IN CINEMA
Saturday, September 20th at 7:45PM
The Harlem International Film Festival
PÉGAME
Dylan Verrechia, 2025, 96 min
PÉGAME is a folktale based on the fable of the scorpion and the frog, and a lucid dream in the tradition of Stanley Kubrick’s "The Shining”, Peter Greenaway’s “The Draughtman’s Contract”, Alex Cox’s “Sid and Nancy”, Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Betty Blue”, Hayao Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro”, Mike Leigh’s “Naked”, Tsai Ming-lian’s “Vive l’Amour”, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cure”, Alfonso Cuarón’s “Y tu mamá también”, Bong Joon-Ho’s “Memories of Murder”, Satoshi Kon’s “Paprika”, Yi’nan Diao’s “Black Coal, Thin Ice”, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s “Évolution”, Andrey Zvyagintsey’s “Loveless”, Ari Aster’s “Midsommar”, or Julie Lecoustre’s “Rien à Foutre”.
The film is based on real events, explores the subject of female violence, and is meant to be watched on the big screen. Shot on ARRI Alexa 35 with a one-man crew, and great performances from non-professional actors.
TEMPORALITY
Aanya Gupta, 2025, 4 min
The idea for TEMPORALITY began with a question that philosophy has grappled with for centuries: What does it mean to live in awareness of death? I wanted to explore how people internalize and respond to the inevitability of their own dying – I was interested not in answers, but in tensions – between fear and acceptance, between cultural myth and personal belief, between the abstract concept of death and the concrete experience of loss. The project took shape as an animated documentary, a medium that allowed for both literal representation and imaginative, visual language, giving me the freedom to move beneath memory, dream and metaphor. This reflected how we actually think about death, often indirectly, emotionally, and through symbols – the goal wasn’t to explain death but to sit with it, to draw it out its strange presence in our lives, and ask why, despite its certainty, we remain unsettled by it. Ultimately, TEMPORALITY is about our attempts to locate ourselves in the face of something unlocatable. It doesn’t seek resolution but offers companionship-through voices, visuals, and the shared human experience of wondering what comes after. It is both a personal and collective reckoning with death, filtered through the lens of animation and philosophy, where temporality itself becomes a subject: how we move through time, how we remember, and how we are face the end that shapes all beginnings.
Post-screening discussion with Dylan Verrechia and Aanya Gupta
$15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price
