2026 Woodstock Museum Film Festival Films
Sept 5 – Saturday
7:30 Spark & Co. – World Tour: Live Season 7:50 Company 8:20 Spheres 8:30 Goddess of Slide
7:30 Spark & Co. – World Tour: Live Season
Award winning AI generated music performance animation captures a live concert experience. 2m57s
Winner — Best Music Video Athens International Monthly Art Film Festival 2026 (Greece)
Winner — Best Music Video, MEI International Film Festival 2026 (India)
Official Physical Screening Selection — A Taste of Theatre Film Showcase 2026, Chicago, USA
Official Selection — Marin County Fair International Festival of Short Film & Video 2026 (USA)
Finalist — Seoul International AI Film Festival 2026 (SIAFF), (South Korea)
Semi-Finalist — Luleå International Film Festival 2026 (Sweden)
Nominee — Digital Griffix Film Awards 2026 (Canada)
Official Selection — Tokyo Lift-Off Film Festival 2026 (Japan)
Official Selection — Toronto Lift-Off Film Festival 2026 (Canada)
Official Selection — New York Lift-Off Film Festival 2026 (USA)
Official Selection — Fescilmar Festival, Poland Session 2026 (Poland)
Official Selection — Sweden Film Awards 2026 (Sweden)
Official Selection — Stockholm City Film Festival 2026 (Sweden)
Official Selection — Short Way International Short Film Festival 2026 (Brazil)
Official Selection — India International Star Film Festival Awards (ISFFA) 2026 (India)
Official Selection — Peshawar International Film Festival 2026 (Pakistan)
Honorable Mention — Thilsri International Film Festival 2026 (India)
Honorable Mention — Indo Dubai International Film Festival 2026 (UAE)
Spark & Co. is a live-band style music video built around Spark’s emotional saxophone performance, supported by drums, bass, and keyboard in a full cinematic arrangement.
The piece combines performance energy, character-driven visuals, and emotional musical storytelling.
Spark & Co. is an AI-generated music performance film capturing the atmosphere of a live concert experience through two continuous musical pieces.
Presented as part of a conceptual world tour, the film explores rhythm, virtual presence, and the evolving visual language of AI-driven performance.
Each screening represents a new stop in this imagined global journey.
Director Biography – Pai Chen
Pai Chen is an independent creator working at the intersection of AI-generated imagery, music, and narrative-driven visual design. His work explores how performance and storytelling can be reshaped through hybrid production methods, where digital characters and cinematic language merge into cohesive experiences.
Focusing on atmosphere, timing, and controlled visual revelation, Pai Chen develops pieces that invite audiences to engage beyond surface-level viewing. His approach often incorporates layered structures, where meaning emerges progressively rather than being immediately disclosed.
His recent work, Spark & Co., continues this direction through a staged performance that subtly introduces a hidden presence, blurring the boundary between what is seen and what is perceived.
Director Statement
With “Spark & Co. – World Tour: Live Session,” I was interested in treating performance as both presence and illusion.
The film is structured as a live session, but not one tied to a fixed place. Instead, it exists within a shifting, imagined tour—where each performance is both a moment and a projection, unfolding somewhere between stage, screen, and memory.
Rather than focusing on realism, I approached the work as a constructed performance space. Rhythm, timing, and visual energy become the primary language, allowing the character to carry the experience through movement and sound.
Using AI as a generative medium made it possible to explore performance without physical constraints—where a “live” moment can exist beyond location, repetition, or even a stable identity.
At its core, the film asks a simple question: if a performance can appear anywhere, what makes it feel real?
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7:50 Company
Isolated Colombian woman discovers a small puppet in desk drawer. This unlikely friendship helps her find courage, joy and belonging. Warm-hearted comedy with amazing special effects.
Georgette Castro will steal your heart in “Company”, a touching short film about the unexpected bonds that become our true family.
When Candela, a young Colombian woman feeling isolated in her new life, discovers Larry — a small, quick-witted puppet living in her desk drawer — the two form an unlikely friendship that helps her find courage, joy, and belonging.
As they navigate work, loneliness, and life together, the film reveals that family isn’t always the people we’re born to… it’s the company we keep.
The movie will also amaze audiences with realistic practical effects that have to be seen to be believed-all done without green-screens, CGI or AI.
