TILT-SHIFT

In September, TILT-SHIFT welcomes filmmaker Matte Hewitt for an advanced screening and discussion of Shimmering (2025), and Flying Jewels (2024). These short, experimental documentaries emerge from years of field work and intensive  research into how US military technology, Indigenous knowledge systems, and local ecology come together in the figure of the hummingbird. 

Indexical welcomes Em Butler, a Social Documentation MFA student in the Film & Digital Media department at UC Santa Cruz. Butler received a BS in Human Biology at UC San Diego, with a minor in Visual Arts. She is a community organizer, writer, and filmmaker from Long Beach, California whose work struggles through the relationships between land, culture, embodied memory, and anti-imperialist movements. Alongside her work, Em will also screen Tsai Ming-liang's The Skywalk is Gone (2002), a mystery that unfolds against the backdrop of Taiwanese urban development. These will be followed by the 1996 short, Blight, which in the words of director John Smith, "revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition."

*POSTPONED - Due to unforeseen circumstances this event has been postponed. We're working to reschedule this event and hope to have an update on that as soon as possible.*

TILT-SHIFT, referring to a pair of interactions between a camera lens and the image plane, is a new film series about moving images and politics. TILT-SHIFT invites guest filmmakers to screen their work alongside a film that helped inspire it, and discuss with audiences how their work connects to longer lineages of radical cinema and anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle.