Kelly Sears: After concluding the 2026 Brakhage Symposium, I found myself reflecting on the beautiful, playful, and deeply resonant work we basked in together over two days. Hosted by the Brakhage Center, the 2026 Brakhage Symposium took place at the University of Colorado Boulder on February 21st and 22nd. This marked my second year as Director of the Brakhage Center, whose mission is to encourage experimentation in the moving-image arts while honoring the legacy of Stan Brakhage’s teaching and visionary work.
The Center’s main event is an annual symposium—a unique gathering that grounds experimental film as a catalyst for discovery, inspiration, conversation, friendship, and an ongoing reimagining of what cinema can be. Over two days, I want attendees to actively discover throughlines between films, and for artists to find resonance in one another’s practices. The ethos of the Symposium is one of welcoming, with intentional social spaces between programs and after screenings for communing. I see the Brakhage Center as a place that welcomes filmmakers and scholars to the Mountain West, and to Boulder in particular—a site with deep histories of experimentation across many art practices.
I envision the Brakhage Symposium to be more than screenings with a Q & As. I want it to be an encounter. Inspired by Mike Hoolboom’s reading performance at the 2025 Brakhage Symposium, programmed by Jim Supanick, I wanted to incorporate a performative element into each filmmaker’s program. Stephanie Barber shared an extraordinary convergence of artist talk, philosophical reflection, films, and life poetics in jhana and the rats of james old. A.S.M. Kobayashi presented excerpts from her remarkable performance, Say Something Bunny, alongside work-in-progress selections from Electric Neon Clock. Deborah Stratman screened Last Things, followed by a presentation on geological listening.
On the second day, we reconvened for a group screening by the featured filmmakers and a roundtable discussion that wove together telling stories outside of ourselves, casting evidence, borrowing voices, and otherhood. As I was building the program for the symposium, I noticed these connections across their works, but I wanted to step back from proclaiming any fixed themes and instead invite everyone to find their own way through the work.
We moved into a radical program, 1990s Experimental Film in Japan: Women’s Anarchic Visions of the Everyday, curated by Wakae Nakane and Miryam Sass. Wakae joined us to present an incisive and detailed talk on feminist experimental cinema in Japan that preceded the screening. We concluded with Celebrating Stan, a program of Stan Brakhage 16 MM work, curated by Suranjan Ganguly, Director of the Brakhage Center from 2015-2020.
My takeaway from this year’s symposium is the necessity of creating social cinema spaces where vulnerable, honest, and deeply worked visions can emerge, where ideas can meld between presenters, and form intimate connections with the films. A weekend feels like the right amount of time, long enough to fully commit, to turn oneself over, and to follow where the artists, scholars, and the cinema lead us.
I didn’t want this reflection to be mine alone, so I invited participants to share their own thoughts from the symposium.
Stephanie Barber: I had expected to be moved by the mountains and the sky so close. I had expected to be thrilled and challenged by the artwork of A.S.M. Kobayashi and Deborah Stratman. To be amazed by the selections and words of Wakae Nakane and Suranjan Ganguly. And I had expected incisive questions and comments from brilliant Kelly Sears, Erin Espelie, Jim Supanick and all the attendees. But I think I was not prepared for such a warm weekend of continual film talk. The symposium was the perfect antidote for the current horrors of our political and environmental mishegas. Long deep consideration, nuanced explanations and open attentive reception, all in service of this strange artwork to which we are all in thrall.
A.S.M. Kobayashi: The weekend launched with Stephanie Barber’s I Love You, which was created with patrons of the Baltimore Museum of Art where Barber subjects say “I love you” directly to the camera. As she scrolled through the performances, Barber shared anecdotes from the experience of filming these chance encounters. She paused on a quiet moment in the video: an elderly woman in black sunglasses waits a beat before softly pushing out an “I love you,” her voice vulnerable and almost cracking. It wasn’t lost on me that the weekend, as a whole, was about actively listening and looking, directing our attention to people, animals, and things that are often disregarded or unheard. This kind of listening can be painful. In Wakane’s program of 90s Japanese experimental cinema, a brutal scene in Benighted but Not Begun (Yukikuredomo machiakazu) shows the protagonist’s boyfriend sadistically filming her alongside industrially caged chickens. The chickens’ frantic squawks loop with the protagonist’s screams of horror. The young woman on screen, Yukie Saitō, was also the director of the work. Though she no longer makes films, this early piece was resurrected by Wakane over 30 years after it was made in 1994 and is now screening as part of her kaleidoscopic program of shorts.
Deborah Stratman’s Last Things asks us to listen to rocks. In her presentation on geologic listening, she reminded us that the stone landscape is a kind of tape recorder, and her practice feels grounded in attuning to these stone voices embedded in these landscapes.