“Company” is a warm-hearted comedy that will leave you with a smile.
Director Biography – Brian Mortensen
BRIAN MORTENSEN – WRITER / DIRECTOR / PRODUCER
Brian Mortensen is an award-winning filmmaker and founder of Mortenveld Productions, an independent studio based in Madison, New Jersey. His work includes the award-winning short films My Roommate Dan and Crossing Over, known for their originality and emotional storytelling.
He focuses on character-driven projects and builds collaborative environments that bring together volunteers, students, and the local community.
Mortenveld Productions produces narrative films, community programming, and the bi-monthly news show Real Good News, while also running an internship program with New Jersey colleges that gives students hands-on production experience.
His latest film, Company, continues his focus on imaginative storytelling grounded in real human connection.
Mortensen’s work is driven by a simple belief: independent film works best when people come together to create something meaningful.
Director Statement
Are we defined by the company we work for, or the company we keep?
Support local artists, musicians and non-profits. Empower women and marginalized people.
Peace – love – and have fun doing it.
8:20 Spheres
Smallest vibrations of existence echo outward into the vast architecture of being and cosmos. A reminder of the wonders of our incomprehensibly beautiful world. 5m52s
or
From the microscopic to the mythical; how the smallest vibrations of existence echo outward into the vast architecture of being and cosmos. A breathing meditation.
Spheres is an homage to life, a poetic essay that drifts through a series of expanding spheres, each revealing a different layer of our shared reality, from the microscopic to the mythical. The film is an exploration of how the smallest vibrations of existence echo outward into the vast architecture of being and cosmos, a breathing meditation designed to remind us of the wonders of our incomprehensibly beautiful world.
Spheres invites viewers to look closely, to listen deeply, and to remember that every sphere – no matter how small or vast – is part of one continuous unfolding. The film is an invitation to see life not as a ladder but as a constellation of spheres: interdependent, fragile, and astonishing.
Director Biography – Martin Gerigk
Martin Gerigk (*1972) is a composer of contemporary music. His repertoire includes compositions for orchestra and chamber music, as well as several solo concertos. His works are performed both nationally and internationally, including in Korea, Japan, the USA, England, Finland, Austria, and Switzerland. In this context, he collaborates with renowned international soloists and ensembles.
In addition to his compositional work, Gerigk is known for his remarkable audiovisual art and experimental films, which explore the inherent synesthetic connections between sound and visual perception. Beyond creating interwoven landscapes of music, natural sounds, and video sequences, a significant aspect of his art illustrates the hidden poetry of natural phenomena and scientific concepts.
His experimental films have won several international awards and have been screened at numerous prestigious festivals – some of which are Academy Award qualifying – such as the Seattle International Film Festival, Tirana International Film Festival, Thomas Edison Film Festival, Salerno International Film Festival, Asolo Art Film Festival, Montecatini International Short Film Festival, USA Film Festival, Festival International du Film de Nancy, International Digital Arts Festival Videoformes, Girona Film Festival, Columbus International Film & Animation Festival, Thess International Short Film Festival, New Jersey Film Festival, Humboldt International Film Fest, Sydney International Film Festival or Fargo Film Festival.
Director Statement
Spheres is an homage to life, a poetic essay that drifts through a series of expanding spheres, each revealing a different layer of our shared reality, from the microscopic to the mythical. The film is an exploration of how the smallest vibrations of existence echo outward into the vast architecture of being and cosmos, a breathing meditation designed to remind us of the wonders of our incomprehensibly beautiful world.
We enter first the Sphere of the Smallest, where existence trembles at its point of origin. Here, the world is a whisper, a vibration before form. Then, gradually, we step into the Sphere of Matter, where substance gathers and begins to hold shape – weight, texture, resistance. The journey continues into the Sphere of Plant Life which rises, green and slow, revealing a choreography without ego. Growth becomes a form of storytelling; roots become memory.
The journey deepens into the Sphere of Evolution, where life endlessly rewrites itself. Here, evolution is shaped not only by survival but by the blossoming of communication and the emergence of emotion. Signals become languages; responses become feelings; relationships become forces of adaptation. Over time, the capacity to express, to perceive, to empathize becomes an inevitable determination of life’s unfolding, an evolutionary current guiding species toward deeper forms of awareness.
