Shadow Nette is a traditional fishing device that projects the silhouette of the fisherman. The “fishr” assumes archetypal (and secret) poses of virility that display their strength and ability. It is these projections that attract the innocent prey, drawing them close to be captured in nets. “Shadow Nettes” is a 17.25 minute film that follows one Shadow Nette Fisherman as he attempts to teach the operation of the device to his teenage son. The film crew were given special permission to track the fishing family and witness the strange rituals, capturing them on film for the first time. Some…

  • RETRODREAMING

    “Retrodreaming” examines the common phenomenon of ghostly, abandoned schools due to demographic change in the countryside of Japan. Empty schools in deserted villages tell their own story – whether during the pandemic, after a nuclear catastrophe, or just due to depopulation. The film references the Japanese tradition of telling “Kaidan “(ghost stories/scary stories) and the multiple school-themed “Kaidan” (Gakkō no Kaidan, Japanese for “Scary School Story”) in Japanese mainstream culture, which encompass the idea of entities and memories remaining in these architectures. The film focuses on the visual quality of the Showa-era architecture of the abandoned Sawada School in Nakanojo.…

  • Another Europe

    An essay film rooted in experimental cinema and queer storytelling. A female narrator (fellow artist Kathi Hofer) provides the voice over for this film, making it a reflection on my life and my journey through Europe from 2019-2020. Associative spaces unfold. A train of thoughts. The boundaries between factual and memories become a blur. How much of my personal story can be read more globally? Visual portraits of Europe’s faraway places away from typical tourist hot spots provide the mise en scène for this film. Landscapes in transition, pictures of movement, visually resembling the long journeys I have undertaken using…

  • the_other_images

    A hard drive, 2.8 terabyte leftover data from a project that was shot 10 years ago. In 2008, the author and filmmaker Iris Blauensteiner made her first short movie. Now she sifts through this waste material: outtake scenes, photographs, sound files, e-mails, script passages, discarded ideas. This data was archived and well stored, but time has taken its toll. Old data formats cannot be played anymore because they are no longer compatible with current players. The multitude of read errors and image distortions disallow a comfortable recollection of the past, the pictures and sounds are not what they used to…

  • Minus Twenty

    A cold storage worker’s job follows him around.

  • Sightings

    During my childhood I spent countless hours daydreaming. Often about boarding an alien spacecraft where they would ask me about life on Earth. I would enthusiastically tell them my thoughts and observations about this or that, which the space aliens always seemed to find interesting. In retrospect I was engaging in a transference of my frustration that no one on this planet seemed particularly interested in my opinions. At that time, I was a voracious reader of science fiction novels, in particular Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov. After watching Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” I was certain…

  • Boys of My Youth

    Through eerie iPhone photographs of empty high school hallways and dimly lit locker rooms, an unknown narrator reflects on his teenage sexual repression.

  • seeds are meant to disperse

    seeds are meant to disperse (2015-ongoing) is an ongoing project where I grow, save and share seeds. Seeds take time to grow, to harvest, to prepare, and to share—an act that I see as gift as much as necessity and survival. As such, the seeds are offered as trade or gift, in an attempt to encourage and support alternative systems of exchange. As the seeds are gifted and grown they are meant to help others imagine building a world different from the trajectory it is currently on. As an ongoing and forever growing project, I continue to adapt and rethink…

  • connecting thru grasses

    Looking to prairie grass ecosystems, as well as the technologies that map and reflect the diminishing biome, connecting thru grasses considers how we might both map and define prairie boundaries anew. Considering how satellites passing overhead reflect an image of the earth (and thus of ourselves) back to us, and how these images shape or mis-shape our understanding of the land and our relationship to it, the work looks closer at TERRA, a research satellite that has circled the earth since 1999 constructing images for use in the monitoring of environmental and climate data. http://cbattle.com/connecting-thru-grasses/

  • the air we breathe

    the air we breathe is an experimental documentary that thinks through the complexities of air pollution by weaving together themes of environmental catastrophe, environmental racism, cultural and political shifts, and conspiracy. Combining research into air pollution along with personal storytelling and speculative imaginings, this project deeply considers the complicated ways in which our air impacts us: from the way that smells travel through it and the memories they evoke; to the physical impacts of pollutants through shared inhalation; to the ways in which the air serves as a metaphor of connection in a cultural sense.