The Experimental Film Podcast

Raine Roberts

Raine (b. 1996) is a photographer, filmmaker, sculptor, and educator from Chicago, IL. Her work studies themes of repetition, structure, the environment, and the body. 

Raine received the 2025 Dior Photography and Visual Artists Award for Young Talent, with a Jury Special Mention. Her work has been exhibited in LUMA Arles, Westlab + Gallery, ECAL School of Design, Berry Campbell Gallery, WORTHLESS STUDIOS, Fugue Gallery, Haus Am See, The National Arts Club, among others. Her work has been profiled in Architectural Digest India, Woven Tale Press, El Universal, Musée Magazine, Este País, and The Bushwick Daily, among others. She has held residencies with the Woodward Residency and the FREE FILM PROJECT. Her films have screened at Anthology Film Archives, BAFTA-qualifying Aesthetica Shorts Film Festival, Future of Film is Female, XVIII Mono Biennial Festival of Cinema Arts, Experimental Film Fest, Film Church, among others. She holds a BFA and BA from the University of Colorado in Boulder (2019). After working in documentary editing, she studied at the International Center of Photography (2023) and received the Director’s Fellowship. Raine is a member of the international photography group SmallTable Collective. She is based in Brooklyn, NY.

Cara Griffin

Cara Griffin is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She loves coming-of-age films, romance books, and going to the beach.

Cara has screened her directorial work with The Future of Film is Female, New Faces New Voices Festival, the New York No Limits Film Series, the Yosemite Fantasy Film Festival, the Orlando Film Festival, St. Bimbo’s Film Church, the Neighborhood Film Festival, the NYU Gallatin Student Film Festival, and more. She received the 2023 NYC Women’s Fund finishing grant, in partnership with NYFA and MOME, for her short film My Savior.

Cara is the Acquisitions Director for Shorts Movie Theater, the first-ever theater exclusively for short films, opening in Brooklyn, NY.

Episode 14 is the final podcast for Season 5. Please enjoy as I cover listener questions, film funding, festival waivers, festival success, and student films.

As always, I appreciate the time you spend listening to the podcast. I hope you enjoy it, and please let me know if you have questions, comments, or suggestions.

Please get in touch with me if you’d like to schedule an interview, sponsor the podcast, point me to some cool experimental films, or connect me to other experimental filmmakers.

Tess Martin is a Rotterdam-based film and visual artist working across animation, installation, and expanded cinema. Her practice explores how time, memory, and place can be revealed through handcrafted animations and site-specific works.

Raised across shifting cultural contexts, her work reflects an ongoing interest in how belonging and identity are formed through perception, relation, and memory. Many of her projects exist simultaneously as films and installations, often incorporating sculptural elements and soundtracks to create intimate time-based experiences.

Her work has been presented internationally in both film and exhibition contexts, including festivals, museums, and artist residencies across Europe, North America, and Asia.

In this episode, we discuss Tess' film 1976: Search for Life.

*Errata - I mistakenly identified Holst's Jupiter as the "Surprise" symphony when it's actually Haydn's Jupiter. Holst did write a Jupiter for "The Planets," but it isn't the same piece. Mozart also wrote a Jupiter, but it's not mentioned except here for clarity.

Marta Renzi is a filmmaker and choreographer who has created over 20 short films, which have screened in over 100 festivals. Marta and her Project Company received a New York Dance and Performance Award (a “Bessie”) in 1992 and the first Dancing in the Streets award in 1995. She has received two videodance commissions from PBS, including one for MOUNTAINVIEW (1989), made in collaboration with filmmaker John Sayles. A seven-time recipient of funding from the NEA, Marta was a Bogliasco Fellow at the Liguria Center for Arts & Humanities in 2013 and a RAW Community Supported Artist in 2014. She served on the Board of Directors of DFA from 2008-2018.

Handbook: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry presents an illuminating dialogue between the documentary arts, feminism, film, immigration, labor history, and theater. Throughout, a playwright and filmmaker contemplate how art-making can alter our understanding of the social structures of city life.

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet. Her early works on Celluloid took a feminist approach to images and writing—a commitment which has grounded her ever since. With each project, Sachs investigates the connections between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Embracing archives, found images, letters, and journals, her work pursues a critical journey through reality and memory. In films such as The House of Science, Which Way Is East, Your Day Is My Night, and Film About a Father Who, Sachs uses a hybrid form and collaboration, incorporating documentary, performance, and collage.

