Mills Folly Microcinema welcomes filmmaker Emily Pelstring for an in-person presentation of Our Psychedelic Nature, a program of her short films, on Wednesday, June 10, 2026 at 7:00pm. Suggested donation: $5.00. Doors open at 6:30pm.
Emily Pelstring is a Canadian artist and tenured professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Her animated short films have screened widely at film festivals, including Slamdance, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Transmediale Berlin, Images, and Internationale Short Film Festival Oberhausen. The Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) presented a 13-film retrospective of her work in 2020. In 2023, the GIRAF Festival presented a second retrospective of her work.
Parallel to, and often in connection with her work in film and animation, Pelstring creates sculptural installations that expand cinema into material space. She is also a founding member of the underground experimental music group, The Powers (Katherine Kline, Jessica Mensch, and Pelstring), who create theatrical installations and performances that use speculative play, camp, and visual spectacle as tools for transformation.
"Pelstring, as much a sound artist and performer as a visual artist and filmmaker, uses her super powers for good; critiquing the world in which she lives indirectly by way of celebrating what makes it strong rather than by explicitly exposing what makes it weak. Her interests and creative output make her as true a multi-disciplinary artist as ever I've seen...
Pelstring's visual language has one foot in the realm of the familiar and one foot gleefully in a world of levitation, alternate histories and spells, which gives Pelstring's cinematic space an almost infinite and inexplicable depth." —Keltie Duncan, Association Internationale du Film d'Animation (ASIFA)
Total program running time: approx. 56 minutes, with a talkback portion to follow.
Witch's Work | 2018 | 7 minutes
Three small tales, brought to you by the shared divining eye of the Graeae, a trinity of sisters from Greek myth. They each offer visions of a life-death cycle: a water goddess gives birth to an owl, a crystal, and a glowing orb; a young ghost dances and transforms into a snake; a scientist deals with computer problems until a skeletal hand bursts through her screen and offers her a transparent egg with a tiny soul inside. A glimpse of the underworld. In the end, Medusa laughs.
Somnium Lapidum | 2016 | 3 minutes
A stop-motion audiovisual meditation on the material animation of stones. The concept is inspired by Camillo Leonardi's "Speculum Lapidum," published in 1533, which describes the magical healing virtues of a variety of stones, categorized by colour. The character-based animated vignettes are inspired by the woodcuts in "De Hortus Sanitatis," a natural history encyclopedia published in 1485, which details various methods of harnessing the power of gems.
Intro and Outro Signal Films for 2020 Ottawa International Animation Festival | 1.25 minutes
A witchy blessing in a year full of devastation and grief in many ways. The death of loved ones, precarious life situations getting more difficult, a wave of reckoning with ongoing state-sanctioned violence. Candles are a double-sided image: a symbol of mourning and a tool to light the way. This vigil/blessing is happening in a space that is both the woods and the ocean, connected by a portal made of an old rope, debris from a shipwreck. The owls are witnesses.
Petal To The Metal | 2021 | 3 minutes
A hand-processed 16mm film that reflects on botanical animism. It is a song written for night-crawlers, compost, and shadows, inspired by human flower-lust. Water, fire, earth and air are interwoven with the garden's creature crew. The work draws a parallel between the photographic alchemy of cinematic experiments and the photosynthetic processes of plants.
U.S. Girls' "Navy & Cream" music video | 2016 | 4 minutes
Video accompaniment to the psychedelic art pop song by Meg Remy.
Gryphon Rue's "Insect Express" music video | 2017 | 3 minutes
Video accompaniment explores an intersection of species; insect flight patterns and modes of industrial travel merge as collective rituals in a fever dream.
Skeleton Dance | 2010 | 2 minutes
Cut-out animation processed with a Paik-Abe Raster Scan Device, Jones Six Channel Colorizer/Mixer, and Ross Video Switcher.
Head Cleaner | 2015 | 7 minutes
Distorted voices offer an expressionistic tour of the inside of a dirty VCR. Hand-drawn and digital animation, analog video effects, re-photography and video feedback transform images from an apparently malfunctioning machine.
Hedge Rider | 2023 | 5 minutes
The Hedge-Rider sits at the boundary between the garden and the wild. She uses flying ointments to transcend her body and take flight during the night.
A Flame The Colour Of Air | 2025 | 7.5 minutes
Hildegard von Bingen was a medieval Catholic mystic, known for her waking visions of the divine, her musical compositions, and her extensive medical encyclopedias. In this speculative tale, she grapples with the virgin/whore dichotomy in a psychedelic, erotic vision. The narration is collaged from her surviving transcriptions. A 2026 Slamdance Film Festival selection.
Psychoterra | 2025 | 6 minutes | co-directed with Naomi Okabe
Two scientists from the Technomystic Ecology Lab develop technology that processes the ecological grief contained within a database of audio testimonials. In their lab, located deep inside a cave, they alchemize these feelings into a seed archive for an unknown future.
Spinners | 2024 | 7.5 minutes | co-directed with Jessica Mensch
Part of a live-streamed series of dramatic reenactments of stories about hurricanes and tornadoes that were offered to us by women we met on a journey across the U.S. "Spinners" focuses on women witnessing these unbelievable phenomena, to challenge the ways in which women are often considered unreliable narrators of their own experiences. The stories each tell of unusual sightings—from birds collecting in the eye of a storm, to the force of wind moving cars. The dramatic reenactments take the form of playful, paper cut-out puppet shows, with both of us streaming layers of the scenes from separate locations and time zones.
ABOUT MILLS FOLLY MICROCINEMA
Mills Folly Microcinema showcases nationally recognized experimental film and video art from the festival and microcinema circuit. We network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at Project Projection events.
