Yuula Benivolski

A gentle character study of Harvey - a straight, fat man who decides to submit a photograph of himself to a gay magazine for 'big men and their admirers'.

Set in a small room, an adolescent woman experiences synesthesia. While she stares at half filled glasses on the table sound replaces her gaze. Harmonic tones exude and induce a trance like state over the woman. Her meditative harmonies are disrupted when an ominous character arrives with the intent to ingest the song. After consuming the beauty the dark character leaves. Left alone, the adolescent woman employs thaumaturgy to lure her song back to life again.

Follows a multimodal, autobiographical essay that deploys both personal memory and incomplete archives to reflect on a childhood in a militarized border town.

In March, the streets of Mexico City are covered in purple Jacaranda flowers. Obrera— “Worker” in Spanish—is a working class neighbourhood. I follow the trail of purple flowers on the ground, and discover a large bronze monument behind the fence of an apartment building courtyard: a seamstress, working on a sewing machine. At home, I look up the address: Manuel José Othón, corner of San Antonio Abad. I find a photo of the monument and these words: "Topeka, large garment factory, employed hundreds of women." And then: "Bronze statue at site of collapsed factory."

Three women engage with the medical system to confront strange dreams that may not belong to them. Early one morning, I regained consciousness in a hospital bed as the sun was coming up. I was sixteen. First thing I heard was the news: Princess Diana had died in a car accident. Two hours earlier, I was hitchhiking home from a party with friends. We were picked up by a Toyota hatchback; the driver was drunk, but we were desperate. At the bottom of the twisted mountain road we crashed into the wall surrounding my town’s cemetery. As I watched updates on Diana from my hospital bed, images of her smashed-up car crept into my mind and imprinted as my own. (Yuula Benivolski)

"My mother always wanted a garden, and now she has one. A poem about family genealogy that highlights the relationship between a name and a place. *** Tatars and other non-Russian communities in the USSR were forced to go through Russification - the spread of Russian language, culture, and people into non-Russian cultures and regions. Forcing the many minority groups within Russia to accept the Russian culture was an attempt to prevent self-determination and separatism. As a result my mother, a Tatar woman born in Moscow, never properly learned her mother tongue or practiced Tatar traditions outside her family home. Composed of super 8 home movies." –Y.B.

A film about a glassblower in Hebron—a place historically known for its glass and ceramics production, which shaped the city’s economy for centuries. In 2022 I interviewed the last glassblower in Hebron’s Old City, and filmed him during a typical day at his studio.