Binghamton University students in the Cinema 545: Curating Film and Video course held their annual Student Experimental Film Festival, themed “Dwellings,” at the Bundy Museum of History and Art on Friday.

The international film festival was built around the literal and metaphorical examination of what can be considered a “dwelling,” embodying themes of displacement, familiarity and memory, highlighting the physical and emotional tokens that people hold close to themselves.

“Over the course of the first couple months of the semester we plan the festival from financial, logistic, and creative perspectives,” Theo Poulin, a member of the executive team and a sophomore majoring in cinema, wrote in an email. “A number of the members of our creative team pitched different themes and by voting and combining ideas we liked we arrived at the theme of Dwellings.”

With more than 140 submissions spanning over 39 countries, 17 short films were selected for the festival and curated into three subgroups: “Arrival,” “Stasis” and “Return.” SEFF began with remarks from members of the executive team and students whose work was featured in the final curation.

Benjamin Stone ‘12, a co-curator and a second-year graduate student studying cinema, expanded on the various interpretations of the theme, prepping the audience for the kind of work displayed in the upcoming programs.

“‘Dwellings,’ both physical and intangible, is about the lived and felt experiences that we all carry every day in our psyche and our bones,” Stone said. “It is a constant revisiting and reconciling — what was familiar and important, spaces, textures, sounds that have become alien to us now. I think about this often, replaying and projecting moments onto these places. The films we have curated for you tonight explore and reckon with these circumstances — these psychological distances contained in physical closeness.”

Showcasing a variety of different cultures and languages, including Spanish, Farsi and Malay, “Arrival” ruminated on the concept of a new beginning.

Voiced over in Farsi and including English subtitles, Nastaran Bagheri’s “On (Non)Dwelling” unpacked feelings of dislocation and the mourning of a distant home. The film featured a montage of clips set in Buffalo, New York, on a rainy, overcast day, with an emphasis on desolate locations and natural scenery. “On (Non)Dwelling” was heavily dominated by the speaker’s voice as the mundanity of her setting faded into the background of the film.

Striking lines such as “I feel as though I carry a city within another” immersed the audience in a quiet, yet powerful longing.

The film was followed by Mahda Purmehdi’s “Noli me tangere,” Adam Taufiq Suharto’s “Kuala Lain (‘The Other Kuala’),” José J. Martinez’s “Los pájaros y yo (‘The birds and I’),” Alex Guerra’s “Palo Santo” and “four of cups” by Nicholas Friedlander, a sophomore majoring in computer science.

Katie Kirkland, assistant professor of cinema at the University, facilitated an artist talk with Bagheri and Friedlander, allotting time for audience members to ask the filmmakers any remaining questions about their work.

Kirkland asked the filmmakers to speak to their use of tension and the sublime in both of their films.

“I think the tension you mentioned in my film comes from the sense of displacement,” Bagheri said. “And being engaged with the perspective of someone coming to a new place and experiencing a new environment that might be very, very different from their previous place of living. And I believe, in my field, there is a parallel comparison to some sort of psychogeographic to understand what is the city doing to you, how you can relate to it and how challenging it might be to have some sort of attachment to it because it takes time to create your own memories and your own encoding on the places you always visit.”

“And I think that, from that tension, that struggle that is happening in the first half of the film, there’s a shift into the idea of sublime, something that’s beyond you, something that’s more abstract,” she continued. “And it’s some sort of breeze when you are not seeing something that comes with the idea of modern life, living in the modern city, traveling and other journeys, but you come to see the presence of nature.”

Monarch, the band was then invited to the stage, performing classic songs like “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac and “Just the Two of Us” by Bill Withers and Grover Washington Jr. and transforming the covers with their soulful voices and psychedelic elements.

Sonny Stellmann, a member of the outreach team and a junior majoring in cinema, discussed the process their class used when selecting this year’s theme.

“Before we collectively decided on a theme for this year’s festival, we as a class took a trip to the Binghamton University Art Museum (BUAM) to see the exhibit ‘In the American Grain: Exploring America through Art, 1919-1946’ curated by Tom McDonough,” Stellmann wrote in an email. “He gave us insight on his curatorial process and some advice when it came to our own installations: ideally, you start with picking the pieces you want to put on display first, then you find a common theme connecting them together — not the other way around.”

“Stasis,” which was dominated by depictions of the transformation of psychological perceptions in physical spaces, opened with Lin Salillas’ “prison of the muse.”

The film featured a young woman in an all white room, void of any definition or markers of space. She repeatedly wakes up, begins an art piece and upon completion, the screen flashes red. Along with the eerie film score, “prison of the muse” uses horror and gore to demonstrate the struggle between conformity and individuality in creative spaces.

Following the theme of psychological prisons, Autumn Vesper’s “missed call (1)” visualizes what depression looks and feels like in young adults. The film shows various activities of a subject completing tasks such as painting their nails and doing tarot card readings in bed, as a voicemail from them to a friend details how their emotional state affects their relationships, behaviors and everyday life.

The last program, “Return,” focuses on how a shift in what defines “home” causes the self to adapt.

Mahdokt Molaei’s “Homa” discusses the difficulty and stress of motherhood and the complex relationship between mother and daughter. The film is grounded in passionate dialogue, acting and a yellow hue that seems to reflect the intensity of the scenes.

A raffle for a basket of goods from Tom’s Coffee Cards & Gifts, a local gift shop, was open for audience members to participate in and SEFF merchandise was available for purchase, alongside complementary snacks.

“The films we selected show a diverse range of experimental techniques and inspiration,” Stone wrote. “Hand processed film, stop-motion animation, durational editing, and more are all aesthetically represented. These formal decisions are also applied to the use of mixed media, surrealistic tendencies, diary film, and inner monologue. So I’d refine that by saying the formal approaches taken by these selected films visually, aesthetically, and sonically come from the historical avant-garde with a modern curiosity to continue expressing in unconventional methods.”