Genres: docufiction

  • The City And

    On a bleak day in midwinter, a girl travels to her city’s bus station to meet someone. She travels familiar streets and moves confidently. Her relationship with her city changes when no one arrives on the expected bus. She wanders out of the bus station, noticing her city in a new way.

  • 敬祖 ·PAYING RESPECTS

    ‘敬祖 ·PAYING RESPECTS’ is a short film using the Chinese ritual of burning joss paper to reflect on questions of death & diaspora. Yiqing explores her grief by offering her ancestors everything they couldn’t afford. Everything she burns gets sent to the afterlife. The film plays with themes of memory, distance and dreams.

  • It’s Not Brakhage

    It’s Not Brakhage is a feature-length parafiction film, structured around an unnamed narrator’s investigation of a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Shrouded in speculation and actively contested, the film reel is believed to be the sole remaining artifact from a cancelled 1959 film festival, co-organized by Brakhage and military-industrial giant DuPont chemical. The story follows the narrator’s forensic deconstruction of the film reel’s history, sifting through a patchwork of theories and speculations that have arisen since its discovery, and connecting the artifact to DuPont’s wider networks of military-industrial research and artistic…

  • Salvage Archives

    Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems. Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste. As both narrators’ grandiose…

  • and the story remains

    After years of silence, a woman returns to a memory she was once forbidden to recall. As she develops forgotten images, the past surfaces in fragments of light, grain, and the slow emergence of a face. The film lingers between past and present, exploring whether enforced silence can wound more deeply than the trauma itself.

  • Exit & Arrival

    There are places that we seek, and there are places that find us. One can never know for sure which comes first; the seeking or the finding. Often the unexpected moment occurs, the unforeseen discovery.

  • Passing Shadows

    Passing Shadows attempts the seeming impossible: to travel the inner pathways of poet Andrew Suknaski’s creative impulses. The film traces in detail the painstaking, methodical and happenstance search Suknaski undertakes to discover the images and the emotions that fill his poetry. He wanders along bookshelves, across faces and into shadows pursuing the moments and symbols of truth that Suknaski strives to translate into words.

  • Vanishing Heat

    Vanishing Heat is part of a series of films where I explore the dichotomy between tranquility and activity in our natural and manufactured worlds. Time, motion and stillness are intertwined to express interactions that are both deliberate and accidental as energy given off by one system affects another.

  • Work(ing Together) in Process

    On a quest to obtain some misdelivered camera batteries, Sam Koopman finds himself in a Rotterdam-based sex shop. Here he meets Marty who works there, and this chance encounter turns into a cinematic project between the two. When Sam turns the camera towards this new stranger, the two end up embarking on a year-long journey to create a film together. Their shared process of self-discovery turns this playful desktop film into a profound meditation on the nature of non-fiction film.

  • Dear Moritz

    A short film essay that invites you to observe and reflect along a chance encounter between an artist, police and two friends in public space. A spontaneous moment attached to a loaded location, reflecting upon power, privilege, colonial pasts and present realities.