The Sphere of Natural Cycles reminds us that becoming is circular, that creation and decay echo one another, that renewal is not an event but a rhythm. Water rises from soil into air, gathers in clouds, returns as rain, and sinks back into the ground, completing an endless loop of nourishment. Seasons turn in quiet succession – growth, harvest, rest, renewal – each one carrying the memory of the last. In these circulations and returns, life maintains its continuity; nothing is lost, only transformed.
At the center lies the Sphere of the Essential, the foundational elements that make existence possible. Cells dividing through mitosis, blood carrying oxygen through intricate channels, nerves firing electrical impulses that shape sensation and thought. Alongside them, computer chips process streams of information, and quantum waves ripple beneath the surface of everything, revealing a world built from interactions too small to see yet too powerful to ignore. These essentials – biological, technological, and subatomic – form the architecture upon which all life and awareness are built.
From there we enter the fragile Sphere of Human Existence, understood here as a tapestry of accumulations. Movements gather into paths, paths into dwellings, dwellings into cities. Ideas accumulate into culture. Human life becomes a collective architecture, each individual a fragment contributing to the rising pattern of shared meaning.
Opposing it, yet born from it, stands the Sphere of Artificial Life, a domain of systems and machines – reflections of ourselves, yet increasingly independent shadows – an extension of our own evolving minds. Here, thought migrates into new forms, algorithms inherit patterns of human intuition, and intelligence begins to unfold in bodies made of code rather than flesh. It is a sphere where our cognitive echoes take on a life of their own, asking us to reconsider what consciousness may become.
Finally, we arrive at the Last Sphere, a space where all previous layers converge. That sphere is the outward breath of existence, our lives expanding beyond Earth, dissolving into the vastness of space and the macrocosmos. Here, humanity becomes stardust once more, drifting through galaxies, merging with cosmic structures far older than memory. And at the furthest edge of this expansion, the circle completes itself: the infinite collapses back into the infinitesimal. The macrocosmos folds into the quantum realm, revealing that the smallest and the largest are reflections of one another. A horizon awaiting the next gesture.
Spheres invites viewers to look closely, to listen deeply, and to remember that every sphere – no matter how small or vast – is part of one continuous unfolding. The film is an invitation to see life not as a ladder but as a constellation of spheres: interdependent, fragile, and astonishing.
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8:30 Goddess of Slide
Pioneer woman fought for her right to play slide guitar in a male dominated world. She ignited the stage with Jimi Hendrix that changed the course of her life. An intimate look at a pioneer performer whose road trip to stardom and long career deserves a rightful place in music history.1h31m
Goddess of Slide: The Forgotten Story of Ellen McIlwaine is a feature length documentary about the legendary – and largely forgotten – Canadian musician who fought for her right to play the slide guitar, a male- dominated instrument in a male-dominated world. Eight months after arriving in Greenwich Village with no prospects, she found herself opening for the biggest blues legends in the world, like Odetta, Richie Havens, and Mississippi John Hurt. But it’s the six magical nights Ellen, a young fearless redhead, ignited the stage with Jimi Hendrix that changed the course of her life. Goddess of Slide is an intimate look at a pioneer performer whose road trip to stardom and long career deserves a rightful place in music history.
Director Biography – Alfonso Maiorana
Alfonso Maiorana is a filmmaker and cinematographer with over 30 years of experience in the motion film industry. He began his career in Montreal and Vancouver directing music videos, independent short films, and documentaries. Some of his personal fictional projects as a Writer/Director that have had a successful festival and award run include, The Big World (Narrative Short, premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival 1996) and Annabelle (Narrative Short, premiered at the Sao Paulo International Film Festival 1993). Maiorana’s most recent film (Co-Director/Co-Writer/Cinematographer) Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017 and walked away with the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Masterful Storytelling. The film won two top prizes at Hot Docs 2017, Rogers Audience Award for Best Canadian Documentary, and also the Hot Docs Audience Award. In 2018, the film won all three awards at the CSA for Documentary in Canada. Maiorana won two individual awards for Best Feature Length Documentary and Best Cinematography in a Feature Length Documentary. Internationally: Best Audience Award at the Biografilm Festival in Bologna, Italy, Best Music Documentary Film at Doc’n Roll Film Festival London 2017, Best Music Documentary at the Reeperbahn Festival. Rumble was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2020.
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