Currents
Currents Program 1: The Hidden Dimension
Yixuan Zhang, Josh Weissbach, Natalia Marín, Jamie Crewe, Tatsu Aoki
This program includes the world premiere of Yixuan Zhang’s Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness, the world premiere of Josh Weissbach and Ben Balcom’s A Correspondence, Natalia Marín’s Chronicle of Tiredness, the world premiere of Jamie Crewe’s Rebecca’s Mess, and Tatsu Aoki’s Harmony.
- Runtime
- 64 min
- Country
- U.S./
China/ Spain/ U.K. - Language
- English,
Spanish - More information
- Official film page
Screenings
Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness
Yixuan Zhang, 2026, U.S./China, 3D, 15m
World Premiere
Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness. © 2026 Yixuan Zhang.
A garden path, a billiards room, a solarium, a parlor—historical photographs of these shadowy scenes and spectral atmospheres are subject to strange and subtle transformations in Yixuan Zhang’s evocative stereoscopic film, which explores the uncanny space-time and illusions of depths hidden within the two-dimensional surface of the screen.
A Correspondence
Josh Weissbach, Ben Balcom, 2026, U.S., 8m
World Premiere
A Correspondence
The title of Ben Balcom and Josh Weissbach’s collaborative film suggests both the form of letter-writing and the act of making meaning. Cryptic voices and ghostly images accumulate and collide in eerie soft focus and fleeting alternations of light and shadow, as noise steadily coalesces into a signal.
Chronicle of Tiredness / Crónica del cansancio
Natalia Marín, 2026, Spain, 21m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Chronicle of Tiredness
The audio track mixes sounds of toil with dialogues compiling a history of housing precarity in the filmmaker’s native Spain. As long lateral pans materialize the foundations of the modern housing crisis—land, labor, bureaucracy—and are interrupted with one numbing, repetitive fixed-camera setup, Natalia Marín unfurls a structuralist cri de coeur for a generation running to stand still.
Rebecca’s Mess
Jamie Crewe, 2026, U.K., 10m
World Premiere
Rebecca’s Mess
Fluttering forms and buzzing shards of light conjure a grimy monochrome world in Rebecca’s Mess. Punctuated by eruptions of pixelation, apologetic text, and jump-scare abstractions, Jamie Crewe’s tense and sinister work creates a hybrid organic-electric space in which lurking dolls peer out at the spectator from a haze of cursed video.
Harmony
Tatsu Aoki, 1991, U.S., 16mm, 10m
New York Premiere of Restoration
Harmony
To make Harmony—newly restored by the Chicago Film Society—Tatsu Aoki gathered 16mm footage of pedestrians in Chicago’s Loop, and assembled it into as many as 32 layers of superimposition. As striding business-casual slacks and summer dresses effulge into a blur, a formal pattern as rigorous as the urban grid becomes overwhelmed by the vibrating tactility of teeming humanity.
Preserved by Chicago Film Society through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness
Yixuan Zhang, 2026, U.S./China, 3D, 15m
World Premiere
Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness. © 2026 Yixuan Zhang.
A garden path, a billiards room, a solarium, a parlor—historical photographs of these shadowy scenes and spectral atmospheres are subject to strange and subtle transformations in Yixuan Zhang’s evocative stereoscopic film, which explores the uncanny space-time and illusions of depths hidden within the two-dimensional surface of the screen.
A Correspondence
Josh Weissbach, Ben Balcom, 2026, U.S., 8m
World Premiere
A Correspondence
The title of Ben Balcom and Josh Weissbach’s collaborative film suggests both the form of letter-writing and the act of making meaning. Cryptic voices and ghostly images accumulate and collide in eerie soft focus and fleeting alternations of light and shadow, as noise steadily coalesces into a signal.
Chronicle of Tiredness / Crónica del cansancio
Natalia Marín, 2026, Spain, 21m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Chronicle of Tiredness
The audio track mixes sounds of toil with dialogues compiling a history of housing precarity in the filmmaker’s native Spain. As long lateral pans materialize the foundations of the modern housing crisis—land, labor, bureaucracy—and are interrupted with one numbing, repetitive fixed-camera setup, Natalia Marín unfurls a structuralist cri de coeur for a generation running to stand still.
Rebecca’s Mess
Jamie Crewe, 2026, U.K., 10m
World Premiere
Rebecca’s Mess
Fluttering forms and buzzing shards of light conjure a grimy monochrome world in Rebecca’s Mess. Punctuated by eruptions of pixelation, apologetic text, and jump-scare abstractions, Jamie Crewe’s tense and sinister work creates a hybrid organic-electric space in which lurking dolls peer out at the spectator from a haze of cursed video.
Harmony
Tatsu Aoki, 1991, U.S., 16mm, 10m
New York Premiere of Restoration
Harmony
To make Harmony—newly restored by the Chicago Film Society—Tatsu Aoki gathered 16mm footage of pedestrians in Chicago’s Loop, and assembled it into as many as 32 layers of superimposition. As striding business-casual slacks and summer dresses effulge into a blur, a formal pattern as rigorous as the urban grid becomes overwhelmed by the vibrating tactility of teeming humanity.
Preserved by Chicago Film Society through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.