Our final screening, Celebrating Stan, was a tribute to Stan Brakhage, to whom the symposium pays homage. The program, assembled by Suranjan Ganguly, who mentioned that after seeing my presentation on Electric Neon Clock, a project focused on my family history, he felt moved to include more of Brakhage’s films centered on family and home life. An Avant-Garde Home Movie (1961) captures moments of his life with his first wife, Jane, and their children. One moment that stood out was Jane at the wheel of a car packed with children, looking exhausted. As a new mother, I found myself wanting the film to pause, for Stan to help, to step in and share the labor of escorting the children on this errand.
On the first night, during a discussion of Barber’s research into animals, Stratman brought up Jane’s book Wolf Dictionary, which explores how animals communicate with one another. She spoke about Jane’s writing and research, her listening to animals, as well as the film made about her by legendary queer avant-garde filmmaker Barbara Hammer, Jane Brakhage (1974). Hammer says, “She was so much more complex than Stan’s portrayal of her in Window Water Baby Moving.” It felt, this year, that the Brakhage symposium carried the spirit of Jane Brakhage, who chose to listen not to what is obvious or easily comprehensible, but to something much more curious and unknown.
Deborah Stratman: The best part of the symposium for me was reconnecting with friends and listening to how others think through their art. Learning where the tentacles of their thinking draw inspiration from, how they try out their ideas, and letting some of that curiosity pixie dust rub off on me. It’s interesting as well to think about what the symposium as a historical entity represents, and might become, in relationship to the imminent relocation of Sundance Film Festival. Long live exploration, cross-pollination and idiosyncratic cinematic forms!
Wakae Nakane: My participation in the Brakhage Symposium was both an enchanting experience and an opportunity for critical reorientation for me. Arriving in Boulder (so deeply associated with Stan Brakhage) I could not help but project a kind of mythic aura onto the site. For those of us committed to the history of the experimental cinema, this location carries a symbolic charge: it evokes a lineage of singular artistic vision, one that casts Brakhage as an isolated genius, deeply intertwined with a transcendental romanticism grounded in the Colorado wilderness. The altitude heightened this sensation, leaving me slightly lightheaded, shifting my bodily perception, ended up amplifying the sense of the journey as a pilgrimage.
Yet what I experienced over the course of the symposium complicated and ultimately unsettled my personal mythology. The presentations by Stephanie Barber, Alison Kobayashi, and Deborah Stratman shifted attention away from the figure of the solitary artist toward the procedural temporality of making, foregrounding collaborative modes of production that, in a way, decenter the individualized notion of authorship. Stephanie’s practice, structured through rigorous, almost ritualistic repetition rendered artistic labor as a durational and embodied rhythm. Alison’s work-in-progress project, by contrast, revealed a temporality of fragmentation of the artistic process, unfolding across years as she navigates familial memory, trauma, and their necessity of forgetting as a condition of survival. Deborah’s notion of “geological listening” takes up a radical framework, displacing human-centered authorship by attuning to geophony—the sounds of the earth itself—as a form of narration. Here, process becomes a way of reconfiguring relations between the animate and inanimate.
These encounters reframed how I approached the program I curated, “1990s Experimental Film in Japan: Women’s Anarchic Visions of the Everyday.” The program traced ephemeral trajectories of filmmakers who have often been marginalized or forgotten within the largely male-dominated field of Japanese experimental cinema. What emerged in the conversation between the three artists’ works was not a reaffirmation of stable authorship, but the sense that they are themselves products of what artist Margaret Dragu calls “patchwork time”—conditions of discontinuation, contingency, and uneven resources to sustain artistic practices.
These practices subtly suggest that they are constituted through shared conditions of feminized labor and constraint that remain largely invisible within dominant narratives of experimental film. What the symposium ultimately offered, I believe, was a shift from the mystique of individual visionary toward a more grounded, communal, collaborative understanding of artistic production as processual and collectively resonant. In this sense, the personal meaning I derived from this experience was not simply the encounter with individual works, but the palpable sense of community: the co-presence of artists, scholars, and audiences, each participating in an ongoing constellation of practices. It is within this constellation (I found myself fascinated with the word during the symposium) that experimental film’s vitality continues to unfold.
Suranjan Ganguly: The 2026 Brakhage symposium stood out for its diverse offerings, strong presentations, and imaginative curatorship. This was Kelly Sears’ second symposium as Brakhage Center director and, like last year, she made sure to incorporate perspectives that were both global and national. Over the years, the symposium has been known for its broad-based multicultural ethos which Sears has been careful to maintain. Along with a session on Japanese experimental film from the 1990s, there were presentations by contemporary North American women artists that covered a wide range of subjects such as ecology, family, landscape, memory, and mortality. The films they showed were personal, poetic, and innovative. The two-day event concluded with a screening of films by Brakhage which alluded to some of the themes of the symposium. It was a perfect way of honoring the filmmaker and bringing the symposium to a close.
