GRRL HAUS CINEMA : On Healing

GRRL HAUS CINEMA : On Healing

Open Air Screening – August 28th – 8pm – Beach Neukölln @ Berliner Berg Brauerei,

Hosted in partnership with Mobile Kino

A curation of short films exploring the powerful process of healing after personal
loss, political devastation, emotional collapse, cultural erasure, or
transformation. A space for tenderness and transformation, and the quiet
strength of simply continuing.

GRRL HAUS CINEMA, is a Nonprofit film festival, screening series, and
collective dedicated to promoting the works of women, trans, non-binary, and
genderqueer filmmakers in the realms of experimental, low-budget, and
underground cinema. Our emphasis on low budget and DIY culture creates a
space for underrepresented voices in cinema to be heard by promoting creativity
and diversity of expression through film.

www.grrlhauscinema.com

Instagram
Nonprofit : @grrlhauscinema
Berlin Collective : @grrlhausberlin

Featuring Films:
Saturn Risin9 : Tiare Ribeaux, Jody Stillwater
10:16, Documentary, Experimental

Queer performance artist and musician Saturn Risin9 returns home to the Bay
Area to share their journey of perseverance centering self discovery, healing and
creative expansion poetically told through dance, visual narrative, performance,
and documentary.

Saturn Risin9 aims to present healing from that trauma to rise up from both
environmental and systemic racism, to find transcendence and empowerment,
and imagine a world beyond equality. Pulling from Saturn’s real life and
philosophies, we discussed together how to tell this story poetically through
imagery and metaphor. Our DP called it a “dreamumentary” which we think is
the closest description.

The film begins and ends near Heron’s Head Park, at the edge of San Francisco,
right next to one of the most toxic Superfund Sites in the city, Hunter’s Point

Shipyard. The nuclear weapons testing at Bikini Atoll in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean in the 1940s and 50s that sickened and displaced Marshallese
populations were linked to the ships out testing these weapons that came back
to Hunter’s Point with radioactive debris. Their journey through this space, a
case of environmental racism in a historically Black neighborhood, extends to
their own personal struggles while living under systemic racism, as a queer,
femme, black and trans-identifying person.

The urgency of this film lies in the overt systemic failures around displacement
and tied to water issues that continue to this day, especially in Black, Indigenous
and Pasifika communities. This film highlights Saturn both as a storyteller in
many different forms (word, dance, music) and as a protagonist through a
character driven story of perseverance, transformation, transcendence and
queer joy. Intended to be a never ending well of visual and lyrical affirmations;
we visualize a mirroring of love between the work and the human beings that
brought it to life.

Tiare Ribeaux is a Kānaka ‘Ōiwi filmmaker based in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Her films
disrupt conventional storytelling methods by employing magical realist
explorations of spirituality, labor, and the environment to critique both social and
ecological imbalances. Her films use components of speculative fiction and
fantasy to reimagine both our present realities and future trajectories of healing,
queerness, lineage, and belonging. Ribeaux’s work traverses between the
mundane and dreamworlds – creating stories around transformation and how
our bodies are inextricably linked to land and water systems. She integrates
immersion within community, personal/ancestral narratives, and Hawaiian
cosmology into her films.

She has shown work both nationally and internationally, and has won numerous
grants and awards for her artistic leadership including the Creative Capital
Award, the NDN Radical Imagination Grant, the Native Lab Fellowship and
Indigenous Film Fund from Sundance, two New and Experimental Works Grants
from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Building Demand for the Arts Grant
from the Doris Duke Foundation, and the Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund, among
others.

Jody Stillwater 周青海 is a writer, director and creative technologist from the
San Francisco Bay Area. His film and interdisciplinary project themes are based
in dream logic and tactile reality, with a modern/transforming approach to visual semiotics & archetype, grounded in Eastern rhizomatic systems and Western classical narrative. His cultural background as a Chinese/Norwegian/Cherokee-American amidst colliding waves of post-temporal diaspora and arhythmic, intertidal class structures has influenced a value of justice, representation and the ethereal, and allowed him to express these values in experimental film, immersive installation and narrative cinema. He has screened his films at the Marfa Film Festival, Choreoscope Int’l Dance Film Festival in Barcelona, Rockefeller’s Imagine Science Film Festival, Denver Film Festival, Bucharest Int’l Dance Film Festival, directed films for Meta/Facebook, Google, Knotel, Bentley Mills, Tribeca Film Festival Hacks Lab (incorporating film + technology), the San Francisco Dance Film Festival Co-Lab (built around choreography + film), appeared as a featured guest on Asian Pacific America on NBC and was selected as the featured film artist at APAture 2018.

