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Prismatic Ground 2026: Windows and Thresholds
I Heard That They Are Not Going to See Each Other Anymore In its sixth year, New York City’s Prismatic Ground festival doesn’t show any signs of rote predictability. Founder and programmer Inney Prakash has used the festival, which most recently took place from April 29 through May 3, to foreground global voices in the contemporary avant-garde. He likens his curatorial process to “conducting a piece of music or slaloming down a mountain,” but otherwise prefers to let the viewer parse threads and connections between the films he programs across four separate waves. It’s a galvanizing approach towards curation that remains surprising, generative, and ultimately grounding in a tumultuous moment for the democratizing power of the moving image.
Opening the festival with a buoyant, even insouciant flourish, I Heard That They Are Not Going to See Each Other Anymore is Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Ka Ki’s feature debut. Building off the metatextual whimsy of her shorts, including A Shrimp’s Daily Rehearsal (which also screened in this year’s Prismatic Ground), Wong follows the travails of two pairs of lovers: a filmmaker (Tao) whose volatile relationship with her boyfriend (Shin) is documented (or perhaps recreated) in copious amounts of footage, and a Turkish vendor (Mehli) whose perpetual melancholy attracts him to a kindred spirit (Ping).
Wong’s methodology of improvisation during production imbues the film’s slippery nature with alternately iterative and wayward momentum. At its best, Wong mixes the generic signatures of neorealism, silent comedy, and essay film into an unapologetically distinct meditation on the moving image’s transfiguration of intimacy and pain. Yet its flashes of poignant reflexivity are overwhelmed by digressions which feel more like affectations than developments of the central themes. The cosmopolitanism of Taipei, for example, is granted the most rudimentary corollary with Mehli’s exilic identity. The parting impression is ultimately of a filmmaker whose confidence in their creative process yields promise for their future features.
Another feature debut, Isabelle Kalandar’s Another Birth, remains squarely fixed within the more conventional selections of the festival, which is not necessarily a slight against the film’s thematic ambitions. Set in a small village in Tajikistan, the film follows Parastu (Shukrona Navruzbekova), a young girl whose grandfather is dying, she believes, of a broken heart from not seeing his son. Parastu embarks on a quest to save her grandfather, but the journey eventually shifts toward locating the father who broke the heart of her mother, played by Kalandar herself.
Another Birth freely intersperses the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad alongside the mythic figure of Pari to privilege a decidedly feminist historiography, one where girls and women contend with the emotional violence of absent men. What separates Kalandar’s work from rampant miserablism is her keen eye for earthy poeticism, situating her characters against the land in service to her own strain of terrestrial verses. The second in a planned trilogy, Another Birth carefully treads a skein of tragedy that culminates in a tantalizingly ambiguous denouement, one that sees its magical realist gambit through to quietly moving ends.
The beguiling quality of Prismatic Ground’s repertory slate is how several of these rediscovered films operate as both time capsules and gestures towards alternative futures. Case in point, the Iraqi-Lebanese-American filmmaker Parine Jaddo’s trilogy of shorts, made between the aftermath of the First Gulf War and the months leading up to the second, have their historical context nested within counter-hegemonic narratives concerning women and the construction of their images within and beyond an Orientalist gaze.
Thirst (1995), the first in the trilogy, observes a woman reading Mohammed Mrabet’s short story “The Big Mirror,” contrasting the tale’s illicit sensationalism with the quotidian glimpses of life in post-war Lebanon. Surviving (1998) marks a geographical shift to the United States, which informs the remainder of the trilogy while deepening its questions of subjectivity as a young woman makes a pseudo-documentary about her cousin and the American men who have fetishized her. Astray (produced in 2002 but screened for the first time at Prismatic Ground) narrows the trilogy’s focus to claustrophobic ends as a woman contends with questions of belonging following the September 11 attacks. It’s in the closing passages of this final film that Jaddo poignantly summarizes her position as an artist: “I may get lost in this world, but I refuse to lose myself there.”
Kevin B. Lee’s Afterlives picks up the thread of Orientalist othering in Parine Jaddo’s work to mount his own exploration of the ways violence circulates across digital media. Utilizing his signature desktop documentary format, Lee hopscotches across various interviews with scholars and archivists responding to the destruction wrought by ISIS on cultural artifacts. Not content to settle for a simplistic binary between reconstruction and annihilation, Lee’s interests expand more broadly to interrogate cycles of sectarian violence—and whether a cycle of exploitation can ever be broken.
Lee’s film is striking in the way it deftly employs multiple onscreen images, which contend with the psychic and sociopolitical weight of violent media in constant circulation. Behind one specialist who reviews ISIS execution videos is a poster featuring the recognizable visage of Werner Herzog, and Lee indeed channels a Herzogian clinicism without sacrificing his own deeply personal positionality as a consumer of these brutal images. The resulting film is a formally dexterous, resolutely humane riposte to the atomization of our species vis-a-vis our own digitized creations.
If the mournful yet quietly hopeful fervor of Lee’s film offers a glimmer of redemption for digital media, Isiah Medina’s Gangsterism barrels headfirst into that angst with a furious elasticity unmatched by anything else I saw out of Prismatic Ground this year. This film about filmmaking consists of fragmented conversations between a Canadian-Filipino filmmaker (Mark Bacolcol) and his crew on economics, colonialism, and criticism. Medina’s recognizable, mathematically-inflected array of rapid cuts are exhilarating and exasperating in equal measure, gesturing to both the immensity of cinema’s possibilities and the dearth of information overwhelming our synaptic processes.
Comparisons to Godard’s La Chinoise and Hollis Frampton’s work are all in order here, and Medina runs the risk of stitching his citations together like the patchwork of a familiar quilt. What saves Gangsterism—or what makes it such an oddly vivifying watch—is its fierce conviction in the relevance of the medium in this fraught moment. Neither romantic nor despairing, the film instead offers a trial by fire, literalized in the final moments that cheekily end on a title card reading “Intermission.” It’s a pause, Medina seems to suggest, that’s sorely needed for us to take stock of how redeeming our vocation is inseparable from salvaging the best qualities of a dying empire.
