Thursday, 10/17
7:00pm doors / 7:30pm show
$10. NOTAFLOF

OCCULT AESTHETICS
feat. Pia Borg, Alex Familian, Riar Rizaldi, and Danielle Wakin

Dearest Ghouls and Goblins,

We’re excited to announce our October program, OCCULT AESTHETICS. Join us for an evening of ghost hunting, Satanic Panic, and journeys into the underworld.

Featuring work by Pia Borg, Alex Familian, Riar Rizaldi, and Danielle Wakin, this month’s program highlights films in which the image-making process itself is occult(ed), uncanny, and/or haunted. Using a wide array of formal strategies, our filmmakers explore the generative possibilities of cinematic liminal space.

Summon your demons. Dig up the dead. Come party with us.

Join us on Thursday, October 17th at Coaxial Arts. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the artists and frightfully festive snacks and drinks!

The Program

Mr. Chihuahua Presents: The Backrooms | Alex Familian
A chihuahua’s fate takes a tragic turn when he unexpectedly falls into a sinkhole and awakens to find himself inside a nightmarish maze of office backrooms haunted by a malevolent force. Things only get weirder when he finds…a bag of Taco Bell.

Ghost Like Us | Riar Rizaldi
Revisiting the Indonesian horror/exploitation films of the 80s and 90s that he loved as a teenager, Riar Rizaldi examines the ways in which these films – shown outside of the theatre and other formal spaces of the film industry – constitute a ‘cinematic elsewhere’.

Hymn to Demeter | Danielle Wakin
Reflecting on the descent into the elusive liminal space—a katabasis. Propelled through the intricate anatomy of a creature, yearning for the moment of resurfacing, gasping for air.

Demonic | Pia Borg
During the 1980s, claims of satanic ritual abuse ran rife throughout the western world, uncovered by hypnotic therapists and perpetuated throughout the media, including high-rating television talk shows. In Demonic, filmmaker Pia Borg delves into this bizarre chapter of history, examining the elusive line between fact, fiction and the persuasive power of the media.

The Filmmakers

Pia Borg is a Maltese/Australian filmmaker. Her non-fiction films that chronicle historical events and psychological phenomena have received numerous prizes including the Golden Leopard at Locarno Festival for the documentary Abandoned Goods (2014). Her latest short film, Demonic premiered at the International Critics’ Week, Cannes Film Festival (2019). The film was recently nominated for an Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Award. Her film Silica was installed in the Maltese Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and was awarded prizes at the AFI fest, Ann Arbor, 25 FPS and Tacoma Film Festival. In 2015, she was named as one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film in Filmmaker Magazine. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Macdowell fellowship and a Netflix Nonfiction fellowship. Borg has had solo screenings at REDCAT, Los Angeles, Museum of Moving Image, New York, ICA, London and Cineteca, Mexico City. Her films have shown at festivals around the word, including Sundance, NYFF, London, Oberhausen, Rotterdam, SXSW and many more. Last year her feature film script was awarded the Torino Film lab production award. She joined the faculty of the Experimental Animation faculty at California Institute of the Arts in 2014.

Alex Familian has produced and/or edited films that have premiered at Sundance, SXSW, Slamdance, Fantastic Fest, Tribeca, and Sitges.

In 2023, Alex produced & edited Appendage, which premiered at SXSW. It was released worldwide on Hulu and Disney+ in October 2023-- receiving rave reviews from RogerEbert.com, The Daily Beast, and Screenrant, as well as garnering a featured streaming pick from The New York Times.

In 2024, Alex edited Mr. Crocket, which premiered as the Closing Night Film at Fantastic Fest before its October Hulu and Disney+ release.

His Taco Bell order is a Cheesy Gordita Crunch and a bean and cheese burrito with an overabundance of fire sauce.

He was raised in Las Vegas and currently lives in LA.

Riar Rizaldi works as an artist and filmmaker. He works predominantly with the medium of moving images and sound, both in the black-box of cinema settings as well spatial presentation as installation. His artistic practice focuses mostly on the relationship between technology, labour, and nature, worldviews, genre cinema, and the possibility of theoretical fiction. His works have been shown at various international film festivals (including Locarno, IFFR, FID Marseille, Viennale, BFI London, Cinema du Reel, Vancouver, etc.) as well as Centre Pompidou Paris (2021), Museum of Modern Art (2024), Whitney Biennial (2024), Taipei Biennial (2023), Istanbul Biennial (2023), Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), Biennale Jogja (2021), National Gallery of Indonesia (2019), and other venues and institutions. In addition, recent solo exhibitions and focus programs of his works had been held at Gasworks London (2024), Z33 Hasselt (2024), Centre de la photographie Genève (2023), and Batalha Centro de Cinema Porto (2023) amongst others.

Danielle Wakin is an experimental film & video artist based in Los Angeles. Her work draws inspiration from memory, esotericism, mythology, and psychological states. She holds a BFA in Film & Photography from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Film & Video from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been screened at the San Diego Underground Film Festival, Millennium Workshop Channel, Kinoskop International Festival of Analog Experimental Cinema, Montreal Independent Film Festival, Blum & Poe, and more.

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Mask wearing is highly recommended indoors. N/95, KN/95, surgical masks suggested and provided.