The small-press festivals that cultivate daring cinema can feel like clandestine laboratories. Prismatic Ground has positioned itself as one such lab, insisting that the move to online presentation during the pandemic was not a temporary patch but a moment to fundamentally reconfigure the festival encounter. The festival’s founder and director, Inney Prakash, framed the project as an answer to a gap in the festival ecosystem: a space explicitly devoted to experimental cinema where questions of access, distribution, and the economics of exhibition are central concerns rather than afterthoughts.
The festival’s practical commitments reflect that philosophy. Organizers have removed geographic restrictions on many screenings, enabled wider online viewership, and insisted on paying filmmakers for the presentation of their work. These policy choices are more than administrative; they are cultural statements about who should benefit when cinema circulates. Such decisions reverberate across the program, shaping both the kinds of works selected and the conversations that emerge around them.
Closing night and a confrontational chamber piece
The festival’s final screening this year was Isiah Medina’s Gangsterism, a film that many attendees described as simultaneously combative and self-aware. Medina, long known for a practice that divides opinion, uses repetition and jarring audio-image juxtapositions to stage disputes about the meaning and utility of theory in filmmaking. The film foregrounds debate—characters hold protracted arguments about the financing of cinema, the responsibilities of academic discourse, and the implications of digital circulation. Central to the drama is the protagonist Clem’s fury at being labeled inaccessible by potential funders, which drives the film’s interrogation of how intelligibility and value are assigned in contemporary film culture.
Awards, retrospectives, and personal cinema
Prismatic Ground hands out a single annual honor: the Ground Glass prize, intended as a lifetime-recognition award. In its first year the prize went to Brooklyn-based artist Lynne Sachs, and this edition recognized Japanese experimental artist Kohei Ando. Both recipients also had films in the program, creating a throughline between the festival’s institutional recognition and its curatorial eye. Sachs’ piece, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, is a reflective self-documentary that tracks personal encounters through a stack of old business cards; the camera revisits people from different eras, and those reunions expose how memory, performance, and vulnerability perform together on screen.
Kohei Ando and the elasticity of time
Ando’s shorts leaned into memory and temporal play with a warm, often playful touch. Works such as My Friends in My Address Book present intimate gestures—friends holding name cards for the camera—while the Passing Train series treats motion and continuity as stylistic devices that collapse distance rather than generate it. On the Far Side of Twilight adds a sentimental piano score and playful narration to chart a life from youth into old age, and Ando’s bold image work—burning, cutting, and reshaping the film frame—keeps the viewer alert to how cinema constructs recollection.
Shorts that expand what experimental film can do
Several short programs posed urgent questions about documentary practice, social memory, and contemporary society. Rajee Samarasinghe’s A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth reuses outtakes from his feature Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, reframing imperfect interview footage to remind viewers that trauma and testimony cannot be extricated from the material traces of their making. Eislow Johnson’s Injured? flips the language of legal advertising into kinetic satire: a rapid montage of roadways and billboards becomes an action-film parody that also critiques car culture and litigiousness.
Other program notes
Yusuf Demiror’s Archura Leaves the City Forever was a hypnotic fable that mixed urban bleakness with lush natural imagery, evoking a cinematic lineage from outsider road films to playful, surreal melodramas. Michael Barwise’s That Sanity Be Kept offered a chilling meditation on surveillance, tracking young people’s faces and movements during a ceasefire in the context of The Troubles. And a rare grouping of works by Iraqi filmmaker Parine Jaddo—Atash, Aisha, and Teyh—threaded personal and political tensions: gender, desire, and religion play out against the constant presence of conflict, suggesting that in many places post-war life remains precariously situated before the next escalation.
Prismatic Ground’s program is as much about policy as it is about aesthetics: its embrace of online access, its refusal to geo-block screenings, and its insistence on compensating artists form an integrated curatorial stance. The festival proposes that how we show films matters as much as which films we show. Prismatic Ground 2026 takes place April 29-May 3 in venues across NYC.