PART-TIME:
shorts presented by Now Instant Image Hall
Program 1 — Friday, April 10, 7:00 p.m. @ Now Instant Image Hall
Q&A with Madeleine Molyneaux, moderated by filmmaker Dwayne LeBlanc
Program 2 — Saturday, April 11, 5:15 p.m. @ Now Instant Image Hall
Now Instant and the Los Angeles Festival of Movies present PART-TIME, a collection of new moving image works drawn from the worlds of fine art, experimental film, and narrative cinema that impel the structural capacities of the form. 2026’s iteration of PART-TIME features films from Abdellah Taïa, Kim Torres, Neo Sora, Mungo Thomson, Sara Magenheimer, Michael Bell-Smith, Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold, Basma Al-Sharif, Adam Piron, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, and Suneil Sanzgiri. Taken together, the works locate gestures of intimacy that map the inextricable entanglement of private tragedy, political struggle, and the moving image.
PROGRAM 1
Cairo Streets
West Coast Premiere
Director: Abdellah Taïa
France, 19 min, DCP
January 2007. I am back to Cairo. For Work. You have changed your phone number, Omar. I must find you. I love you… Abdellah.
Prior Screenings: Locarno International Film Festival 2025, Toronto International Film Festival 2025, New York Film Festival 2025, Cairo International Film Festival (Youssef Chahine Award) 2025, and others
Screenwriter: Abdellah Taïa
Cinematographer: Abdellah Taïa
Sound Design: Théo Cancelli
Editing: Nobuo Coste
Distributor: SHORT/CUTS
I Dreamed of a Gentle Landscape
West Coast Premiere
Director: Kim Torres
Costa Rica/China, 13 min, DCP
Through the quiet rhythms of everyday life and her imagination, Chunyan drifts between two worlds—her hometown of Enping, China, and her new home in Manzanillo, on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast.
Prior Screenings: Leeds International Film Festival, BOGOSHORTS, Costa Rica Festival Internacional de Cine
Time Life Volume 15. Monument to a Period of Time in Which I Lived
Los Angeles Theatrical Premiere
Director: Mungo Thomson
USA, 2 min, DCP
More than one thousand single-frame images of candles, each a photograph excerpted from reference encyclopedias, production manuals, and how-to guides, mark time's passage in Monument to a Period of Time in Which I Lived. A solemn and hallucinatory memento mori, Mungo Thomson's meticulous reanimation of ephemeral photographs evokes a unique experience of duration, a tension between the moving and the still.
Acetone Reality
Los Angeles Theatrical Premiere
Director: Sara Magenheimer, Michael Bell-Smith
USA, 12 min, DCP
Images cascade and collide in Acetone Reality, as animation, found images, and the artists' own video recordings crash against a dialogue between computer-generated voices exploring the wonders of acetone and the nature of meaning. Across Sara Magenheimer and Michael Bell-Smith's teetering montage, blocky pixels, smeared colors, and cryptic iconography constitute an "insane, yet validated reality."
Distributor: Video Data Bank
Dooni
West Coast Premiere
Director: Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold
USA, 8 min, DCP
Dooni is the eulogy, voiced by actor Timothy Johnson, of the American soul singer and disco legend Sylvester (1947-1988) as delivered by the gospel singer and preacher Walter Hawkins.
A Very Straight Neck
Los Angeles Premiere
Director: Neo Sora
Japan/China, 10 min, DCP
After waking with excruciating neck pain, a woman descends into a surreal odyssey of fragmented memories, haunting dreams, and the relentless challenges of simply moving.
Produced by: Lawrence Xiao
Screenwriter: Neo Sora
Original Story by Momoe Narazaki
Cinematographer: Kaori Oda
Editor: Manaka Nagai
Sound: Izumi Matsuno
Commissioner: Frida Liao
Distribution Coordinator: Cleo Xiong
Artist Coordinator: Yumeng Qiao
Producer Manager: LRJN
Co-Producer: Yu Peng
Line Producer: Hanae Arrour, Cho Na-Young
Producer Assistant: Xun Wang, Tomoki Miyano
PROGRAM 2
Morning Circle
West Coast Premiere
Director: Basma Al-Sharif
Canada/United Arab Emirates, 20 min, DCP
A short visceral narrative film unfolds in three parts to describe loss. From our earliest experience of separation to the imperceptible violence associated with integrating to a new country when yours is no longer livable, Morning Circle follows a father and son in their intimate rituals as they prepare to start the day and head to kindergarten.
The Early Sun, Red As A Hunter's Moon
Los Angeles Premiere
Director: Adam Piron
USA/Portugal, 13 min, DCP
The Early Sun, Red As A Hunter's Moon follows this temporal tradition in an interpolation of Kiowa lore in excerpts from N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain, a reunion in Portugal between the filmmaker and their friend after 20 years, and a historical attempt to decode a cryptic letter from 1890 with "hieroglyphic script" that arrived at Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian Industrial School sent from a reservation in the Oklahoma Territory to a Kiowa student named Belo Cozad. Shot on expired 8mm film, the film presents a collision of fragments of time and Kiowa memory.
Pilgrims cartel / Unclassified
Los Angeles Premiere
Director: Colectivo Los Ingrávidos
Mexico, 1 min, DCP
A one-minute entry from the Hauntology Film Archives, a series described as "ghostly and abstracted representations of political and physical landscapes."
An Impossible Address
West Coast Premiere
Director: Suneil Sanzgiri
USA/India/Angola, 38 min, DCP
A staccato of images and sounds punctuate a letter, both impossible to compose and deliver. This film culminates over four years of research around the bonds of mutual struggle for freedom that developed between India and Africa against the Portuguese empire, focusing on the life of Sita Valles, an Angolan-born doctor and revolutionary of Goan origin who joined the liberation movement against the Portuguese in Angola and was subsequently disappeared there. Scenes of wandering, words of longing, and animations from the architecture of the historic 1955 Afro-Asian solidarity conference in Bandung weave narratives of failure, possibility, and revolutionary desire. Combining the materialist techniques of burying, scratching, and chemically altering 16mm film, and Sanzgiri's signature visual language of digital animations, 3D scanning, and archival translations, the film wrestles with its own form to test the efficacy of words and images in times of struggle, mourning, suffering, and action.