Spectral Transmissions: Love Bends Time

Two years ago, IDFA on Stage featured Spectral Transmissions, a multimedia piece by performer-filmmakers Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher in which ghost stories offered solace in the anxious days of COVID. Now they are back with a new edition. Rather than focusing on fear and horror, this time they explore the unfathomable and sometimes uncanny power of love. In many ghost stories it is the power of love—for childhood friends, for family members, for animals—that bends time.

Mosher and Palmieri have invited musicians, filmmakers and visual artists to contribute work around this theme. Multimedia artist Chloe Abrahams explores the strange world she enters when sleepwalking. Film theorist Dorota Lech tells an intimate tale about an heirloom that embodies family traditions, Polish folklore, an epidemic and a war.

Documentary filmmaker Jeanie Finlay and author and filmmaker Steven Sheil bring a tale of lost siblings connected by an uncanny tape recorder. While watching a 1950’s werewolf film two boys explore sexuality, violence, and the shifting moral positions of fantasy. These stories and more make up this year’s program.