2025 MFA THESIS THEATRICAL SCREENING
MAFF 2025: CONTRAST | THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS BOSTON | SATURDAY MAY 17, 2025
MASTER OF FINE ARTS THESIS PROGRAM: 5.17.25 | 11am
RED
(2025, 04:21)
A scratched text-poem on 16mm…Flickering words, toxic love, soft pain—pleasure caught between frames.
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Stella Bastart is an international filmmaker and transdisciplinary artist, currently based between Boston, MA, and Provence, France. Her practice centers on the destruction and creation of meaning through experimental film, sound, and visual art. By scratching directly onto 16mm film, she transforms trauma into visceral, rhythmic compositions that reflect both emotional release and healing. She explores themes of pain, survival, and identity, using language, subversion, and wordplay to engage with the complexities of human experience.
DAWN
(2025, 03:55)
Found footage from a mid twentieth century Icecapades performance examines the notion that history is always repeating itself.
Lauren Marie Dake is an experimental filmmaker from Seattle. Her practice centers on notions of escape, chaos, the uncanny, and the ethereal. She is fascinated with the worldbuilding potential of handmade and cameraless cinema and experiments with direct animation onto 16mm films, where she engages in an ongoing attempt to create new realities within the dimension of the frame. Lauren’s short films have recently screened at the Grrl Haus Cinema Best of 2024 Festival in Cambridge, MA, the MicroActs Artist Film Screenings in London, the International Avant-Garde Film Festival in New York, and the Boston Short Film Festival.
IN SILENCE OF DIVINE
(2025, 18:12)
In Somalia’s deserts, a docu-drama explores empathy, resilience, and the shared fragility of human life, capturing the struggles of orphaned children while questioning both divine silence and our own role in turning away from others.
Mustafa Yildiz is a multidisciplinary artist from Istanbul, Turkey. He began his lens-based work volunteering for non-profits in marginalized areas, and this evolved into a personal, independent art practice. Mustafa combines personal and cultural narratives with life’s lyrical aspects. His work explores human emotions and existential questions through evocative portraits and stories, reflecting on both individual identity and the collective human condition.
SPLIT HORIZON
(2025, 10:09)
An optically printed 16mm impressionistic handmade film featuring found home movies and travel films from the 1960’s, where characters and places become a mirror for one another, meditating on our own ability to contain multiple versions of self, identity, and internal narratives about our own stories, paths and histories.
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Lauren Marie Dake is an experimental filmmaker from Seattle. Her practice centers on notions of escape, chaos, the uncanny, and the ethereal. She is fascinated with the worldbuilding potential of handmade and cameraless cinema and experiments with direct animation onto 16mm films, where she engages in an ongoing attempt to create new realities within the dimension of the frame. Lauren’s short films have recently screened at the Grrl Haus Cinema Best of 2024 Festival in Cambridge, MA, the MicroActs Artist Film Screenings in London, the International Avant-Garde Film Festival in New York, and the Boston Short Film Festival.
EVIL EVOL LOVE
(2025, 21:07)
A digitized handamde 16mm film set to music…an act of destruction and creation—a way to carve out meaning, release emotion, and reconstruct memory.
Stella Bastart is an international filmmaker and transdisciplinary artist, currently based between Boston, MA, and Provence, France. Her practice centers on the destruction and creation of meaning through experimental film, sound, and visual art. By scratching directly onto 16mm film, she transforms trauma into visceral, rhythmic compositions that reflect both emotional release and healing. She explores themes of pain, survival, and identity, using language, subversion, and wordplay to engage with the complexities of human experience.