I asked audience members to offer reflections and was delighted when two faculty who had been in attendance all weekend shared their perspectives.
Erin Espelie: When I introduced Deborah Stratman and her film Last Things at the 2026 Brakhage Symposium, I began with a quote from Clarice Lispector, that I believe encapsulates the ethos of the event: “So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing[/making].” The symposium is a rarity in the film world, likened to the Flaherty or a mini-film festival. It is housed within a university, with all the theory, history, and pedagogy, yet it embraces counterculture, subcultures, and the bold upending of traditional forms. The artists and curators who come offer windows into their practices that are philosophical and ruminative. Here they ask questions that they uniquely see, articulate, and present in offering. The time-based medium with which they/we work is to echo Stratman, “supernatural” and a supreme “collaborator.” I am deeply grateful for how the Brakhage Symposium allows film communities to gather, together, in the theatre.
Jim Supanick: I’m on a mailing list for the Tri-Centric Foundation, an organization devoted to preserving and disseminating musician Anthony Braxton’s vast body of work. Their emails begins with the salutation, “Dear Friendly Experiencers…”— sweet, beautiful, and so against the grain of standard nonprofit-speak… It’s in that same spirit that the Brakhage Symposium is conceived and carried out.
This was my third time as an attendee- this 2026 edition was so energizing! Stephanie Barber, Alison SM Kobayashi, and Deborah Stratman, each remarkable in their own right, are such different artists- but their work sang together in a gorgeous daylong counterpoint. The Sunday program of 1990s film and video by Japanese women makers assembled by Wakae Nakane and Miryam Sas was a revelation, and so nicely contextualized by Wakae. A powerful reminder to always wonder: what other treasures are there hidden away in not-even-distant memory?
The weekend concluded with a wonderful selection of Brakhage films put together by Suranjan Ganguly. Stan and Suranjan have long been inspirational for film-heads in Boulder and far beyond, and this closing program was a galvanizing charge for us all.
Andy Uhrich: Though I first heard of the Brakhage Symposium twenty years ago, the 2026 edition was the first time I was able to attend. It far surpassed my expectations. The two-day event connected three generations of personal artistic filmmakers via a programming approach that was informative and generative.
A major ingredient for the symposium’s success was its scale. Six screenings and talks over two days results in something in between a festival and an individual screening. You get enough material to understand an individual filmmaker’s sensibility and make connections between the visiting artists. Stephanie Barber, A.S.M. Kobayashi, and Deborah Stratman make very different work. But placed in conversation with other – the work and the artists – shows how each are grappling with questions about personal, social, and planetary memory in ways that are heartbreaking, humorous, and profound.
These conversations and ideas connected across time as well thanks to the two historical screenings. Suranjan Ganguly curated a program of Stan Brakhage shorts, and Wakae Nakane and Miryam Sas (the last of whom was not present) researched and shared a mind-opening screening of 1990s Japanese films and videos by women artists. In my view, the Symposium’s goal was not to create a genealogy of practice from the 60s to today, with each era inspiring their successors. Instead, the screenings showed how artists have to meet their historical moment with the technological tools at hand guided by their unique personal obsession and insights. – Andy Uhrich
Finally, I asked an undergraduate student who attended every program to share what kept him on campus all weekend.
Danny Kim: The Brakhage Symposium was a paradigm shift in how I interpret art as a whole. If humor is the hallmark of perspective, then experimental film is the hallmark of cinema. As a film student, experimental expression is also very approachable – both in scale and skill. “Art is meeting in the middle”, said Stephanie Barber. A type of communication that is truly open for interpretation and expression! Distinct from commercial stories and genres, the Brakhage Symposium is also distinct from any film event I have ever attended. And this year, the symposium hosted all female artists and curators in a year where feminine energy is needed the most, 2026.
It was rebellious, brave, fearless and so down to earth. If I had to distinguish a connection, it was about healing. Kelly Sears stated on day 1, “Theme restricts how audience moves through the work”. But what astounded me was the totally off the wall presentation of not only various themes, but various forms of art mixed in the most unexpected ways. Stephanie Barber had this facetious yet delicate execution in her collection of work which acted both as poem and moving image, which echoes the poetic motion of existence itself. Alison Kobayashi had this intense wit inside her performative art coupled with a glimpse of her voyage into exploring her family lineage. The moving art was about seeing with one’s heart- not their eyes. That sort of perspective is so refreshing that it invigorated a nearly dead sense of wonder in my own heart.
Our planning for the 2027 Brakhage Symposium is already underway, and we look forward to sharing details as the collective encounter takes shape.
Edited by Kelly Sears