Oríkì Oshun : Elena Herminia Guzman
14:55, Experimental
Oríkì Oshun is an experimental short film that honors the Orisha Oshun, a central
figure in Yoruba cosmology and spirituality. Rooted in the Yoruba tradition of
oríkì—a performative act of praise that invokes the essence, attributes, and
destiny of a person, place, or deity—this film reimagines the possibilities of
storytelling through a multisensory, synesthetic cinematic experience. Through a
series of interconnected vignettes, Oríkì Oshun weaves together sacred stories
(pataki) that reveal the multidimensionality of Oshun. While often celebrated as
the Orisha of beauty, love, and wealth, this film ventures beyond these familiar
portrayals, offering a deeper and more complex vision of Oshun’s identity. It
explores her sacrifices, her struggles, her resilience, and her transformation into
a fierce warrior. By blending traditional Yoruba performance aesthetics with
experimental film techniques, Oríkì Oshun creates a polyrhythmic and immersive
space where sound, image, and movement converge to honor the sacred. This
project is not just a celebration of Oshun but a meditation on the power of
storytelling to expand our understanding of divine multiplicity, human
imperfection, and sacred possibility.

Elena Herminia Guzman is an Afro-Boricua director and producer raised in the
Bronx with deep roots in the LES. As an educator, she teaches feminist
filmmaking, Black cinema, production, and visual anthropology. Her work as a
filmmaker has been supported by PBS, Black Public Media, the Independent

Public Media Foundation, and the Scribe Foundation amongst others. She is the
director and producer of the film Smile4Kime (2023), a short experimental hybrid
documentary that uses animation and live-action footage to tell the stories of
how two friends transcend, time, space, and even death to find that their
friendship lives on. The film received an honorable mention for the Jean Rouch
Award at the Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival and was nominated
for the LOLA Shorts Award at the Philadelphia Latino Film Festival. Smile4Kime
had its international broadcast premiere on AfroPop, PBS. She is also producing
a docuseries called Conjure that explores the traditions of African American
Hoodoo in the United States. She is a co-founder of Ethnocine Collective, a
member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, and a producer for the podcast Bad
Feminists Making Films.

Be Here Now : Lauren R Melton, Chichi Castillo
21:22, Drama, Comedy

Upon their return to their hometown, Celeste (20s-30s, they/them) listens to
voicemails from their Mom Edie (she/her, 50s-60s) who wishes Celeste well on
their upcoming art exhibit but acknowledges how hard it has been to reach
them. They want to keep their head down and stay low-key enough to not see
anyone from their past, but their former best friend and ride for the evening,
Henri (20s-30s, they/them), makes a well meaning but not-so-wise decision to
take Celeste to a party.

At the party, Celeste runs into various characters from their past, including their
former band mate Jackie (20s-30s, they/them), ethereal party girl Pony (20s-30s,
she/her), and their ex lover Louise.
When Henri’s car is stolen, Celeste, Henri, Jackie, and Pony journey through the
night as Celeste ultimately must confront the grief of losing their Mother.

Taking cues from irreverent queer 1990s/2000s aesthetics and teen comedy-
dramas, Be Here Now meditates on loss, connection, and friendship through a

DIY punk & femme lens.
Be Here Now is a proud recipient of the STARZ #TakeTheLead completion fund
and Berkeley Film Foundation’s Saul Zaentz Award.
The Abyss : Virag Pazmany, C.A. Cooper

9:33, Art House, Experimental

“The Abyss” takes an experimental approach to visual narrative, exploring one
woman’s reality, subconscious, and the blurred realm in-between.

“The Abyss” was based on my own grief following the sudden death of my
mother last year and so the journey making this film has definitely been an
emotionally challenging, but therapeutic experience. I believe that as a creator,
when you create something, you should take risks and so we set out to create
something powerful and immersive that follows a purely visual narrative,
blending the familiar and mundane with the highly abstract.

Virag Pazmany is a London-based Hungarian visual artist. Her artistic language
always focuses on innovative communication through visual design. Her talent
for innovation is something she always brings to her personal and collaborative
projects.

She has a broad range of experience; her roles have included working as a
scenographer for the Hungarian State Opera and MÜPA in Budapest, and as a
production designer for award-winning film productions. Currently, she is highly
active in the field of video arts and visual effects; her recent credits include
productions for Netflix, Disney and the BBC.

C.A. Cooper started in the camera department, training at Panavision and
freelancing as a cinematographer across multiple independent films whilst also
assisting in a technical capacity on several studio features.

He wrote, directed and produced his first feature film “THE SNARE”, which was
released theatrically across select US cinemas in Jan 2017, followed by a
successful multiplatform release across DVD and Video-On-Demand.
Since “THE SNARE”, Cooper has been collaborating with screenwriters to
develop a slate of feature length projects with a focus on bold, innovative and
boundary pushing content. He also has a slate of four short films planned for
2023, two of which have already been shot and are currently in post-production.