Lizzie Olesker has been creating theater and performance in New York City for several decades, exploring the politics and poetry of everyday experience. Her plays and solo performances exploring domestic work, personal memory, and quotidian gestures have been developed and presented in NYC at The Public, Cherry Lane Theatre, Clubbed Thumb, Dixon Place, New Georges, and the Ohio Theater. As an actor, she’s worked with The Talking Band, appearing at La Mama and on an international tour.

Jeremy Drummond's work has been exhibited in museums, galleries, and festivals worldwide. His films/videos have received awards such as the National Film Board of Canada Award at the Images Festival (Toronto), Best Experimental Video at the Reeling: Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival, the People's Choice Award at the New Forms Festival (Vancouver), and the No Budget Award at the Cinematexas Festival of International Film & Video (Austin). He has received grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, National Film Board of Canada, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. His work has been featured and/or reviewed in magazines, journals, and newspapers, including Art Papers, Cabinet, Canadian Architect, Frieze, NRC Handelsblad, Prefix Photo, SEAMUS, The Washington Post, and The Wire: Adventures in Sound & Music.
Drummond's films and videos are distributed internationally by LIMA (Amsterdam), Videographe (Montreal), Video Pool Inc. (Winnipeg), Vtape (Toronto), and The Film-maker's Cooperative/The New American Cinema Group (NYC). His printed works are/have been available from Art Metropole (Toronto), Printed Matter Inc. (NYC), and the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NYC).
 
In addition to his solo work, Drummond works extensively with artist David Poolman as Never Met A Stranger -- a collaborative platform for the production of art and experimental media, a publisher of vernacular arts and culture, and an ongoing archive of field recordings, interviews, and documentary resources that collectively explore relationships between perception and representation, industry and the environment, and landscape and culture throughout central Appalachia and the rural North American South.
Drummond is the organizer and curator of the Frames of Reference annual program of artists' film and video. With support from the University of Richmond's Department of Art & Art History, University Museums, and School of Arts & Sciences, Frames of Reference showcases some of the most creative, challenging, thoughtful, and visionary artists working in film, video, and alternative media today. Programs feature artists and artworks that resist conventions and ideologies of mainstream media; explore creative, innovative approaches to narrative and experiments in time-based media; and embrace unique viewpoints, perspectives, or frames of reference.

Ian Joseph Greene is a California-based stop-motion animator, filmmaker, and video artist. His award-winning work has screened at festivals such as Shockfest, Butte Film Festival, Warped Dimensions (Best Splatter/Slasher), Coop Microcinema, Nooga Underground, and Tromadance, and is streaming on TromaNow. Greene’s work is known for its grotesque humor, surreal visuals, and experimental technique.

Ian and I had a great time speaking about his work, his techniques, and his struggles with anxiety.

Please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and be sure to share the podcast to help fellow artists get the recognition they deserve.

Tess Martin is an artist who often works with hand-made animation techniques such as cut-outs, ink, paint, sand, objects or phonotropes.

Tess’ work has been exhibited at international galleries and festivals such as TOKAS Hongo (JP), International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL), Ann Arbor Film Festival (USA), and more. She was selected as an artist-in-residence at, among others, the Hawthornden Writer's Retreat (Scotland, 2022), the Camargo Foundation (France, 2019), and the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy, 2017). Recent funders include the Dutch Film Fund, the Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie, the City of Rotterdam, the Center for Visual Art Rotterdam, and Rooftop Films.

If you've followed the MM Serra series, this is part 3.

Curator, author, professor at Parsons at the New School and the Executive Director of Film-Makers' Cooperative, the world's oldest and largest archive of independent media. Her first five films (NYC, 1985, Nightfall, 1984, Framed, 1984, PPI, 1986, Turner, 1987) were preserved and digitized by Anthology Film Archives Preservation series Re-Visions: American Experimental Film 1975-1990. Since 1982, MM Serra has created more than 31 films.

MM Serra is an experimental filmmaker, curator, author, professor at Parsons at the New School and the Executive Director of Film-Makers' Cooperative, the world's oldest and largest archive of independent media. Her first five films (NYC, 1985, Nightfall, 1984, Framed, 1984, PPI, 1986, Turner, 1987) were preserved and digitized by Anthology Film Archives Preservation series Re-Visions: American Experimental Film 1975-1990. Since 1982, MM Serra has created over 31 films. 

This is our second episode in this deep dive with MM Serra.